Haredi Judaism

The Haredi world contains two currents that spent the eighteenth century in bitter conflict with each other and now stand together against modernity. The history explains a good deal about the internal texture.

Hasidism began in the Ukrainian and Polish borderlands around Israel ben Eliezer, called the Baal Shem Tov, who died in 1760. It was a popular revival, drawing on Kabbalah and offering ordinary Jews without Talmudic learning a way to serve God through joy, fervour, song and attachment in prayer, and it gathered around a charismatic tzaddik or rebbe, a righteous man whose blessing, table and person mediated the divine to his followers. The court, the dynasty and the hereditary succession all follow from that.

The Mitnagdim, the opponents, formed around the Vilna Gaon, who issued bans of excommunication against the Hasidim in 1772 and after. Their objections were serious: that a movement organised around a man was idolatrous in tendency, that it disparaged Talmudic learning, and that its ecstatic practice was undisciplined. Their answer was the modern yeshiva, Volozhin, founded in 1803, and its descendants, built on rigorous, full-time, lifelong Talmud study as the highest form of service.

The two settled into coexistence during the nineteenth century, when both concluded that the real threat was the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, and the secularisation that followed it. The word Haredi, from a biblical phrase meaning those who tremble at God's word, now covers both, and the Yiddish-speaking world it describes was substantially destroyed in the Holocaust and rebuilt from remnants in Israel, New York, London and Antwerp with striking speed.

There is no Haredi hierarchy, and yet Haredi communities are among the most tightly governed religious societies in the world. The mechanism is personal authority backed by total institutional coverage.

In the Hasidic world the unit is the court, named for the eastern European town where the dynasty began, Satmar, Ger, Belz, Vizhnitz, Bobov, Skver, Chabad-Lubavitch and dozens more. Each is led by a rebbe, usually succeeded by a son or son-in-law, and each maintains its own synagogues, schools, ritual baths, courts, charities and often its own neighbourhood. Followers consult the rebbe on matters far beyond ritual, marriage, business, medical decisions, and the relationship is the defining feature of Hasidic life. Chabad is the conspicuous exception to the whole pattern: it turned outward, sending emissary couples to establish centres worldwide serving unaffiliated Jews, and it has had no rebbe since 1994, a situation the movement has not resolved and does not intend to.

In the Lithuanian or yeshivish world the centre is the yeshiva and the authority is the gadol, an outstanding scholar whose rulings are accepted across communities without any formal office at all.

Practically, authority is enforced by the completeness of the environment: schooling, marriage brokerage, employment, kosher supervision, housing and burial all run through communal institutions, and separation from the outside is maintained by Yiddish, by dress that identifies dynasty and status precisely, by restrictions on internet and secular media, and by strict segregation of the sexes outside the family.

The disputes are real and are conducted fiercely. Chief among them is Zionism: parts of the Haredi world, Satmar most prominently, reject the State of Israel on theological grounds, while others participate in its politics through Haredi parties that have held the balance of power in Israeli coalitions for decades.

The Haredi world is the fastest-growing part of the Jewish people, and the arithmetic is straightforward: total fertility in Haredi communities has long run at roughly three times the surrounding average, and retention is high.

Israel's Haredi population is around thirteen per cent of the population and rising steadily; official Israeli projections have it approaching a quarter within a generation. The other large concentrations are in New York and its satellite towns, notably Kiryas Joel and New Square, and in London's Stamford Hill, Montreal, Antwerp and Melbourne. Yiddish, written off as a dying language in the 1960s, has more native speakers under twenty than it has had in decades because of this growth.

Two pressures dominate current Haredi life, and both are matters of public record. The first is economic. Large families, extended full-time Talmud study for men, and limited secular curriculum in boys' schools together produce very high poverty rates; in most Haredi households women are the principal earners. Arguments over the secular content of state-funded Haredi schooling have reached the courts in New York and Britain. The second is military service. The Israeli exemption for full-time yeshiva students, granted at the state's founding to a few hundred men, now covers tens of thousands; the Israeli Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled the arrangement unlawful, and successive governments have fallen or nearly fallen over attempts to legislate around it. Since 2023 the issue has become acute.

Internally, the world has also faced sustained scrutiny over the handling of child sexual abuse, where the traditional prohibition on informing to secular authorities has been publicly challenged by survivors and by some rabbinic authorities, and over the treatment of those who leave, who describe the loss of family, language and qualifications as close to total.