Haredi Judaism: Encyclopedia II - Haredi Judaism - History

Haredi Judaism - History

Haredi Judaism - Modern origins

For several centuries before the Emancipation of European Jewry, most of Europe's Jews were forced to live in closed communities, where their culture and religious observances persevered, no less because of internal pressure within their own community as because of the refusal of the outside world to accept them. In a predominantly Christian society, the only way for Jews to gain social acceptance was to convert, thereby abandoning all ties with one's own family and community. There was very little middle ground, especially in the ghetto, for people to negotiate between the dominant culture and the community.

This began to change with the Enlightenment and calls by some European liberals to include the Jewish population in the emerging empires and nation states. For some Jews, it was an opportunity to escape the physical and psychological restraints imposed by the existence of the ghetto while benefiting from the enduring sense of community by finding some way of spanning the two worlds. In the words of a popular aphorism of the Enlightenment coined by Yehuda Leib Gordon, a person should be "a Jew in the home, and a mentsch (good person) in the street."

Other Jews argued that the division between Jew and gentile had actually protected the Jews' religious and social culture; abandoning such divisions, they argued, would lead to the eventual abandonment of Jewish religion through assimilation. This latter group insisted that the appropriate response to the Enlightenment was to maintain strict adherence to traditional Jewish law and custom to prevent the disintegration of the community and ensure the survival of the Jewish people.

The former group argued that Judaism had to "reform" itself in keeping with the social changes taking place around them. They were the forerunners of the Reform movement in Judaism. This group overwhelmingly assimilated into the surrounding culture.

Even as the debate raged, the rate of integration and assimilation grew proportionately to the degree of acceptance of the Jewish population by the host societies. In other countries, particularly in Eastern Europe, acceptance (and integration) was much slower in coming. This was especially true in the Pale of Settlement, a region along Russia's western border including most of modern Poland, to which Jewish settlement in Russia was confined. Although Jews here did not win the same official acceptance as they did in Western and Central Europe, that same spirit of change pervaded the air, albeit in a local variant. Since it was impossible to gain acceptance by the dominant culture, many Jews turned to a number of different movements that they expected would offer hope for a better future. The predominant movement was socialism; other important alternatives were the cultural autonomists, including the Bund and the Zionists. These movements were not neutral on the topic of the Jewish religion: by and large, they entailed complete, not infrequently contemptuous, rejection of traditional religious and cultural norms.

One of the most influential, if not the most influential, members of early Haredi Judaism was the Chatam Sofer, from Hungary. He said "Hadash asur min ha-Torah" and although it is not clear if this was meant to be taken literally, many of his disciples took it entirely literally.

The traditionalists of Eastern Europe, who fought against the new movements emerging in the Jewish community, were the forebears of the contemporary Haredi movement.

Haredi Judaism - Effects of the Holocaust

During this time, the emerging Haredi community was engaged in bitter debates with other developing Jewish communities, most notably those that denied the preeminence, or even relevance, of religion in Jewish life. Anecdotes abound: in one case, a reformer sent a leading rabbi a kosher cookie shaped like a pig, knowing that pork was a forbidden food in the Jewish religion. The rabbi responded by sending back a photograph with this note: "Thank you for your gift. You sent me a picture of you, so I am returning the favor in kind with a picture of me."

The Holocaust brought a pause to the infighting. Until the rise of Nazism, Germany had been the major arena for the Enlightenment policies of acceptance and tolerance. Haredi leaders warned that "if the Jews do not make 'kiddush', the gentiles will make 'havdalah'." 'Kiddush' refers to the beginning ceremonies of the Shabbat, which sanctifies the day through joy and sets it apart from the mundane. 'Havdalah' refers to the ending ceremony, which mourns the departing of the holy as the darkness of the new week commences. Both words connote separation, kiddush meaning literally sanctification, and havdalah meaning separation.

Anti-Semitism that had previously been supressed by legal and social factors, began to spread in the 1930's throughout most of Christian Europe with a fury against all Jews, regardless of their religious affiliation or lack thereof. For a time, in the face of destruction, Jews were able to overlook the differences between them as they faced a common enemy bent on their destruction.

In the following years, however, the survivors were forced to come to grips with the theological implications of the catastrophe that had all but eradicated their communities. While they struggled to rebuild themselves, particularly in the United States and in Palestine (later Israel), they also attempted to understand why God had allowed such a disaster to befall them.

This was coupled with the emergence of socialist Jewish nationalism, or Zionism, as a widely accepted, secular Jewish philosophy. Until that time, the Zionists were a small but vocal minority among the Jewish population of Eastern Europe. Suddenly, they experienced a tremendous growth, since settlement of the Land of Israel seemed to offer a viable response to the anti-Semitism that was still prevalent in Europe. The Haredi traditionalists had long rejected Zionism, partly because it was a predominantly anti-religious movement. Now, suddenly, the secular Zionists were in the process of achieving their goal of a Jewish homeland. Meanwhile, unable to return to their old homes in Europe and with quotas on Jewish immigration in the United States, that a Jewish homeland had necessarily become in some cases the only option for Haredi Jews. In effect, they were suddenly at the mercy of their most bitter opponents. However, they were not without their own leverage, including the sensitive fact that the longest-standing Jewish settlements in Palestine were, in fact, Haredi.

It would have been easy for the Haredi community to explain the events of the 1930s-1950s as the direct result of most Jews abandoning their religious beliefs. In fact, some did; but the vast majority chose a more comforting approach, claiming that the Holocaust was a Divine act beyond human understanding. This allowed them to focus on rebuilding their communities, rather than to obsess on the past. There was, however, one stipulation to this approach: the martyred Eastern European past was idealized as a golden era of Jewish life.

Within a generation, two vibrant new centers of Haredi life emerged: one in the United States, and the other in Israel, with smaller, somewhat less influential communities in England, Canada, France, Belgium, and Australia. As these communities became viable, independent entities, some of the old animosities between them and members of other Jewish groups began to resurface. This time, however, they were sharpened by the conviction on the part of Haredim that, as predicted, those groups' actions and prescriptions often lead to assimilation, thereby threatening the very idea of Jewish continuity. In the post-Holocaust era, that threat is perceived as being more real than ever.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki