Shtreimel

A shtreimel is a wide circular hat, a velvet crown surrounded by a thick ring of fur, traditionally made from the tails of sable, marten or fox and assembled from a number of pieces that varies by custom. It is worn by married Hasidic men on Shabbat, on festivals, at weddings and on occasions of honour, and not on ordinary weekdays.

The related hats are distinguished carefully by those who wear them. The spodik is taller, narrower and darker, worn chiefly by Hasidim of Polish descent. The kolpik, of unpointed fur and usually brown, is worn by some rebbes on occasions that are neither weekday nor full festival, and by their unmarried sons. To a practised eye the height, the width, the fur and the way the crown sits identify a man's community immediately, so the hat functions as a legible statement of affiliation as well as a garment of honour.

It is usually received at marriage, most often as a gift from the father of the bride, and it is expensive. A good one is a significant family purchase, comparable to a piece of furniture, and it is looked after accordingly, kept in a fitted box and treated as an heirloom. Which furs are acceptable, and whether the synthetic substitutes now available are acceptable, are questions discussed within the communities that wear them.

Jewish law does not require a fur hat, does not mention one, and could not, since the garment is a product of eastern Europe rather than of the sources. The shtreimel is custom in the strict sense, and it is custom whose beginnings are not documented.

Several accounts circulate. One holds that Jews adopted an item of Polish or Russian noble dress and kept it after the nobility had moved on, which is a common pattern in the history of dress. Another holds that a decree once required Jews to wear an animal tail as a mark of contempt and that the community turned the humiliation into an ornament of the Sabbath; no such decree has been produced. A third simply reads it as the honouring of Shabbat with the finest thing available in a cold country. None of these has documentary support of the kind that would settle the matter, and the honest position is that nobody knows.

What can be documented is later and more interesting: the hat is a marker of community identity in a way that no source requires and no authority imposed, sustained entirely by the communities that wear it. The recent arguments over synthetic fur, driven partly by cost, partly by animal welfare legislation in some countries and partly by the difficulty of obtaining pelts, are being conducted on exactly that footing, as a question of custom rather than of law.