A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [139]
In its Jewish neighborhood of about thirty blocks Antwerp gives the impression on a Friday night that it is the most Jewish city in Europe. In truth, this provincial center of a half-million people is in some ways Belgium's most Flemish city, with its northern Renaissance old center chilled by harsh gusts of wind from the mouth of the Scheldt, its trim and serious nineteenth-century housing, and its wide modern boulevards. The architecture offers an assortment of symmetrically ornate old Dutch brick, elegantly swirled art nouveau, and stark modern—all set against a chronically gray sky. The Flemish do not go out at night, unless to go to their neighborhood pubs, or if they do leave their neighborhood, they drive. There are no traffic jams in Antwerp. Virtually the only pedestrian crowds, aside from tourists in the old town, are the Orthodox Jews who cannot drive on the Sabbath. By the late 1970s, their neighborhood seemed so prosperous, so concentrated, that it was easy to forget that some twenty thousand Antwerp Jews was less than half the prewar population, which had lived in a far larger area of the city.
Flanders as a safe harbor for the late flourishing of Orthodox Judaism is not without its logic. The Flemish, while achieving an affluent modern standard of living, have remained Europe's most steadfast traditionalists. They have kept their folk customs and the local rituals of each town. They still cling to the Catholic Church, arid like the Jews they usually send their children to their own religious schools. Like Orthodox Jews, the Flemish believe in large families (though in recent years the Flemish birthrate has not been keeping up with the Hasidim). Like their Yiddish-speaking neighbors, they refuse to part with or dilute their dialect. Flemish, which varies from town to town, has remained a purer form of Dutch than in Holland, where Amsterdamers like to adopt foreign words. Flemish eat their own cuisine—stews, husepots, and waterzoois— wluch are not flashy enough to interest foreigners but help fight the chill of a North Sea wind. Were it not for the fading memories of World War II recalled by the extreme Flemish nationalist movement—which grew more boisterous in the 1970s and by the end of the decade openly violent—Antwerp Jews could have felt totally at home in this Flemish heartland. There is even a marked preference for beards among Flemish men.
Not all Antwerp Jews were religious, and it was sometimes whispered that the nonreligious might count for more than 50 percent. But the nonreligious also sent their children to Jewish schools. More than 90 percent of Antwerp's Jewish children attend Jewish schools, the highest attendance record of any Jewish community in the world. And even the nonreligious will often keep kosher homes so that they can invite their friends and business associates.
But the many Jewish schools do not include a university. The community is not a particularly well-educated one because it is centered around diamonds, a trade where a good income can be earned without an education. Jewish education in Antwerp emphasizes fluency in Yiddish and Hebrew and religious study. Yiddish is the most commonly heard language in the Jewish quarter, and it is the working language of the diamond trade.
Dress is one of the ways that Antwerp Jews stand out. It is intentional. The clothing of the ultra-Orthodox serves to make a statement about commitment to a special life, a uniquely Jewish life. The belief is that a distinct exterior guards against assimilation and separates a Jew for a particularly pious life. Before the war, in places where Jews lived separate and pious lives, married women wore wigs, men wore curled side locks, long beards, black wool clothing, and broad-brimmed hats over their yarmulkes. The war generation, remembering their yellow stars, felt ambiguous about this idea of being visually set apart. Orthodox men simply wore a hat. They usually did not even grow beards. But their children, raised on tales of the Holocaust, grew up defiant. They thought