BERGHOLZ, Ohio — Myron Miller and his wife, Arlene, had been asleep for an hour when their 15-year-old daughter woke them and said people were knocking at the door.

Miller, 45, a stocky construction worker and an Amish bishop in the peaceful farmlands of eastern Ohio, found five or six men waiting. Some grabbed him and wrestled him outside as others hacked at his long black beard with scissors, clipping off 6 inches. As Miller kept struggling, his wife screamed at the children to call 911, and the attackers fled.

For an Amish man, it was an unthinkable personal violation, and all the more bewildering because the attack was meted out by other Amish.

“We don’t necessarily fight, but it’s just instinct to defend yourself,” Miller recalled.

The attackers, the authorities said, had traveled from an isolated splinter settlement near Bergholz, south of the Miller residence. Sheriffs and Amish leaders in the region, home to one of the country’s largest concentrations of Amish, had come to expect trouble from the Bergholz group. It is said to be led with an iron hand by Sam Mullet, a prickly 66-year-old man who had become bitterly estranged from mainstream Amish communities and had had several confrontations with the Jefferson County sheriff.

But the violent humiliation that men from his group would inflict on their perceived enemies throughout this fall, using scissors and battery-operated clippers, came as a bizarre shock. The assaults — four are known to the authorities — have stirred fear among the Amish and resulted in the arrests, so far, of five men, including three of Mullet’s sons, on kidnapping and other charges. Officials say more arrests are possible.

In the first incident, on Sept. 6 in the town of Mesopotamia, a married couple who had left the Bergholz community four years ago, Martin and Barbara Miller, were attacked at night by five of their own sons and a son-in law, along with their wives, all of whom had elected to remain with Mullet, according to the victims. The gang left the father with a “ragged beard,” as a sheriff’s report described it, then turned on their mother — who is Mullet’s sister — and chopped off large patches of her hair.

“The beard is a key symbol of masculine Amish identity,” said Donald Kraybill, a sociologist and expert on the Amish at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. The women view their long hair, kept in a bun, as their “glory,” Kraybill said, and shearing it was “an attack on her personal identity and religious teaching.”

The men accused in the attack were released on bail. The elder Mullet has not been charged, although he remains under investigation. “I know that nothing moves out there unless he says it moves,” said Fred Abdalla, the sheriff of Jefferson County.

Federal prosecutors are considering whether to pursue federal hate-crime charges, according to the Cleveland office of the FBI.

The prosecutions are unusual because the Amish do not believe in revenge and prefer to settle disputes internally. The couple in Mesopotamia, Barbara and Martin Miller, have refused to testify, telling officers that they will “turn the other cheek.”

But others are cooperating with law enforcement.

“We want to see these people behind bars so this cult can be torn apart before it ends up like most of them do,” said Myron Miller, who lives in Mechanicstown. Many Amish regard Mullet as a danger to the wider community and above all to the 120 people in the settlement, including dozens of children growing up under his sway.

Mullet, through the front door of his large white house at the center of his Bergholz settlement, refused to speak a reporter last week and ordered him off the property.

In an earlier interview with The Associated Press, Mullet said the recent attacks resulted from “religious differences,” and that he had not ordered the attacks, though he had known they were taking place.

The Sept. 6 attack on Mullet’s sister and her husband sent ripples of anxiety through the Amish community.

The next day the sister, Barbara Miller, 57, at first refused to talk to officers from Trumbull County but then pointed at her husband’s ragged beard.

“They did that to him,” she said, according to the sheriff’s report. “And they did this to me,” she said, removing a bandana, revealing what the officers described as “several patches of hair missing.”

Further episodes on Oct. 4 finally led to the arrests.