Rabbi Jonathan Guttentag is a UK representative of the Coalition for Jewish Values and a communal rabbi based in Manchester.
At nearly ten o’clock on a winter evening in the House of Lords, one of the clearest public defences of Britain’s yeshivot came not from a rabbi, a Jewish communal spokesman, or a campaigner, but from the Bishop of Manchester.
For months, the debate over under-16 yeshiva provision has too often been framed as though there were only two possible positions. On one side: safeguarding, modernity, and public responsibility. On the other: secrecy, backwardness, and resistance. It is an easy frame, and for some, a convenient one. But it is also badly misleading.
The Bishop saw something more important. He understood that the argument was not really about whether children should be safe. On that, there should be no dispute. It was about whether the British state still has the cultural intelligence to recognise that not every serious institution is a school in the modern secular sense.
A yeshivah is not a failed school. It is a different kind of institution.
That distinction may sound narrow. It is not. It goes to the heart of a much larger question in British public life: whether the state can still make room for forms of life that it did not design, does not instinctively understand, and cannot easily fit into a single regulatory template.
The issue arises in relation to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, and particularly the danger that under-16 yeshivot may be treated as though they are simply unregistered schools operating under cover of religion. But that description already assumes the point at issue. For many in the Charedi community, the yeshiva ketanah is not an attempt to evade schooling rules. It is a form of full-time religious formation rooted in a long and coherent tradition of Torah education.
That does not place it beyond scrutiny. No serious person should argue that any institution, religious or otherwise, is immune from safeguarding requirements. But neither should safeguarding become a slogan under which the state quietly abolishes difference.
This is where conservatives ought to be especially alert. We are meant to understand that society is made up not only of individuals and the state, but of families, communities, churches, synagogues, schools, clubs, traditions, and inherited forms of moral life. We are meant to know that these “little platoons” matter precisely because they are not interchangeable units in a national system.
Yet modern bureaucratic culture repeatedly falls into the same temptation: if something looks unfamiliar, regulate it until it resembles something familiar. If an institution does not fit the existing categories, force it into one of them. If it resists, treat that resistance as evidence of guilt.
That is not wisdom. It is administrative impatience.
In the case of yeshivot, the category mistake is especially serious. Britain has long allowed for educational pluralism. It has recognised that parents may raise and educate their children in different ways, within the law, and that not every legitimate path is identical to the standard state model. For decades, parts of the Torah world have operated within a broader understanding of elective home education and religious study, not in a legal vacuum but in a different educational tradition.
The real question, therefore, is not whether the state has an interest. Of course it does. The real question is whether that interest can be exercised with discrimination, restraint, and respect for a minority community’s deeply held way of life.
Can government protect children without insisting on cultural sameness? Can it enforce safeguarding without acting as though every thick, inherited religious culture is merely a problem waiting to be normalised?
Those questions are not only Jewish questions. They concern the shape of a free country.
A mature society does not respond to every unfamiliar institution with panic. It asks calmer questions. Are children safe? Is there neglect? Is there abuse? Are basic legal duties being met? If the answer to such questions is satisfactory, then the burden lies on the state to justify why further intrusion is necessary. And if the proposed intrusion effectively means forcing a religious institution to cease being itself, that should trouble anyone with a serious commitment to liberty.
This is why the Bishop of Manchester’s intervention was so striking. He did not approach the matter as an insider to the yeshiva world. He approached it as a public moral question. And in doing so he performed a service not only to one Jewish community, but to Britain’s wider constitutional culture.
He recognised that when the state loses the ability to distinguish between harm and difference, liberty is in danger. He recognised that a society confident in its own values should not need to flatten every minority institution into the same shape. And he recognised, too, that religious freedom in Britain is not secured merely by warm words about tolerance, but by the harder work of careful classification, proportionate law, and institutional humility.
Too much current discussion proceeds as though any educational model that departs from late-modern assumptions must be suspect. But conservatism, at its best, begins from a different instinct. It knows that human beings are formed in particular traditions. It knows that moral worlds are handed down, not invented afresh by each generation. And it knows that the state, though necessary and often beneficent, is a crude instrument when it tries to replace the organic work of family and faith.
None of this relieves religious communities of responsibility. They must be serious about child welfare, serious about engagement, and serious about explaining themselves to the wider public. But the wider public, and especially the state, has responsibilities too. One of them is not to confuse non-conformity with wrongdoing.
That is why this issue matters beyond the Charedi world. Today it may be a yeshivah. Tomorrow it may be another religious body, another minority institution, another community whose habits do not fit comfortably within official assumptions. Once the principle is established that legitimate difference is merely deviance awaiting correction, the space for freedom shrinks for everyone.
A confident Britain should be able to do better than that. It should be able to safeguard children while preserving liberty. It should be able to regulate carefully without erasing difference. And it should be able to admit that not every valuable institution is legible at first glance to Whitehall.
The Bishop of Manchester understood this. If ministers are wise, they will too.