Jewish Law
Episode 1
Channel 4's three-part series, Jewish Law, gives us a glimpse that's both intriguing and challenging, into the self-contained world of Manchester's ultra-orthodox Jews. Here is a community that is happy to march to a different tune – and indeed takes pride in its difference – from the surrounding population.
The first programme shows us rabbinical inspectors enforcing an array of intricate regulations ‘governed by biblical texts’. In fact, many of these rules were worked out and written down by rabbis after the time of the Bible, but for these extremely orthodox Jews, they form the matrix of ancient traditions into which every aspect of their lives must fit.
To non-Jews, as well as to many other Jews, the rules can seem surreal. The rabbi explains the dietary laws in extraordinary detail: if you mistakenly eat an insect that's on a strawberry, are you breaking the law? If the insect is whole, that is forbidden but if it has been cut into pieces, it's not forbidden, as long as you didn’t deliberately cut it up.
We see a rabbi solemnly inspecting a herd of dairy cows to ensure that they all comply with the biblical injunction only to drink milk from animals that have cloven hooves and chew the cud. But would the herd include any animal other than a cow? ‘There might be a buffalo,’ says Rabbi Brackman. He concedes that he knows the herd consists entirely of cows, and that there are no mixed herds in this country. In any case, buffalo also have cloven hooves and chew the cud. But it is the inspection – the rabbinical seal of approval – that makes the milk kosher. ‘There is no real difference in the milk,’ he admits.
For very orthodox Jews, there is a spiritual dimension. In Jewish Law, the rabbis who are charged with implementing and policing the dietary laws say that the religious law surrounding the preparation and consumption of food boosts spirituality and ‘elevates the soul to a higher level’. This, they claim, is not simply because of the discipline of turning each everyday act into a religious ritual, but because the complex rules which make food kosher, impart a magical quality to the food itself.
The internal logic becomes a little clearer when a rabbinical sage explains, for example, that the original rules on kosher wine had their roots in the need to avoid the association of wine with the rituals of idol-worship. The rules remained when the reason fell away, but now they served a new role. When the Jewish people were dispersed and lived as minority communities all over the world, the strict dietary and other domestic and personal laws were one way of maintaining the distinction between Jews and Gentiles. By making it difficult to socialise with the surrounding peoples, they protected the Jewish communities from assimilation and intermarriage.
Throughout centuries of dispersal and segregation, Jews stubbornly insisted on maintaining their separate identity and tradition. This insistence was often seen by their detractors and enemies as perverse, menacing or even satanic so, in turn, the authorities in the states and cities where they lived imposed a caste-like segregation on them, reinforcing the ‘portable homeland’ of self-imposed and segregatory religious laws and rituals.
For at least two centuries, though, most Jews have found ways of maintaining their identity, without hermetically sealing off their community from any social interaction. Even amongst religious Jews there are different degrees of integration into and segregation from the surrounding society. There are also Jewish people of all shades of religious conviction and otherwise, from convinced atheists to those who believe that God literally handed the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai.
The conundrum posed by the group portrayed in Jewish Law is that, in an age when we have more choices than ever before, some use that very freedom to choose to have every detail of their lives regulated by preordained laws which can only be either obeyed or broken, but not questioned. The saying that for every three Jews there are four opinions may be a joke but it is rooted in reality. The ultra-orthodox are one perspective among many, even in their own community.
