Circumcision and Cancer of Sexual Organs with a Minority of Ashkenazi Jews

The facts speak for themselves where cancer statistics are concerned.

Photo: Intact.com

(PARIS, France) - Ashkenazi Jews represent more than 90% of the Jews¹. Several medical enquiries ^2,3,4 revealed that a minority of two to four per cent of them (against 0.2% for the general population) inherit a genetic mutation (BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes), occurred 600 years ago⁵, inducing a very high risk of cancer of the organs of reproduction.

The most important of these enquiries concerns more than 5,300 subjects. It disclosed that in this minority, 56% of women (almost 5 times the average of 12%) develop breast cancer, and 16% (against 1.4% on average) ovarian cancer. But the rate of prostate cancer: 16%, is 40 times the average of 0.4%.

Biologists attribute that phenomenon to the "founder effect": in populations isolated for religious, cultural or geographical reasons, mutations are transmitted with higher frequency, by endogamy.

With the Jews, an additional phenomenon occurs: circumcision. At variance with the Sephardim who mostly lived amongst Muslims, the Ashkenazis have lived in a minority amongst non circumcising populations. On the one hand, they may have been traumatized by the racism automatically provoked by their barbarous custom⁶.

On the other hand, parents forced to torture their baby boys in the middle of populations respectful of the physical integrity of the child may more easily have become aware of their barbarity and be traumatized by it. As a matter of fact, an anticircumcision reform Jewish movement was born in Frankfurt in 1843. Smothered by the orthodox, it flourished in the USA.

Psychoanalysis and psychosomatic medicine enable to explain the causes of a weakening of the immune system precisely striking the organs of reproduction. For instance, for the breast cancer of Ashkenazi Jewish women, these mothers are very affected by the grasping of their children from their breast for the circumcision.

Forced to be accomplices of a crime that makes them violate as well their duty of protection as the natural process of bonding (some babies refuse the breast after circumcision, they no longer look at their mother in the eyes), it is not astonishing that some should develop a hysterical symptom, apparently autopunitive, but through which they express an unconscious desire not to give life in such a world. That interpretation would not be disavowed by Groddeck⁸. And for gentlemen, it is the same thing.

So, nature seems to be joining ethics in order to condemn a practice that pro-vokes - or should provoke - universal repulsion and reprobation.

¹ Elazar, Daniel J. "Can Sephardic Judaism be Reconstructed?". Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
² Kirchhoff et al. BRCA mutations and risk of prostate cancer in Ashkenazi Jews. Clin Cancer Res, 2004 10; 2918. http://clincancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/10/9/2918.short
³ Rennert H. et al. A Novel founder mutation in the RNASEL gene, 471delAAAG, is associated with prostate cancer in Ashkenazi Jews. Am J Hum Genet. 2002; 71(4) : 981–984. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC378554/
⁴ Struewing J., Hartge P., Wacholder S., Baker S., Berlin M., McAdams M., Timmerman M., Brody L., Tucker M. The risk of cancer associated with specific mutations of BRCA1 and BRCA2 among Ashke-nazi Jews. N Engl J Med. 1997 ; 15, 336 (20) : 1401-8. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199705153362001
⁵ http://www.genetichealth.com/BROV_GEN_of_BROV_In_ASHJ.shtml
⁶ Freud S. Moses and monotheism. 1936. London: The Hogarth press ltd.; 1964. S.E., XXIII, p. 91.
⁷ http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2010/08/25/my_son_circumcision
⁸ Groddeck G. Le livre du ça.

Michel Hervé Navoiseau-Bertaux (Sigismond) is the author of "Sexual mutilation: excision, circumcision, the victims' point of view", for free at circabolition.multiply.com; he is an Independent psychoanalysis researcher (Chercheur indépendant en psychanalyse) based in Paris, France, who works with Salem-News.com to help raise awareness of the massive societal problems connected to the blindly accepted, mutilating practice of circumcision. He says, "Non violence is as fundamental as violence, love and hatred, justice and injustice. But power is at the tip of the tongue and the sweet violence of speech, if one takes hold of it, can silence weapons."

(La non violence est aussi fondamentale que la violence, l'amour et la haine, le juste et l'injuste. Mais le pouvoir est au bout de la langue et la douce violence de la parole, si l'on s'en empare, peut faire taire les armes.)