ABSTRACT
This chapter defines haredi, but it is clear that one of the outstanding characteristics of that society is its greater commitment to the traditional, Eastern European Jewish way of life. The fact that, beginning with the 1950s, the vast majority of haredi young men spent all their time learning Torah within a Volozhin-type yeshiva, reflects a most significant social change. Haredi Judaism is consciously committed to the formulation of an elitist self-image. The chapter emphasizes the background processes of secularization and modernization on the one hand, the uprooting of Eastern European Jewry and its migration to the West on the other. The destruction of Eastern European Jewry in the twentieth century that created the conditions which enabled the spread of ultraorthodoxy. The yeshiva gedolah of the kind typified by the Volozhin Yeshiva, has long been recognized as one of the most important internal developments to take place within the traditional Jewish framework.
