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In the 18th century, the Hasidim - the largest group of Haredi Jews, who comprise perhaps ninety per cent of the Stamford Hill community - were noted for the ecstatic fervour of their worship. Many, one noticed, wore spectacles. It was once assumed that it was strain brought on by the long hours of study in the yeshive, or Torah schools, that affected the eyesight of so many Haredi men.
However, a study in Israel suggested that much of the blame lay with shockelling - the fervent rocking backward and forward motion that students make as they read the texts, and which causes an incessant change of focus in the eyes leading to myopia. He was a short stocky man of 61, grey bearded, curls protruding from his yarmulke. I say to them, in the morning after you go to pray, go out for a brisk walk Within the Jewish community at large, the Haredi have traditionally been regarded as , eccentric, inward-looking - some would say religious extremists.
In many ways they are a community frozen in aspic - a repository of life as it was lived in 19th century Eastern Europe, where tradition is held sacrosanct and modernity is largely scorned. It is a deeply conservative community that venerates religious learning above all else and in which Yiddish is the primary language. It is a community where a lack of secular education means that economic hardship is rife, and dependence on benefits is high. A community where television, secular newspapers and visits to the cinema are forbidden, where the internet is frowned upon, and where outsiders are treated guardedly.
The word Haredi is a fairly recent coinage, an umbrella term for strictly Orthodox Jewry. The Haredi see themselves as defenders of the faith - engaged in struggle which dates back to the rise of the Jewish Reform movement in early 19th century Germany, when liberal thinking started to challenge the traditional religious teachings and practices.
Along with that came the increasing assimilation of Jews within mainstream society and a rise in secularism in which religious learning was exchanged for the scholarship of the university. In the face of this drift from tradition, the Haredi regarded themselves as the last redoubt of orthodoxy, taking sustenance from their rigid observance of the halacha - the body of ethical and ritual injunctions governing Jewish life. Even their appearance symbolised a defiant resistance to any trace of modernity.
The Holocaust brought the Haredi to the brink of extinction, but also created the conditions that enabled the spread of ultra-orthodoxy, the determination to remake the past - its language, its dress, its rituals and practices - in new soil, in Israel, America and Britain. There are now estimated to be around 1. In Britain - home to the largest Haredi community in Europe - almost three out of every four Jewish births are in the Haredi community. If current trends continue, the strictly-Orthodox will constitute the majority of British Jews by The Haredi community first took root in Britain in Gateshead at the end of the 19th century, when a small group of Jews from Lithuania docked in Newcastle upon Tyne.
Appalled at what they regarded as the laxity of the local synagogue, they established their own on the other side of the river. With all of the great centres of Orthodox Jewish scholarship in Europe having been destroyed during the Holocaust, Gateshead became the largest such centre outside the United States and Israel. It remains the principal centre of learning for the Haredi in Britain.
In Stamford Hill, a small Haredi community that had lived in the area since the end of the 19th century was swollen dramatically by the influx of pre-war refugees and survivors of the Holocaust. The population has grown with arrivals from Israel and America. Now within a tight geographical area, little more than a square mile, there are no fewer than 74 synagogues, or shuls, 32 orthodox schools, kosher supermarkets, butchers, fishmongers and a multitude of other businesses.
To the outsider, the Stamford Hill Haredi community may seem like one confusing, amorphous whole, but in fact it is made up of a number of different streams, mostly Hasidic. Hasidism had its roots in Podolia - what is now Ukraine - in the early 18th century, a populist movement that emphasised an ecstatic form of worship, deeply rooted in mysticism, and that quickly spread throughout Eastern Europe. The Hasidim are themselves subdivided into numerous rabbinical dynasties - the Satmar the largest group , the Gerer, the Belzer and the Bobover, all taking their name from the village or town in Poland, Hungary or Ukraine where they originated, and each distinguished by some slight variation of religious practice and of dress.
At the head of each dynasty is the grand rabbi, or Rebbe - nowadays all of whom are to be found living in Hasidic communities in New York or Israel. More than just a religious teacher, the Rebbe is held to be the fount of all wisdom and authority, on domestic, financial and marital matters - the repository of a stream of learning and wisdom that extends back through the rabbinical teachings and commentaries, to the Talmud and the Torah, and thus to Abraham, Moses and God Himself. Walking around Stamford Hill , it is the geometry of family relationships that you notice.
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There are groups of mothers uniformly dressed in the mandatory dark coats and long skirts, and wearing the wigs that are an obligation for married women, pushing prams, a handful of children in tow. There are groups of men, but seldom men and women together. Modesty is paramount to the Haredi, and the mingling of the sexes is strictly regulated.
Unmarried boys and girls will have little contact with the opposite sex outside their families. At concerts and wedding parties men and women will always be separated. A Haredi man will avoid making eye-contact with any woman other than his wife, and would never shake hands.
Among the Gerer, the more traditional will observe the rule that even husbands and wives should not be seen walking on the street together, giving rise to the joke: The act of study is a supreme religious obligation, as much for the layman as the rabbi, and the talmid hakham - the student of the Talmud, the compendious volumes of rabbinical discussions pertaining to Jewish law and custom - is venerated above all others. All Haredi children in Stamford Hill attend Jewish schools, all of them single-sex, and all but one of them private.
An Ofsted report on faith schools schools in noted that most of these Haredi schools have few resources, and many are in converted houses. Fees are heavily subsidised by the community at large, but for families with five, six or more children to educate the burden can be crippling. For boys in particular, education revolves almost entirely around religious studies. The school week can sometimes be more than 40 hours, with the non-religious curriculum taking up only six or seven hours, mostly covering English, mathematics and general knowledge. In the last round of Ofsted inspections in , more than a third of the strictly Orthodox schools under inspection were criticised for the quality of their secular education.
By their mid-teens boys will have entered a yeshiva, where they will remain until their shidduch - an arranged marriage, which usually happens between the ages of 18 and A married man will then go on to a kollel, either full or part-time. In recent years, the enthusiasm for study has become more, not less, intense. Until the s full-time learning in the kollel was unusual - Gateshead was the only one in Britain. But now it is estimated that more than 20 per cent of married men continue their studies in a kollel well into middle-age and beyond, supported by their family.
It is not unusual for wives to take on the burden of providing for their families. This emphasis on religious learning exacts a high price in other ways. Haredim may be well educated in Jewish law, but many are poorly equipped for employment in the outside world. More than ten per cent of men obtain a rabbinical qualification, but very few have a professional one. Many take jobs in the community that allow time for study. A survey suggested that between a quarter and a third of all men work in property; 18 per cent work in retail; 17 per cent teach in local Haredi institutions.
The diamond business, centred in Hatton Garden, is a traditional mainstay. Such are the ties to the community that very few will chose to work outside it. I met him at his office at the school. He sat behind his desk, wearing a black beaver hat and top coat. His grey beard gathered in clouds around his face, and sharp, amused eyes blinked behind rimless glasses.
Rabbi Pinter is a ubiquitous and much-respected figure in Stamford Hill, a man who seems to enjoy his position as the public face of the Haredi community. He runs three schools, and is an influential voice in any number of bodies and organisations. A discursive conversationalist, much given to jokes and ruminations, he has a reputation for worldliness - 'he has a Blackberry,' somebody told me.
The girls' senior department became a voluntary aided school in , and at the same time moved into superb new, purpose-built accommodation.
Tony Blair attended its official opening. The school has pupils, from 11 to 16, drawn from all sections of the Haredi community. When the school became voluntary aided, Rabbi Pinter told me, there had been some parental concern about having to follow certain aspects of the national curriculum. But parents can choose to opt out. Sex education is something we deal with on our own terms through the Jewish curriculum, based on very strong family values. I had never seen a school as clean and orderly as Yesodey Hatorah, nor a more well-behaved body of students.
While the education of boys is centred on religious study, girls enjoy a much more balanced curriculum, at primary and secondary level.
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The attitude to learning was what defined a Jew as Haredi, Rabbi Pinter said. There is a difference in aspiration. You could be an authority in halacha [Jewish law] - why would you want a PhD in physics? I would say second-rate. A doctor, a lawyer, an accountant, I would say second-rate.
The phone rang, and Rabbi Pinter answered it. I can think straight, I can think horizontally, and I can think with my head as well. Talmud develops a person morally, ethically and intellectually. Midwifery is a particularly popular option - and in Stamford Hill there is no shortage of opportunities to practise it. But for women, the primary expectation is to marry, create a home and raise their children in the faith.
Because of the size of families, and the emphasis put on continued religious studies, poverty is a real problem in the community. A study of the Stamford Hill community, Between Torah Learning and Wage Earning, published by the Floersheimer Institute for Policy Studies in Jerusalem, estimated that more than half the households below retirement age were receiving a means tested benefit of some sort, 62 per cent of families in the study were receiving child benefits, and 70 per cent receiving housing benefits.
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Agudas Israel Community Services is an independent body that gives advice to the Stamford Hill Haredi on welfare, employment and immigration issues. An affiliated housing association has more than residential units in Stamford Hill, neighbouring Haringey and Manchester. Housing, Michael Posen the director of the advisory service told me, was a major concern among many Haredi in Stamford Hill. Of the 3, families in the community, more than 2, live in private rented accommodation; housing is scarce and and there are high levels of over-crowding.
He estimates that more than families in the community will be affected. But a lot of what the government has proposed will affect larger families disproportionately to smaller families. People in the community had a mixed view of drawing benefits, Posen went on. But in terms of stigma Jobseeker's Allowance, yes there would be embarrassment. I wondered, would worsening financial straits perhaps encourage people to have smaller families?
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For that we can rely that we will be looked after by God. It might be argued, I said, that in this day and age one should be thinking about limiting numbers. He shot me a look.