Circumcision - Not just the Jews!

by Brian Bamford

WHEN, in the 1970s I worked at Arrow Mill in Rochdale as a bobbin weigh-man and unofficial representative of the workforce, my Pakistann workmates once suggested that I should convert to Islam.  In the next breath, I was told that naturally if I did, I would have to get myself circumcised.

I was recently reminded of this when I read recently an account by Malcolm Muggeridge of how he and Anthony Powell had been laughing about an incident in a novel by Arthur Koestler in which the hero, in seducing one of the female characters, through being circumcised, reveals that he is a Jew.

It seems that George Orwell was very put out by their amusement, and he said it's not true, that in this country only Jews are circumcised, but it is true that, generally speaking, the upper classes are and the lower classes aren't. 

Orwell cited his own problems when he was at Eton, where in the changing-room he was ashamed of being uncircumcised, and had apparently kept himself covered.  Muggeridge described this as 'vintage Orwell'.

I don't suppose it occurred to Orwell, as it did to me and my Pakistani workmates in the 1970s, to get himself circumcised in order to pass himself off as upper class.  He, Orwell, had been disapproving when Muggeridge told him 'how in Travancore I use to wear an Indian dhoyi made of kadi, the homespun cloth which was the uniform of the (Indian) nationalist, and live on Indian food which I ate with my fingers, and travel third-class on railways, and suffer the tortures of the damned by making myself sit cross-legged on the ground.'

Of course, this would now be categorised as cultural appropriation by those obsessed with political correctness.

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