Tzniut

The root verse the sources return to is from Micah, and it asks for justice, mercy and walking modestly with God. Nothing in it is about clothing. In the classical rabbinic material a tzanua is a kind of person: someone who does not announce their own charity, who does not press their opinion into every room, who conducts private matters privately. The Talmud praises modesty in men explicitly, and several of its examples concern the behaviour of scholars rather than of women.

The value governs speech as much as dress. Boasting, gossip and the public airing of a family difficulty are failures of tzniut, and so is display of wealth. The rabbinic texts on hospitality and on entering a house treat privacy as something owed to other people, which is the same value read from the other side.

The move from disposition to detailed regulation happens in the halakhic literature, where tzniut becomes a heading under which the codes place rules about dress, about which parts of the body are to be covered, about the separation of men and women at gatherings, and about a man reciting prayer within sight or hearing of things that would distract him. Maimonides and later Joseph Karo organise the material, and the later responsa literature is where the detailed contemporary standards were worked out, community by community.

The most visible practice is the covering of a married woman hair, and the halakhic derivation runs through a passage in the Mishnah about a woman suspected of adultery whose head is uncovered by the priest, from which the rabbis inferred that a married woman head was normally covered. The obligation is discussed in the Talmud, codified in the medieval works, and applied differently in every century since.

Practice today spans a wide range and the differences are visible at a glance. In Haredi communities the covering is thorough and constant, and the question of whether a wig satisfies the requirement is answered differently by different groups: some regard a wig as fully acceptable and it is the normal covering, while some Hasidic authorities have opposed wigs on the ground that they do not look like a covering at all, and in a few communities the hair is cut short or shaved beneath it. Many Modern Orthodox women cover in the synagogue and at communal occasions and not otherwise, or wear a partial covering. Most non-Orthodox movements treat tzniut as an ethic of restraint without a dress code attached.

A substantial body of writing by Orthodox women in recent decades has argued about how the value should be taught, and in particular whether presenting it mainly as a set of rules for girls distorts a principle the classical sources address to everybody. The atlas records the range of practice and the argument, and does not prescribe.