(July 13, 2012) European Jewish leaders furiously condemned a German court's ruling outlawing circumcision as the "worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust" yesterday and demanded that Chancellor Angela Merkel's government intervene to protect the practice as a religious rite.

The damning remarks came amid growing European Jewish and Muslim outrage over a ruling by a Cologne court last month declaring that the circumcision of young boys could be considered a criminal offence because it caused bodily harm and infringed a child's right to integrity.

Yesterday, Moscow's Chief Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, the president of the Conference of European Rabbis who made the Holocaust comments, added: "I see no future for Jews in Germany if the ruling is upheld".

Opinion polls conducted after the ruling found that a majority of Germans approved of the court's decision. Rabbi Goldschmidt said the poll's findings were "shocking". He said the court's ruling suggested that Muslims and Jews were no longer socially acceptable in Europe.