By an appropriate coincidence, today’s sentencing of Sholom Rubashkin, former head of the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking plant in Iowa, for fraud and money laundering, comes just a few days on the heels of the guilty plea of Eliahu Ben Haim, one of a group of rabbis caught up in a New Jersey money laundering conspiracy.

Both men come out of insular, ultra-orthodox worlds: the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic sect in the case of Rubashkin, the Syrian-Jewish community of Brooklyn and the Jersey shore in the case of Ben Haim. And in both cases, the criminal activity was done under cover of religion. Ben Haim laundered the money through a special fund for charitable works. Rubashkin claimed to be pursuing a religious mission. Here’s what Federal District Judge Linda R. Reade’s sentencing memo had to say about that.

Defendant devotes a substantial amount of evidence and argument to his contention that his offenses of conviction were not motivated out of a sense of personal greed, but rather, out of a sense of duty to maintain his family business for religious purposes. No matter Defendant’s motive, he defrauded the victim banks out of millions of dollars. He unlawfully placed his family business’s interest above the victim banks’ interest. His family business and he personally benefitted at the expense of all the victim banks’ innocent shareholders.

Inside the Syrian-Jewish community, the man who brought the rabbis (and various public officials in the Garden State) down, a real estate wheeler-dealer named Solomon Dwek, has been vilified for undermining the community. Chabad’s friends have called the prosecutors anti-Semites, and so mischaracterized the case that the U.S. Attorney has felt compelled to write a public letter to set the record straight. In both cases, there was a sense that communal ends justified illegal means. As my colleague Ron Kiener points out in an article on Agriprocessors, Chabad had a theological justification (yo, Dreher!) to go with it.

This is a tale of Hasidic Jews who are utterly at odds with what most Americans understand as modernity. They learn from their most sacred text, the Tanya, (published in 1797 by the founder of Chabad Hasidism, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi) that “the souls of the nations of the world, the idol worshippers, derive from unclean husks and havde no goodness in them whatsoever.

This xenophobic teaching, an intolerant note hiding within the otherwise fetching melody of Chabad Hasidism, is spun differently for different audiences. But it indicates what can happen when business proprietors armed with a chauvinistic mystical theology that denies the humanity of non-Jews face off against the “laws of the land.”

Let’s hear it for modernity.