Informant38

This is the beginning of what will be a series of explorations of anti-Semitism.
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"Routine circumcision as a preventative or cure for masturbation was proposed in Victorian times in America. Masturbation was thought to be the cause of a number of diseases. The procedure of routine circumcision became commonplace between 1870 and 1920, and it consequently spread to all the English-speaking countries (England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand). None of these countries now circumcise the majority of their male children, a distinction reserved today for the United States (in the UK, in fact, nonreligious circumcision has virtually ceased). Yet, there are still those who promote this social surgery, long after the masturbation hysteria of the past century has subsided.

'To obtain the best results one must cut away enough skin and mucous membrane to rather put it on the stretch when erections come later. There must be no play in the skin after the wound has thoroughly healed, but it must fit tightly over the penis, for should there be any play the patient will be found to readily resume his practice not begrudging the time and extra energy required to produce the orgasm... We may not be sure that we have done away with the possibility of masturbation, but we may feel confident that we have limited it to within the danger lines.'

E.J. Spratling, M.D. 1895
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In America, foreskins were not rare at the time circumcision was introduced into widespread practice. Paradoxically, then, the understanding of the intact male organ at that time was somewhat greater than it is today. (In particular, it never would have been possible to promote circumcision on the basis that it was "necessary for hygienic reasons"---this came later, when doctors themselves were mostly circumcised men.)
Further, in proposing circumcision as a preventative against self-abuse, physicians of the day understood very well that male masturbation involves stimulation of the foreskin. However they were incorrect in assuming that, by reducing the pleasure, masturbation itself could be reduced or eliminated."

What were the original motivations behind
routine infant circumcision in the West?
CIRP

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"Similarly with regard to circumcision, one of the reasons for it is, in my opinion, the wish to bring about a decrease in sexual intercourse and a weakening of the organ in question, so that this activity be diminished and the organ be in as quiet a state as possible. It has been thought that circumcision perfects what is defective congenitally. This gave the possibility to everyone to raise an objection and to say: How can natural things be defective so that they need to be perfected from outside, all the more because we know how useful the foreskin is for that member? In fact this commandment has not been prescribed with a view to perfecting what is defective congenitally, but to perfecting what is defective morally. The bodily pain caused to that member is the real purpose of circumcision. None of the activities necessary for the preservation of the individual is harmed thereby, nor is procreation rendered impossible, but violent concupiscence and lust that goes beyond what is needed are diminished. The fact that circumcision weakens the faculty of sexual excitement and sometimes perhaps diminishes the pleasure is indubitable. For if at birth this member has been made to bleed and has had its covering taken away from it, it must indubitably be weakened. The Sages, may their memory be blessed, have explicitly stated: It is hard for a woman with whom an uncircumcised man has had sexual intercourse to separate from him. In my opinion this is the strongest of the reasons for circumcision."
Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), translated by Shlomo Pines

Circumcision Information and Resource Pages
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The dominance expressed in the act of circumcision is near total, and the depth of its entry into the person, into the sexual identity of the circumcised, is near total as well. All you have to do is imagine the effect on an unwilling adult male, and lose the bogus idea that infants because they can't communicate linguistically - and when they can, later, are rarely able to articulate remembered events - are incapable of such basic emotions as rage and grief and the complex of coping reactions that allow the defeated to go on with their lives.
The benefits of that dominance when it's asserted on an infant will go to whoever can convince the circumcised they're responsible for having done it to them. Keeping that responsibility vague and indistinct is even more effective as social control, because it doesn't get tied to any particular individual, but the whole pre-existing social order.
In ritual circumcision of pre-pubescent males, such as the traditional Jewish Brit Milah this is straightforward, the dominant force is recognized and limited, the line of submission is visible, and accepted.
To the infant being circumcised unwillingly there is only the unrememberable horror. Like many other structured disintegration/reintegration practices - the boot camp, hazing rituals etc - there's a tendency toward acceptance of the new identity as appropriate, inevitable; most circumcised men probably don't think much about it, and when they do see themselves as belonging, not wounded.
It takes momentous change to gain a perspective of what's happened, and an acceptance of irrecoverable loss, woundedness, incompletion.
This is one of the barriers the traumatized always have, the struggle against the need to not see, the healing of covering up - to testify to the wound is to proclaim your own brokenness to the world; that brings with it a dangerous vulnerability. In a culture where the priesthood of medicine was capable of Spratling's madness this would be counter to survival.
Things change. But it's important to place this in a larger, still less comfortable context.
A ritual of violent intimacy integral to the practice of Jewish religious law was performed almost universally on male children who were not Jews, and the reasons given were at best grotesque nonsense.
Why?
Setting aside the bizarre hatred of sexual desire and expression the 19th century West was pandemic with - it's safe to assume that men like Spratling were at least as mistaken in their self-knowledge and views of their own motives as they were about the "hygienic" effect of their mutilating surgeries - we can see that it could be a means of establishing dominance, with a minimal expenditure of energy on the part of the dominating power.
Social dominance is absolutely central to the creation and preservation of systems of control - the whipping of slaves, the punitive enforcement of rules, yelling at insubordinates, these things are obvious enough.
I can remember vividly the first time someone told me that circumcision wasn't necessary, I was maybe 12, a friend of mine whose father hadn't let them cut him said it. It was shocking and I went through all the learned responses I had; which were few, because there hadn't been much questioning of it in my experience.
The question now is whether or not to view it as a mistake, made for generations on millions of infant boys; or as something more sinister. If it was only a mistake it's a regrettable thing, but something we can move on from and resolve to prevent. First, though, we need to dispense with the possibility of its being intentional.
In order to do that we'll need to place the intent somewhere more accurately than in the hands of Spratling and his ilk, who I think can be dismissed as pathological and confused, projecting their own received and internalized conflicts onto the tabula rasa of the young.
What I'm going to try to describe here is the locus of that intent as something that hasn't got its own term in the equation, that doesn't have a recognizable name or identity. The theme of dominance and control by almost invisible techniques and by the consistent use of patterns of camouflage that place the innocent between the attacking righteous and the real perpetrator.
This is what I believe is driving the evident rise of anti-Semitism in many parts of the world now, and it's also what makes most of that unfocused prejudice inaccurate and ineffectual.