Millions of Jews who were committed to the Halacha, the Jewish code of law, were under Nazi rule and control during the Second World War. Various sources indicate that during the Holocaust, such Jews petitioned rabbis and Halacha sages with questions on halachic matters, both of a ritual nature as well as a legal nature. Due to the tremendous profusion during the Holocaust of situations in which the matter of preferring one life over another arose, one would expect to find (...) an abundance of halachic questions dealing with subjects related to this matter. There are two main situations in which the matter of preferring one life over another emerges. The one typical case involves saving the life of a person in peril, where the central question that arises is whether there is a duty to endanger oneself in order to save the life of another, whether there is a prohibition on doing this, or whether this is permitted and, perhaps even recommended, but not a duty per se. The second typical instance is when a power-wielding entity with authority demands that someone be handed over and if this is not complied with, another person will be harmed. A great deal of comprehensive discussion was devoted to these two sitituations in the halachic sources throughout the ages, beginning from the period of the Talmud and thereafter. These matters were given particularly prominent and thorough consideration in the teachings of the halachic sages of Poland during the period in which the Jews enjoyed broad judicial and community autonomy. These sources could have served the halachic,sages during the Holocaust, the overwhelming majority of whom were to be found in Poland and the neighboring countries in Eastern Europe. However, most surprisingly, we have almost no evidence of any real hcilachic grappling with situations of weighing one life against another during the Holocaust. The author maintains that the reason for this silence does not derive from a massive loss of testimonies during the Holocaust, but, rather stems from the fact that the Holocaust is a "black hole" in the human experience. In the face of this experience, created by the Germans, even the Halacha, which regulates totally the life of the observant Jew, stood dumbfounded, regarding it as a Singularity, in the physics sense of the term - that is to say, a situation in which defined laws and legal rules cease to exist. (shrink)

Changes in the foundations of the negotiability of deeds took place in Jewish law in Christian Spain towards the end of the thirteenth century and in the fourteenth century. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, sages there adopted the legal tradition that had been shaped in Muslim Spain and North Africa in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This was a direct continuation of the tradition of the Geonim in Babylon of the ninth to the eleventh centuries, and was based on (...) Talmudic law. According to this tradition, a creditor could sell a loan deed, which is a necessary condition for the possibility of developing a negotiable bill, but two other decrees significantly impeded the emergence of the negotiable bill: one was the rule enabling a lender who sold the deed to forgive the debt, and the other was the requirement of a bill of sale in order to transfer ownership of the loan deed. In the kingdom of Catalonia, the famous scholar Rashba stood at the forefront of the changes, blocking the forgiveness of a debt by a lender who sold a deed of the types: "to the lender and to whom he has empowered," and "to lender or bearer." Both deeds resemble the "pay to order" promissory note in English law. However, there is no evidence of modern negotiable instruments, where the transferee as a holder in due course obtains a bill without defects and with almost no direct links to the transferor. Rashba’s and his followers’ position appears consistent with the economic reality in the region of Catalonia and its capital city of Barcelona as a result of the transformation of the kingdom into a Mediterranean empire. Changes in the kingdom of Castile were hesitant and focused on easing the transferability of deeds by adding special clauses. Harosh ruled in the case of a deed "to lender and whom he has empowered" or a deed "to lender or bearer" that the lender/seller can forgive the debt to the borrower after the sale of the deed, rejecting the innovation of Rashba, his contemporary in Catalonia. Thus, the legal tradition in Castile, a powerful landlocked country, failed to make significant progress toward negotiability at that time, perhaps, unlike Catalonia, because of a lack of economic pressure to do so. (shrink)

Ethical challenges surrounding the implementation of male circumcision as an HIV prevention strategyResearchers have been exploring the possibility of a correlation between male circumcision and lowered risk of HIV infection almost since the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.1 Results from a randomised controlled trial in South Africa in 2005 indicate that male circumcision protects men against the acquisition of HIV through heterosexual intercourse,2 confirming the findings from 20 years of observational studies.3 Circumcised men in the South African trial were 60% (...) less likely to acquire HIV than their uncircumcised counterparts. A mathematical modelling study, based on the South African trial, estimates that the practice of male circumcision could avert two million new HIV infections and 300 000 HIV-related deaths over the next 10 years in sub-Saharan Africa.4 More recently, two randomised controlled trials in Kisumu, Kenya and Rakai, Uganda showed, respectively, 53% and 48% reductions in HIV acquisition among circumcised men than uncircumcised men in the trial.5 These results strongly suggest that male circumcision could play an important role in the struggle against the continued rise in new HIV infections. However, as observers noted at the 2006 XVI International AIDS Conference in Toronto, Canada, excitement about the potential epidemiological impact has overshadowed the debate over the difficult translation of research on male circumcision, into policy and practice.6 Similar calls for caution have been raised before and elsewhere.7,8The topic of male circumcision carries an enormous amount of ethical baggage. Male infants, worldwide, are circumcised for various medical, social and/or religious reasons. Circumcision is a cultural act and a surgical procedure; medical reasons are not the only reasons to circumcise that people have found and continue to find as compelling. Benatar and Benatar9 have argued that—when …. (shrink)