Jewish Law
Episode 3
The third and last programme in Channel 4's series, Jewish Law, describes some of the details of daily life in an ultra-orthodox section of Manchester's Jewish community. Elaborate rules govern every element of people's routine, from getting up in the morning and going to work to what they eat. These injunctions are not aimed purely at individuals but are communal and family responsibilities.
Members of the community deliver a prepared kosher meal to an orthodox resident in a non-kosher old people’s home; others visit and comfort a bereaved man. There is a party for elderly people at a community centre and a Jewish welcoming ceremony for a child’s first day at school.
Like the prospective convert interviewed by a rabbi about why he wants to become a Jew, we can begin to understand why some people are attracted by the warmth of this tight-knit community. But the intensity of the closed community has another side, which secular or less religious outsiders might find less appealing. A rabbi, asked about the justification for segregating of men and women in the synagogue gives the almost flippant answer: 'It’s a credit to the women that we see them as a distraction.'
We realise that the boys and girls we see playing boisterously together in the family home will be forbidden any physical contact with their siblings of the opposite sex after the age of 12 for girls and 13 for boys. In a rare hint of mild dissension within the community, we hear of a social for the elderly where the rabbis banned an appearance by a woman singer as inappropriate.
In the topsy-turvy carnival atmosphere of the spring festival of Purim, it is a religious obligation to celebrate, even to the point of drunkenness, the deliverance of the Jews from a threatened massacre in ancient Persia. The programme gives no details of the traditional Purim story as told in the ‘scroll of Esther’ which we see being read in the synagogue. This tells how the Jews were saved from destruction thanks to the intervention of Esther, the Persian king’s Jewish Queen – a highly unorthodox case of the Jews being saved as the result of a mixed marriage.
Strangely, the Book of Esther contains no reference to God or to religious belief as such. Its boisterous celebrations based on ostentatious inversion of daily rules – even permitting cross-dressing between the sexes – was often denounced by severer rabbis in times past. But it became firmly established in Jewish custom. As the joyful celebrants tell us at the conclusion of the three programmes , it stands as a reminder of the perennial possibility of sudden deliverance from even the most hopeless fate – a comforting message of which Jewish communities often stood in great need from ancient Persia to the concentration camps of 20th century Europe.
And while the film shows some of the more unusual customs associated with Passover, it explains little about the wider significance of the Passover story which tells of the liberation of the Ancient Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. This tale, which Jews down the ages have been urged to tell 'as if you yourself had been a slave to Pharaoh in Egypt' carries a message of emancipation. It has been related down the generations through a child-oriented ritual which retains a fascination and significance for even the most secular Jews.
Today, the orthodox Jewish community portrayed in this series is not alone in maintaining a distinctive and self-contained life-style. Other minority cultures – based on ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation – rub shoulders with each other in varying degrees of seperation and integration. But Jews – even observant Jews – like other ethnic and religious minorities, are diverse. The particular group described in Jewish Law is at one extreme of the community as a whole.
For most of the people portrayed in this programme it would be unthinkable for them to follow any other path than that of their strict orthodoxy. Their practices are sanctified and justified as in line with ancient tradition which they alone maintain. But other Jews – many just as devout – would admit that the tradition has varied considerably down the ages. In one respect at least, communities like this one in Manchester differ radically from all their predecessors. Before what is generally known as the ‘emancipation of the Jews’ following the French Revolution, Jews in most countries in Europe had no choice but to submit to the authority of Jewish religious law and rabbinical courts, which was upheld by the state. It is only in the last 200 years or so (a short span in the long history of the Jewish people), that Jews have been free to decide for themselves just how Jewish they wish to be. Now, unlike their ancestors, the broader society in which they live allows these ultra-orthodox Jews the freedom to choose that way of life.
Prior to the French Revolution, the Jews of Europe were considered inferior and unequal to the rest of the population. They were excluded from all but marginal areas of the economy, and were often restricted as to where they could live. But their communities were autonomous, governed by traditional religious leaders whose powers over their coreligionists were upheld by the state.
There is a story which demonstrates how this affected people's lives. The Jews of Hungary were emancipated later than those in Austria. In the interim period, the Chief Rabbi of what is now Bratislava, which was then in Hungary, visited the Chief Rabbi of Vienna. After the Sabbath service he said to his host: ‘I saw a terrible sight on my way here – Jewish shops were open and trading on the Sabbath. If that happened in my city I would send round a policeman to close up the shops.'
‘I know,’ replied his Viennese rabbi. ‘It used to be the same with us. But since this cursed emancipation, our people seem to think they can do whatever they like.'
Europe’s Jews used that freedom in a wide range of ways. Many sought simply to merge with the surrounding population, even adopting Christianity, or revising their own religious practices to resemble those of Protestant Christianity, as with German Reform Judaism. Others saw their Jewish identity as merely a religious denomination, preferring the title ‘Israelite’ [in France] or ‘Mosaic’ [in Germany] to the despised label of ‘Jew’. Others identified with a secular Jewish identity based on what were seen as Jewish ethical and social values without religious beliefs, sometimes combined with secularised versions of Jewish festivals.
The racial antisemitism of the Nazis and the traumatic horror of the genocide they perpetrated undermined the belief of many Jews that they could or should assimilate. Support for Zionism, which advocated a separate state for the Jews, was one response. But most Jewish people adopted an eclectic mix of all these strategies – a pragmatic combination of varying degrees of religious practice and participation in the wider society, with, for many, an emotional attachment to Israel as an insurance policy against revived antisemitism.
As with many other ethnic and faith communities, there is a tendency to polarisation: at one extreme are those who want greater integration into the surrounding society; at the other, are those who claim to live by a ‘pure’ and ‘authentic’ version of religious tradition. Some would question why, for example, clothing worn by Polish merchants in the 17th century – the long black coats and fur hats of Hassidic men – should be seen as more ‘authentically Jewish’ than modern dress. But in any event the ultra-orthodox, like all other branches of Jewry and indeed all other religious and ethnic subcultures, are adapting in their own way to the unfamiliar freedom of a society that allows individuals to determine, within some limits, their own combination of identities.
Today, whatever our religious and cultural background, we can be grateful that the ultra-orthodox community of Manchester feels secure enough to celebrate its distinctive way of life without the need to apologise for it. In a historically Christian Europe, where for centuries the Jew symbolised and represented the mysterious and diabolic ‘other’, there is today an unprecedented acceptance of the principle of diversity – religious, cultural, ethnic, sexual. That acceptance is not immune from threat and needs constant vigilance for its preservation. But the more people who benefit from an acceptance of diversity – the Jew and the Muslim, the Catholic and the Protestant, the religious and the secular, the straight and the gay, the indigenous communities and those recently arrived – the more secure it will be.
