Star of David
Ancient Shape, Modern Emblem
- Earliest record
- 1512the title page of the first Hebrew book printed in Prague, at Hanukkah 1512, whose main ornament is the six-pointed star; the Prague community's 1354 flag privilege from Charles IV survives only in later notes and does not describe the emblem (Scholem 1949)
- Said to date from
- around 1000 BCEasserted by popular tradition, which ascribes it to the shield of King David
The claim is about 2,500 years older than the evidence.
Scholem showed in 1949 that neither the Zohar nor Isaac Luria mentions it; the name Shield of David first marks the figure in a Spanish manuscript of the early 1300s.
Gershom Scholem, 'The Curious History of the Six-Pointed Star: How the Magen David Became the Jewish Symbol', Commentary 8 (September 1949), pp. 243-251
The six-pointed hexagram called the Magen David, or Shield of David: the emblem of Jewish identity.
More context
The hexagram is ancient and widespread, a decorative motif in many cultures, and was not a Jewish emblem for most of Jewish history. Its Jewish career began in magic: medieval amulets and magical mezuzot used it against evil spirits, and the name Shield of David grew from a legend of David's engraved shield. Arabic magic called the same figure the Seal of Solomon. Prague's community put it on its banner and seals from the sixteenth century. Broad adoption came in the nineteenth, when emancipated European communities sought an emblem answering the Christian cross. The Zionist movement took it in 1897, Nazi occupiers imposed it as a badge from 1939, and it entered Israel's flag in 1948.
Light
For Scholem, the sign forced on Jews as a Nazi badge was sanctified by suffering and earned the right to mark rebuilding.
Shadow
Scholem called it, at the height of its nineteenth-century popularity, 'a meaningless symbol of Judaism', adopted to mimic the Christian cross.