19
Rejection
In the eyes of the haredim, those ‘fearful of God’ or ‘anxious’ to observe
the commandments, as Isaiah had urged his hearers to ‘tremble’ at God’s
word and as pious teachers in the time of Ezra had trembled at the
divine instruction for Israel to put aside their gentile alliances and dis-
own their offspring, all such attempts to adapt Judaism to modernity
over the past two centuries have been profoundly mistaken. The term
haredi entered modern Hebrew in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries as a translation of ‘orthodox’ which was used for (among
others) the neo- orthodox followers of Samuel Raphael Hirsch, but over
the past half- century it has acquired a more specific connotation in ref-
erence to the ultra- orthodox who reject contemporary secular society
altogether.^1
To enter the Meah Shearim neighbourhood in Jerusalem, just to the
west of the walls of the Old City, is to step back into the shtetls of east-
ern Europe as imagined by Shalom Aleichem, with Yiddish both spoken
and written everywhere; men, even at the height of a Mediterranean
summer, in black frock coats and caftans, and a great variety of broad-
brimmed fur hats; and women and girls dressed modestly with long
sleeves and black stockings. Men and boys wear sidelocks (sometimes
tucked behind the ears), and beards are luxuriant. Married women keep
their hair covered to all but their husbands by wearing either a scarf or
a wig (with a hat when in public). Wigs can be quite glamorous: those
manufactured from blonde hair bought in eastern Europe are partic-
ularly prized. The market in wigs from the Indian subcontinent is
sufficiently large for an attempt by rivals to undermine it by claiming
that the hair used might be out of bounds to the religiously scrupulous
on the grounds that it might have been given as an offering to a Hindu
divinity before it was used for its present purpose. All life is structured
around religious ritual, either in the home for the women or in the syna-
gogues and study halls for the men. There is a sense of deep purposefulness,