Published: 30 May 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
For many ultra-Orthodox men, the wide-brimmed Italian Borsalino is the gold standard, a tradition that has social rather than religious origins
Long before the Borsalino became the hat of choice among ultra-Orthodox Jews, it achieved popularity in Hollywood. Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman wore them in Casablanca. Jean Paul Belmondo and Marcello Mastroianni wore Borsalinos. Fred Astaire, Winston Churchill and Ernest Hemingway favoured the hat, too. Al Pacino—as Michael Corleone—wore one. So did real-life mobster Al Capone.
Rabbi Menachem Tendler, the head rabbi at U. City Shul in Missouri, is the owner of three Borsalinos. Tendler suggests the popularity of the hat may derive from the early 1900s and Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel.
Finkel was known as the Alter of Slabodka. He was an influential leader of Orthodox Judaism in Eastern Europe and the founder of the Slabodka Yeshiva, in Vilijampolė, Lithuania.
“Young boys would sit and learn from Finkel,” Rabbi Tendler said. “They were very poor and looked down upon — they were nebbishes. Finkel’s thing was that if the Torah is the manual for the world and if you’re involved in it, then you’ve got to be respectable and look respectable.
“He raised money so every boy in his synagogue would walk around in a suit, a hat, a tie, they would walk around town and people would say, ‘That is a successful person!’
A person who wakes up and looks like a schlepper starts to treat himself like a shlepper,” he said. “And if you wake up and you dress like a millionaire, it has a big influence. This is how things started. Nowadays, it’s become like the Yeshiva boy’s uniform.”
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The history of the Borsalino, the wide-brimmed fedora worn by some Orthodox Jewish men (St Louis Jewish Light)
Image: Humphrey Bogart (Warner Brothers) and a Haredi man in Jerusalem (Deborah Stone)
