Making Bodies Kosher

The Politics of Reproduction among Haredi Jews in England

Ben Kasstan

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789202298
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Minority populations are often regarded as being 'hard to reach' and evading state expectations of health protection. This ethnographic and archival study analyses how devout Jews in Britain negotiate healthcare services to preserve the reproduction of culture and continuity. This book demonstrates how the transformative and transgressive possibilities of technology reveal multiple pursuits of protection between this religious minority and the state. Making Bodies Kosher advances theoretical perspectives of immunity, and sits at the intersection of medical anthropology, social history and the study of religions.

Part I

‘COMMUNITY’ HEALTH

Chapter 1

THE PURSUIT OF SELF-PROTECTION

In December 2014 I visited the Manchester Jewish Museum, which inhabits a deconsecrated Sephardi synagogue in the area that was formerly the Jewish Quarter. Sara, a volunteer guide, articulated the complexities and difficulties of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for émigré Jews, and she told me that the vast majority of them were destitute and settled in the area stretching off Manchester Victoria railway station. Émigré Jewish neighbourhoods sat in the shadows of the city and formed a significant part of the slum areas of Red Bank and lower Strangeways.¹ The main reason for moving to the slums was poverty and the proximity to the station, for the émigré Jews would have been travelling ‘a long way, [when] you left God knows what behind you in horror or poor circumstances’ (Sara). Whilst many of the émigré Jews were escaping pogroms and penury on the European continent, Sara emphasised how many also came ‘not in need, but in preference, because tradings were good and Manchester was the area to be in the world, rivalling London’.

With such close proximity to Manchester Victoria, continuous immigration meant the slum areas of Red Bank and Strangeways became ‘absolutely saturated with Jews and Jewish culture’ (Sara). This Jewish Quarter, she went on to say, sat ‘cheek by jowl’ with the wider émigré and ‘indigenous’ populations that were just as financially marginalised, often leading to tense and hostile relations. The aspiration for many Jewish families at this point was to climb from the areas within and surrounding ‘the slums’ and move well in to, and north of, Cheetham Hill and Hightown. These areas, according to Sara, were home to what people called the ‘alrightniks’, because by then ‘you’d made it, you’d done alright for yourself [whereas] down there you had a community of people who needed food and shelter’.

Only a remnant of this ‘illustrious Jewish past’ (as Sara put it) remains, since families began to gradually move northwards into leafier and often more affluent districts – the Jewish Manchester I came to know. Traces of the bygone Jewish Quarter can still be seen in the convenience and grocery shops now owned by émigré families originating from South Asia, alluding to an enduring narrative of immigration and integration for diverse ethnic groups in this corner of England (Figures 1.1 and 1.2).

Jewish Manchester has changed considerably in size, diversity and intensity over generations, and is now home to among the fastest growing Haredi populations in the UK. Mrs Kuschner, a (Litvish) Haredi local in her sixties, told me that Jewish Manchester used to be smaller and tightly woven, resembling ‘an area in Jerusalem called bayit v’gan.² It was just a garden in between the neighbours. Manchester was a little bit like that, everybody knew everybody’. Relations between Haredim and the broader Jewish and non-Jewish populations are nowadays marked by a mutual gap in understanding, and Sara claimed the former are ‘terribly defencive, so what secular people – and lets get this right – what secular people regard as hostility, is fear’ (emphasis added). Sara clearly had a stake in re-presenting a particular view of Jewish Manchester as a Museum guide, and she was careful to put across the correct image. Yet her comment signposts how the image of a garden in between the neighbours has, to paraphrase the epigraph of this book, come to resemble vineyards surrounded by (de)fences to separate what is seen to be kosher from what is not.

This ethnographic vignette offers a stepping-stone to explore the shifting social dynamics that occur over time among the Jews of Manchester, and in this chapter I look closely at how a historically self-sufficient Jewish settlement has become increasingly protective against internal diversities as well as the external world. Unravelling the socio-religious composition of Jewish Manchester illuminates how Haredim have nuanced health and wellbeing needs as well as expectations, which are often obscured by the term ‘community’ (Chapter Two).

Economic, socio-religious and ethnic multiplicity in the historic Jewish Quarter manifested in a gradation of internal marginalities that is continuous with the present day topography of Jewish Manchester. In what follows I first narrate the implications of consecutive flows of immigration during a period of heightened social and medical racism, and the consequent attempts to incorporate émigré Jews into the established Jewish social body and integrate them into the body of the nation. I then discuss how internal dissonance in the present-day Haredi settlement rests on differences in worldviews or religious outlooks (vernacularly termed hashkofos),³ the coming together of which can be viewed as dangerous to local moral orders. The representation of a homogenous ‘ultra-Orthodox Jewish community’ can be understood as an imagined and amalgamated category that does not reflect the realities of Jewish Manchester.

The ways in which Manchester’s Haredi settlement attempts to meet its own socioeconomic and material needs has the effect of maintaining a degree of collective autonomy, and a reduced reliance on external services and the state. Rather than Jewish Manchester being a self-sustaining settlement per se, I argue that it has become increasingly self-protective – enabling the careful negotiation of encounters with the non-Jewish and non-Haredi worlds, and the avoidance of socially constructed contagions. Perceived threats to the Haredi lifeworld requires a continuous process of response: self-protection emerges as a strategy of social immunity among different Haredi groups, and between the inside against the outside – thus creating a graded relation to the UK state.

FIGURE 1.1 Formerly the New Synagogue (consecrated 1889), now a South Asian enterprise. Photograph by the author.

FIGURE 1.2 Torah Street, the former Jewish Quarter. Photograph by the author.

The Jewish ‘Community’

Changing social dynamics in Jewish Manchester are most clearly associated with notably higher total fertility rates among Haredi families, and it is estimated that Haredi children will account for fifty per cent of all Jewish children in the UK by 2031 (Staetsky and Boyd 2015). Broader influences include inward Jewish migration from London as well as internationally, a number of ‘nouveau frum’ families,⁴ and those who move to Manchester to become Jewish through giyur.⁵ The growing prominence of the Haredim in Jewish Manchester (and England) reflects the wider demographic changes that are currently underway in Jewish populations of the United States and Israel (Staetsky and Boyd 2015; Valins 2003; Malach et al. 2016; Cohen 2016).

Shifting demographics and internal fragmentations in Manchester were already developing by the late 1970s, which was, according to Mrs Levy, ‘too awful for words’ in what she described as an era of ‘religious mania’.⁶ Mrs Kahn, a Haredi mother of nine, observed how Jewish Manchester has become more polarised as a result of the settlement’s unprecedented growth over the last twenty-five years. The rise in the number and plurality of Hassidish groups in the settlement is a noticeable example of socio-religious changes in the Jewish social body over time, as many locals told me. Mrs Kuschner recalled how ‘there were very, very, few Hassidim in Manchester years ago when my mother was a little girl’, but now, ‘even people who were not brought up Hassidish have taken on their ways and their garb for some reason’. Remarks such as these indicate how Haredi Judaism is a socio-religious movement that responds to broader social processes, rather than being a static construction of religious ‘extremism’ or ‘fundamentalism’ (Introduction). Mrs Gellner, a frum neighbour of mine, made this clear by discussing how the settlement has become:

More Haredi than it was twenty to thirty years ago and that’s a protection. But I think we’ve probably gone more right⁷ than we were because the world out there has gone much more to the left; the world out there is much more permissive. Society and morals have all gone downhill and to protect yourself and your family, you’ve built up more protective shelter and the way to do that has gone to the right. (Emphasis added)

Similarly, Mr Dror described how:

The community has moved very much to the right over the last fifteen to twenty years, increasingly so, much more insular and much more protective, feeling much more threatened by the advent of the internet, by changes in society and the world outside. (Emphasis added)

The perceived need for ‘protection’ – or social immunity from external contagion – has therefore been driving the gradual push to the ‘right’ that Jewish Manchester has experienced. It can be inferred from Mr Dror’s and Mrs Gellner’s claim that changes in the standard of religious observance is an antonymic shift in response to increasingly dangerous strides that the non-Haredi world and national culture has taken towards the ‘left,’ requiring protection. Thus Haredi Judaism should be understood as sitting relationally (and as a continuous response) to broader political, socio-religious and technological changes in the outside world.

The flux in which frum Jews have become more Haredi and protective against the external world over time differs from what is described as ‘denominational switching’ from one conceptualisation of Judaism to another.⁸ Mr Emet (a pious Sephardi father) told me, ‘I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: The community here in Manchester can be more extreme than the Taliban’ (emphasis added). For Mr Emet, the Haredi expression of Judaism in Manchester and the vernacular construction of religious authenticity is then perceived to surpass the ‘extreme’ of what public and media discourse otherwise regards as ‘religious fundamentalism’.

The Jewish settlement in Manchester that Mr Dror and Mrs Gellner described can be understood as a protective refuge and form of dissimilation, which is the intentional pursuit of cultural (and perhaps physical) distance by upholding and maintaining conducts that constitute markers of difference in relation to the mainstream (see Scott 2009: 173–174). It forms part of a deliberate strategy and ‘art of not being governed’ (Scott 2009), and this form of resistance or ‘counter-conduct’ can then be perceived as threatening to the state’s authority, integrity and perhaps even its continuity. The preference for self-protection and social immunity among the Haredim illustrates how minority groups can indeed choose to dissimilate or insulate themselves (cf. Ecks and Sax 2006), but it would equally be inaccurate to represent them as living in isolation or detachment from the body of the nation.

Scott (2009) uses the example of minority groups in the Zomia region of Southeast Asia to analyse and frame minority–state relations, and remarks how such groups still exist ‘relationally and positionally’ to the state, despite dissimilating. His argument is that these quasi-autonomous bands seek to evade what he terms a ‘subject status’, rather than a relationship with the state altogether, an argument which I here use to frame the experience of Haredi Jews in Manchester.⁹ The immuno-protective stance of the Haredim then illustrates how the concept of citizenship and a subject status can be negotiated. Thus the status of an ‘ultra-Orthodox Jewish community’ as being ‘hard to reach’ (the focus of Chapter Two) can be grounded in a broader anthropological discourse of minority identity and positioning in relation to the state.

The historical quest for autonomy and self-reliance in Jewish Manchester (and increasing strides towards self-protection currently underway) should not be misconstrued as constituting a utopian ‘community’. Intra- and inter-group prejudices that have historically existed between Manchester’s Jewish and non-Jewish populations are part of the fortification that constructs an ethnic boundary, as ‘ethnic identities function as categories of inclusion/exclusion and of interaction’ (Barth 1969: 132). However, perceptions of inclusivity and exclusivity in Jewish Manchester run within the settlement, as much as between the minority and majority populations. Ethnic identities and ascriptions are not inborn or given but are socio-historically contingent, with the boundaries of ethnic contestation – both within and between groups – being a response to external events (Alexander and Alexander 2002).

The historical flows of immigration as well as the current diversity in Manchester bring a constellation of Jewish sub-groups together – with some continuing to have their legitimacy and belonging contested (such as the Sephardim, as I go on to discuss). Other Jewish groups and modalities are resisted because of the potential danger they can pose to the socio-religious and moral order of Haredi and Hassidish Judaism. The splintered composition of Jewish Manchester therefore warrants critical engagement with the term ‘community’, and echoes broader calls to ‘to stop talking of the community as a unitary subject and to analyse axes of contestation within it’ (Benjamin 2002: 8).¹⁰

The term ‘community’ is often used to describe the Jewish social body and is generally regarded in a positive light: imagined as being a place of comfort, unity and safety. A ‘community’ is, as Bauman descri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Text and Transliteration
• Abbreviations
• Introduction. Creating Difference from Within
• Part I. ‘Community’ Health
• Part II. Maternity and Infant Body Politics
• Conclusion. Antonymic Immunities
• Appendix
• Glossary
• List of Archival Materials and Oral Histories
• Index