A couple of miles from where I live, in north-east London, there is a suburb called Stamford Hill. It is notable for its ultra-orthodox Jewish community, the Haredi. They’re amazingly visible, whenever we drive through it on our way to Victoria Park or wherever we are going. The men wear large, furred, broad-brimmed hats, and dark robe-like coats; they have ringlets falling from their sideburns. The women dress in sober, old-fashioned blouses and cardigans. Their children largely go to private, single-sex religious schools; their primary language is Yiddish. There are around 20,000 of them in Stamford Hill.
The Haredi first arrived in Britain in the late 19th century. Most immigrant communities that have been around for that long blend into the wider national life – there was a lengthy wave of Irish immigration to Britain at around the same time, for instance, and Archway, also in north London, had a large Irish community. Now the great-grandsons and great-granddaughters of those immigrants are distinguished, usually, only by their surnames.
But the Haredi have worked hard to maintain their distinction. Most don’t have televisions or the internet, many read only Haredi-produced local newspapers. Marriage is within the community, usually arranged. It’s like entropy: if you unplug a fridge, it slowly reverts to the same temperature as the room around it. It needs to work to maintain its difference. The Haredi, deliberately, put that work in.
I sometimes think about the Haredi when I read people saying that because immigration is economically positive (which, almost entirely, it is), the only reason to oppose it is bigotry. I’ve seen the argument a few times; the latest is by Matthew D’Ancona, who is a clever and fair-minded writer, in the Guardian. D’Ancona rightly points out that surveys have shown that anxiety about immigration drove the Brexit vote, and says that this shows that a large percentage of Britons “just don’t much like people of foreign extraction, and certainly don’t want many more of them around the place”.
Changing their way of life – allowing the internet, opening their community up to outsiders – would undoubtedly be good for the Haredi, economically. But it would open them up to the social entropy they’ve worked so hard to counteract. Are they bigoted for doing so?
Honestly: I don’t know. It depends, in large degree, on what your definition of “bigoted” is. It is worth noting that a few years ago Haredi three-year-olds were being given school-produced sheets describing non-Jews as “evil” and claiming the “goyim” wanted to kill all Jews, which certainly raises a few red flags with me.
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