Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (32 page)

Asleep in their rural farmhouse, forty-five-year-old Myron Miller and his wife Arlene were roused by pounding at their door. Six men
were waiting outside. When Myron opened the door just a crack to see who it was, a man grabbed his beard and pulled him through the door. Myron grabbed the other man’s beard as well, tearing some of it out as still more men jumped from the shadows to wrestle him to the ground. Arlene screamed for the their children to call for help as one of the attackers, brandishing scissors, chopped away Miller’s chest-length beard until less than two inches were left. As quick as that, the attackers retreated into the dark, leaving their victim stunned and humiliated.
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This strange crime would seem to be ripped from the pages of ancient history, but in fact it was perpetrated in Ohio on October 4, 2011. Miller was an Amish bishop embroiled in a dispute with a breakaway group of fellow Amish living a settlement called Bergholz and led by their own angry and eccentric bishop, Sam Mullet. The attack on Miller’s beard was Mullet’s version of revenge, an idea that is generally rejected in the Amish community. It was neither the first nor the last time Mullet’s men attacked. Over a period of about two months, the “Bergholz barbers,” though not Mullet himself, committed five attacks, cutting the beards of eight men and the hair of one woman, all of whom were perceived to have insulted and betrayed them and, by extension, the Christian faith. The early victims of these attacks refused to press charges, but Miller and a later victim decided to press charges when it appeared that nothing less would stop Mullet’s men. Un-Amish behavior demanded an un-Amish response.

What followed was a sensational and groundbreaking trial that drew international attention and led to the first-ever conviction under the 2009 Shepard-Byrd Act, which made it a federal offense to cause bodily injury to any person on the basis of his or her actual or perceived race, color, religion, sexual orientation, or national origin. For the wider world, the trial presented the curious spectacle of violence within a bucolic community, as well as a striking illustration of the religious resonance of beards for traditionalist faith communities. The hate-crime case that federal prosecutors brought against the attackers was built on the understanding that a beard was not just a beard. Cutting an Amish man’s beard was a form of religious hatred, they argued, and was thus far more serious than temporary disfigurement.

In many regards, Sam Mullet’s group was a cult, and he was a cult leader. A taciturn sexagenarian who held his followers in thrall through a regime of fear, Mullet told his followers that he was a prophet who
spoke with God and that any who opposed him were sinners. He ordered his followers to abandon traditional Sunday worship as unnecessary, presenting his own pronouncements as sufficient revelation. He also promoted the notion of individual and communal penance, denouncing his followers for individual and collective spiritual failings, and ordering unusual forms of penance, including beating with paddles and long stays in goat pens or chicken coops. Often the wife of a man thus interned was ordered to move into Mullet’s home, and into his bed for “sexual counseling,” during which Mullet would demonstrate to the wife how better to please her husband.

Beard- and hair-cutting was introduced as another form of humiliation and penance for sins at Bergholz. From their origins in seventeenth-century Europe, the Amish have set themselves apart from the corrupted world about them and made it an article of faith to renounce artificial, indulgent, carefully groomed modernity in favor of simple beards and bonnets. The significance of removing a faithfully grown beard or feminine long hair is understood in terms of Old Testament references to the ancient practice of tearing or shaving hair as a sign of mourning or disrespect. Sinners in Bergholz were encouraged to have themselves trimmed voluntarily as a sign of their eagerness to
purge themselves of evil thoughts and renew their spirits. Then Mullet and his followers conceived the idea that such humiliating penance might be visited upon “hypocrites” who had left the community or spoken ill of them.
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At trial, Mullet’s lawyers argued that shearing away hair did not amount to bodily harm, as required by the federal statute. The court therefore needed to determine the nature of the harm caused. Testimony made it clear that the attacks had achieved their desired effect, deeply distressing the victims. One man confessed to being heartbroken. “I was depressed. It was not the Amish way of living to go around without hair and beard.”
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He reported taking an assortment of vitamins in the hope his hair would grow back faster. Another victim told the court, “I’d rather have them beat me black and blue than take my hair.”
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The harm was real, even if it was more spiritual and psychological than physical in nature. After deliberating for four days, a federal jury in Cleveland found Mullet and fifteen of his followers guilty as charged. A few months later, Mullet was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, and others to sentences ranging from one to seven years.
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In the fall of 2014, however, the defendants had their hate-crime convictions overturned when an appeals court decided that the assaults resulted from personal disputes rather than religious hatred.
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The case may be retried and the religious meaning of beards reconsidered.

The case of the Bergholz barbers illuminates the prominent role beards can play in establishing religious and ethnic identities. The Amish isolate themselves, hold fast to old customs, and demonstrate their religious commitment with their hair. Fundamentalist Jews and Muslims follow a similar script, also preferring plain, old-fashioned clothing and untrimmed beards. While the Amish have retreated to unelectrified homesteads, conservative Jews and Muslims have established urban enclaves, such as the Hasidic Jews who, in novelist Chaim Potok’s vivid words, “walked the Brooklyn streets like specters, with their black hats, long black coats, black beards, and earlocks.”
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Religious separatists of all stripes reach deep into the past to shape their antimodern religious identity, and in the matter of facial hair, Jews can stake a claim to the oldest of all written directives.

As mentioned in
chapter 2
, the ancient Hebrews left us with history’s first beard-preservation law. Ironically, this ancient teaching has
proved more significant in recent centuries than at any other time since it was written down. For most ancient and medieval Jewish communities, the commandment in Leviticus not to “shave off the edge of their beards” was unremarkable and uncontroversial because facial hair was commonplace and few were tempted to contravene it. The Talmud, a collection of postbiblical rabbinical writings generally took the view that, as a God-given adornment, the beard was meant to distinguish men from women and should not be removed.
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On the other hand, it was not a matter that rose to the level of great legal or religious significance, and rabbinic writings also softened the impact of the biblical ban by interpreting it to refer only to the use of razors, and not scissors, clippers, or other cutting implements.

An important exception to this easygoing attitude, however, was the mystical Kabbalist school of Jewish thought, which had its roots in a thirteenth-century Spanish book called the
Zohar
. In its complex scheme of relationships between divine, human, and earthly substances, the
Zohar
assigned the beard an exalted status as a physical manifestation of the highest dimension of God’s creative power and mercy. Even now, rabbis influenced by Kabbalistic thought instruct their male followers to preserve all of the hair of their beards, lest they cut off one of the conduits of God’s grace.
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Though their tradition is definitely favorable to facial hair, most Jews living in Western Europe and the Americas over the past three centuries have accommodated themselves to the modes and tastes of a shaven society. Even highly observant and Orthodox Jews of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often chose to make themselves as smooth-faced as their Christian neighbors.
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Samson Raphael Hirsch, an influential early nineteenth-century German rabbi and one of the founders of modern Orthodoxy, shaved himself until the middle of the century, when that era’s beard movement inspired Jews and non-Jews alike to acquire a more patriarchal aspect.
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For both observant and secular Jews, the late nineteenth century was an important turning point. Just as the bearded style was once again in retreat in the non-Jewish world, both Ultra-Orthodox and secular Zionist Jews pushed strongly in the opposite direction, opening an increasingly visible divide between assimilators and separatists. An influential early Jewish fundamentalist, the Hungarian rabbi Moses
Sofer, and his even more strident Ultra-Orthodox successors erected a bulwark against the erosion of tradition by stressing the equal importance of every religious stricture found in Jewish law and writings.
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Two important consequences of this stance were a refusal to relativize or minimize biblical directives on hair, and an inclination to interpret obedience to these and other regulations as a sign of commitment to the Jewish way of life.
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Secular Jews were also increasingly disillusioned with late nineteenth-century European society. Educated and professional Jews in nineteenth-century European cities typically sought to integrate themselves into the larger culture, but found as the century progressed that the social barriers against them were stiffening. This was the experience of Theodor Herzl, a Viennese banker’s son and journalist. As a young man, Herzl was sophisticated and stylish, showing an affinity for German literature and music, as well as a distain for the old and seemingly uncouth Jewish folkways, including drab, untrimmed beards. As a young man, he adopted the grand sideburns and shaved chin modeled by the Austrian emperor.
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With the rise of explicitly anti-Semitic politics in Europe in during the 1890s, however, Herzl changed his mind about the prospect of Jews’ integration, concluding instead that the Jews needed their own nationalist movement and their own state. In 1896, he spelled out his ideas in a book
, The Jewish State
, that launched the modern Zionist movement and helped lead eventually to the creation of modern Israel.

Any nationalist movement, Jewish or otherwise, needs symbols, icons, and images to rally around. Herzl understood that he must himself be a symbol as well as a leader for his movement, and he carefully reconsidered his appearance. He abandoned his stylish sideburns in favor of a luxuriant, square-cut beard of the sort found in the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian monuments installed in European museums. In the hands of Zionist artists and publicists, Herzl’s grandiloquent figure was deployed to popularize Zionist ideas.
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By reclaiming their identity as heirs of an ancient civilization, secular Jews sought to reinforce a non-European identity, as well as their claim to a homeland in the Middle East.

In these ways, both secular and observant Jews in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have found reasons to adopt beards as a sign
of Jewish identity. This practice, in turn, has led to disputes between Orthodox communities and secular, non-Jewish states. In 2012, for example, a Hasidic student in the New York City police academy was dismissed when he refused for religious reasons to trim his beard to the required one-millimeter length. “I don’t understand what the problem would be,” the recruit said.
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The issue, of course, was not his hair, but whether the regulations of state or religion should prevail.

Symbols of segregation, like long beards, affirm distinct values that stand in contrast to the more liberal values of Western society. It may be, as the admittedly unbearded New York City rabbi Meir Soloveichik has argued, that Jewish beards stand as an honest rebuke to the modern tendency to deny aging and mortality. On the other hand, long Orthodox beards say even more loudly that religious identity is paramount, and that traditionalists refuse to be defined by the values—progressive or otherwise—of a liberal and secular society.
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A similar pattern has emerged on a rather larger scale in the Muslim world. Here again, the majority of Muslims worldwide take a pragmatic approach to hair, while an increasingly adamant conservative element insists that traditional directives be strictly followed.
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For these fundamentalists, beards are one of several bulwarks against Western power and culture, including its unwelcome tendency to weaken male authority. As in the cases of the Amish and Orthodox Jews, conservative Muslims rely on both ancient and modern religious sanctions that make facial hair a signifier of identity, commitment, and the proper ordering of society.

“Every day when I shaved, I used to ask God for forgiveness.” Those were the words in 2012 of Ahmed Hamdy, an Egyptian police officer torn between the regulations of his employment and what he believed to be his religious obligations as an observant Muslim.
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Hair had become the front line in the cultural battle between modernists and traditionalists in the Muslim world. After Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak was forced from power in the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, Hamdy dared to show up to work unshaved, joining thousands of others clamoring to embrace their faith in this very public way. He was immediately placed on leave at reduced pay. In the summer of 2012, Mohamed Morsi, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, became both the first democratically elected and the first bearded president of modern Egypt. The
triumph of the traditionalists, however, was too much for the secular elites to accept. Morsi and his bearded supporters were violently forced from power in 2013, and men like Hamdy were required to return to their razors and prayers for forgiveness.