Luxembourg records 2.42% total-population male circumcision prevalence (Morris et al., 2016/2024 update), reflecting a small circumcising minority inside an unusually cosmopolitan country. As of January 2024, 47.3% of Luxembourg's 672,050 residents were foreign nationals, and per a 2024 OECD report, 51.2% of the population is foreign-born — the first time any OECD country has recorded a majority foreign-born population, with more than 170 nationalities represented. That demographic openness has a specific and much darker historical antecedent: during the Nazi occupation from 1940, Luxembourg's roughly 4,000-strong Jewish community (native Luxembourgers plus refugees who had already fled there) was reduced by emigration, deportation, and death, with 674 people deported to Nazi camps in 1941-1943 and only 36 of them surviving.
Luxembourg records 2.42% total-population male circumcision prevalence (Morris et al. 2016, refined in the 2024 global update from an original 2.4%), reflecting a small, minority-driven circumcising population inside one of the world's most demographically unusual countries.
As of 1 January 2024, 47.3% of Luxembourg's 672,050 residents held foreign nationality, and per a 2024 OECD report, 51.2% of the population is foreign-born — making Luxembourg the first OECD country ever recorded with a majority foreign-born population. More than 170 different nationalities are represented within its borders. Against that backdrop of extreme cosmopolitanism, any single circumcising minority — Jewish, Muslim, or otherwise — necessarily represents a small and diffuse share of the whole.
That demographic openness sits atop a considerably darker historical chapter. Luxembourg was occupied by Nazi Germany from May 1940, and its government fled into exile in London. The country's pre-war Jewish population numbered over 3,500 native Luxembourgers, joined by more than 1,000 German-Jewish refugees who had already fled there — roughly 4,000 people in total. During a permitted emigration window between 8 August 1940 and 15 October 1941, more than 2,500 Jews managed to leave the country, mostly for still-unoccupied France, before Germany closed off further departures. Between October 1941 and April 1943, German authorities deported 674 Jews from Luxembourg in eight transports to the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Theresienstadt. Only 36 of those deported survived the Nazi camp system. In total, 1,945 of Luxembourg's approximately 3,500 pre-war Jews died in the Holocaust, while 1,555 survived by fleeing abroad, hiding, or surviving detention.
This research did not locate a Luxembourgish statute specifically addressing non-therapeutic male circumcision, nor any verified Luxembourg-specific circumcision harm case — both honest gaps. Luxembourg does not appear on ARC Law's compiled list of countries known to regulate the practice. Female genital mutilation is a wholly separate matter and is not conflated with male circumcision here.
Luxembourg's HIV adult prevalence is approximately 0.3% per the CIA World Factbook (2020, based on 2018 estimates) — notably higher than the other four countries profiled in this same research batch (Montenegro, North Macedonia, Slovenia, and Czechia, all approximately 0.1% each). A separate World Bank modeled estimate gives a slightly lower 0.2% for 2022, reflecting a different year and methodology rather than a contradiction. Luxembourg is not among the 15 WHO Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision (VMMC) priority countries.
