Reading Gone by Kellerman I came across a statement by a detective who thinks that the jewish woman he’s interviewing is wearing a wig to cover her hair out of modesty. Sounds okay, given that many religions have similar prohibitions. I think it’s out of the Old Testament?
So is it fact? I’ve never heard of such a custom for Jewish women.
Shalom,
mangeorge
Bonus query:
Would this practice get one by in any Islamic circles?
It is absolutely a fact. Married Jewish women are expected to cover their hair when in public, and often do so with a wig.
Should the wig be obvious? If the point is modesty…
This is a practice of Orthodox Jewish women; married women in the Conservative and Reform branches of Judaism generally don’t observe any special hair-covering rules during daily life. AFAICT, the explicit rule about hair-covering is found in Talmud and Midrash, not in the Bible itself.
In conservative Islamic circles, adult women are expected to cover their hair irrespective of their marital status. The covering is supposed to be done with a garment such as the hijab. There’s a hadith in which Muhammad says that wearing wigs is prohibited, but I’m not sure whether all Muslims abide by this or only the more conservative ones.
The woman in Kellerman’s Gone was Hasidic (remember when Alex Delaware noticed the sideburn curls on the baby?). Hasidic women often wear wigs to conceal their hair. The wigs are called “sheitels.”
No. In fact, most times you can’t tell if a woman is wearing a sheitl. My friend Karen has two, but most often wears a snood unless she’s at work. Only her husband and males not yet of age can see her hair; women are permitted to see it.
Which defeats the purpose and the spirit of the law. Say for instance she made a wig of her own hair. In essence nobody knows at a glance it’s not her hair … The wig wearing is to get around wearing a cloth covering and trying to appear modern or hide that part of the religion. This is an outright attempt to outsmart God. There’s a story in the Koran I think (maybe hadith) where the Jews were instructed not to work on sundays; so they set the fish traps on saturday; and collected the fish on monday. They were duly punished for that.
virtually yours
Yeah, this had me scratching my (non-covered) head too. From what I understand of other cultures where women were traditionally expected to wear head coverings (and not just Muslims…Puritan women, just as an example, were expected to do this as well), the object was to conceal something that may be deemed sexually arousing or at least distracting to males. So while I can see wearing a nondescript head covering, such as a hijab, babushka, whatever, just putting on a wig that looks just like normal hair does seem a bit like cheating - or, rather, puts into question what law you are actually following and why make that sort of loophole. After all, if she still looks like she has a normal head of hair, then I would think that she would still appear as “interesting” as she would without the wig. Just my $.02.
I was browsing around reading about sheitels, and I came across an interesting document about the reasons for wearing a wig rather than a kerchief.
In Catholicism there are also “hair” rules, though they’ve somewhat relaxed. Pretty much all nuns were once required to cover their hair, as are women while in church. Some women considered it virtuous (pious) to cover their heads. Many Mexican catholic women wear mantillas, even out of church. Italian women too, IIRC.
Some (most) of these mantillas are small and decorative, but some cover the head and shoulder.
It’s this apparent similarity that led me to assume a connection from the OT.
Some christian, Baptist I think, church women wear hats but that may be fashion. I don’t know.
I find woman’s hair attractive, but not really erotic. That which is hidden, eh?
The idea behind wearing wigs rather than scarves, when in a no-scarf society, is that a woman wearing a scarf in the middle of, say, Paris, automatically calls attention to herself - which is definitely not the idea of “modesty”. Those wigs are chosen for mousiness, not flash.
The Christian “rules” about hair coverings for women in Church comes from a piece in one of St Paul’s Epistles, where he bemoans that some women are busier criticizing each other’s hairdo’s than paying attention and says they should be modestly covered. Of course, the same women who’d been busy comparing hairdressers soon started comparing embroiderers. Spanish mantillas are about as unmodest as a head covering can be; out-mantilla’ing and out-manton’ing each other used to be a point for women at high feasts 
I took a class on Halacha (Jewish Law) in college and actually did a research paper on the Halachic reasoning for wigs as headcoverings. There wasn’t much in the Talmud or Midrash that I could find, anyway. From what I remember, this is a case of rabbis going along with practice, rather than women following accepted rabbinic rulings. (Well, *now * they are, but originally, women started doing it for vanity reasons.)
FTR, I don’t think many Modern Orthodox women in the US, anyway, cover their hair. You really only see it among Haredi women. (Haredi = ultra-orthodox, but they don’t really like that term.) And lots of Mizrachi (Middle Eastern Jewish) women cover their hair with scarves similar to hijabs.
It’s been a long time, and things do change, but I grew up in Mexican communities (we were poor) in Bakersfield, CA.
The women did take pride in their mantillas. They, the mantillas, are very beautiful, and involve a lot of hand work.They also had smaller, squarish scarves that they wore. I think these were also called mantillas, but couldn’t swear to it.
Anyway, I vividly remember seeing the women and girls wear mantillas when they would pray at home at the family altar. The altar is often more a religious diarama, and is present in many Mexican homes. There was a talking one in the movie "Born in East L.A. 
I don’t remember it’s spanish name. 
I think there’s a passage in one of the letters about how women shouldn’t cut their hair (it’s their crowning glory?) so sometimes the (fundamentalist?) women and girls will have luxurious long hair showing.
I’ve seen that. Men shall and women shant. Something along those lines.