Volume 8 Number 12
Subjects Discussed In This Issue:
Tekhelet
[Baruch Sterman]
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From: Baruch Sterman <baruch@...>
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 93 22:38:10 EDT
Subject: Tekhelet
I noticed that there has been some discussion of late on the net
regarding the issue of Tekhelet. I have been involved with this
for the past two years, specifically with Trunculus Tekhelet. I
wrote this article which is a general introduction to the history
of the subject - but not totally rigorous from the Halachik side.
We are at the stage where within a few months we will have enough
Tekhelet to begin selling strings to interested parties.
Anyone who would like to find out more details, please feel free
to reach me at:
Baruch Sterman
Te'ena Mizrach 76
Efrat, Israel
972-2-932-136
<baruch@...>
The Riddle of the Biblical Blue
or The Quest for the Holy Snail
Baruch Sterman
The story of the rediscovery of the source for the dye tek-
helet - Biblical Blue, is one of intrigue, deception, deduc-
tion, and luck. It weaves together clues from archeology,
chemistry and Biblical scholarship and its major players in-
clude Jewish and Non-Jewish archeologists, marine biologists
and chemists, the leader of a Hasidic sect, and the former
Chief Rabbi of Israel.
The book of Numbers records, "And God spoke to Moses saying,
Speak to the Children of Israel and say unto them, that they
shall make for themselves fringes on the corners of their
garments for their generations, And they shall place on the
corner fringes a thread of blue. And they shall see it and
remember all of my commandments."
In ancient times colored dyes were rare and valuable, and
the most prized of all were the purple and blue derived from
mollusks, literally worth their weight in gold. Porphyra in
Greek originally meant shellfish and the word purple applied
to the range of colors from purple to blue which were of
shellfish origin. These precious dyes were reserved for
royalty; they colored the robes of the kings and princes of
Media, Babylon, Egypt and Greece, and to wear them was to
identify with the nobility. To the Greeks it was a sign of
hubris as Agamemnon realizes when his wife Clytaemnestra
convinces him to walk over the garments of the Gods, "Now
since my will was bent to listen to you in this, my feet
crush purple as I pass within the hall." The thread of blue
on the corners of the Israelites' garments would have been
conspicuous and solicited attention. The association with
royalty reminded the Israelite of his duties towards his
master, the King of the Universe -"And you shall be to me a
kingdom of Priests".
The Mediterranean coast was the center of the purple dyeing
industry in the ancient world. Tyrian purple came from the
port of Tyre in what is now southern Lebanon. The Talmud
records that the hilazon - the mollusk source of the blue
dye was to be found "from the ladders of Tyre to Haifa." The
Phoenicians (the etymology of their name is from the word
purple) made their wealth trading in the dyestuff, and dye
houses were ubiquitous in the region. Because of its lucra-
tive nature, purple dying slowly came under imperial con-
trol. The Romans issued edicts that only royalty could wear
purple garments and only imperial dye houses were permitted
to manufacture the material. This drove the Jewish tekhelet
making industry underground. A story is recorded in the Tal-
mud of two students carrying tekhelet from Palestine to the
Jews in Babylon, who were caught by the eagle (a Talmudic
metaphor for Rome) and miraculously escaped death. With the
Arab conquest of Palestine (683 AD.) the secret of tekhelet
was lost. Purple dying continued to survive sporadically,
with a small industry in Constantinople, until that city
fell to the Turks on May 29, 1453.
Jews continued to wear fringes on their garments but as the
Midrash (circa 750 AD) laments, "and now we have no tek-
helet, only white, for the tekhelet has been hidden." The
description of the hilazon was recorded by the Talmud in
various, often contradictory, passages. Its distinguishing
features, were that it had a shell, it could be found along
the northern coast of Palestine, and that its body was
similar to the sea. The main characteristics of the tek-
helet were its color, which was similar to the sky and sea,
the steadfast nature of the dye, that it had to be taken
from the hilazon while still alive, and that it was in-
distinguishable from the counterfeit dye of vegetable
origin, kala ilan - indigo.
The rediscovery of the purple dye was due to a chance en-
counter in 1858. The French zoologist Henri de Lacaze-
Duthiers was on a scientific study sailing from the Minorcan
port of Mahon when one of the fishermen took a snail, broke
it open and smeared it on his shirt. He boasted that the
yellow stain would soon turn red in the sunlight, and
Lacaze-Duthiers immediately recognized the snail - Thais
Haemastoma - as the long lost source of the ancient purple.
Subsequent investigation by Lacaze-Duthiers revealed three
mollusks in the Mediterranean which produced dyes, Thais
Haemastoma and Murex Brandaris, which give a pure purple and
Murex Trunculus, which yields a mixture of purple and blue.
At the turn of the century P. Friedlander, a German chemist,
conducted extensive research into the chemical nature of the
purple dye and established the molecule as dibromoindigo,
and the great Egyptologist, A. Dedekind, concluded that the
source of ancient tekhelet was certainly Murex Trunculus.
In 1887, utterly unaware of Lacaze-Duthiers' work, Gershon
Henokh Leiner, a Hasidic Rebbe from the Russian-Polish town
of Radzin, wrote a small pamphlet announcing that he was to
begin searching for the lost hilazon in an effort to bring
back the tekhelet to the Jewish people. Leiner was an excep-
tional individual who might have been an engineer in a dif-
ferent incarnation. With no formal secular training, he
nevertheless spoke several European languages and taught
himself mechanics and medicine. After he suceeded his
father as leader of the Ishbitzer Hasidic sect, he
established a mill furnished with machinery of his own
design, which turned out an amazing 80,000 lbs. of flour
daily. (The venture, however, eventually failed and brought
Leiner and some of his Hasidim to complete financial ruin.)
He set off (in cognito) to scour Europe and records that his
travels brought him to Naples in Italy, where he saw "a
great building of stone deep in the ground on the Mediter-
ranean sea shore, with rooms built of white glass with sea
water flowing through them. And in them all the sea crea-
tures travel freely." Leiner concluded that the cuttlefish,
Sepia officinalis, a type of squid, fit the description of
the coveted hilazon. The only problem was that he could not
fabricate a blue dye from the black ink that the squid
released. He put an advertisement in the local paper of-
fering a substantial reward to any chemist who could solve
the problem. Eventually a solution was procured and Leiner
went back to Radzin and opened up a factory to produce the
tekhelet. Within two years, ten thousand of his followers
were wearing the blue threads on their fringes. Leiner
published two books to counter the strong opposition from
other Rabbis who were not convinced that this was indeed the
true hilazon. Nevertheless, the split between his followers
and others who would not wear his tekhelet, ran deep and
divisive, to the point where Radzin Hasidim were often not
allowed into regular Jewish ritual baths, and the question
arose as to whether they should be buried in regular Jewish
cemeteries!
In 1913, then Chief Rabbi of Ireland Rabbi Isaac Herzog
(later Chief Rabbi of Israel and father of the President of
Israel, Chaim Herzog) wrote a doctoral dissertation on the
subject of Hebrew Porphyrology (the study of purple - a word
Herzog coined). He requested a sample of their tekhelet from
the Hasidim of Radzin, and then sent it off to leading
chemists and dye experts in England and on the Continent.
The results were unanimous; the dye was not organic - it was
Prussian Blue, or Ferric Ferrocyanide! Herzog was sure
that the source of the dye was Sepia, refusing to believe
that Leiner would purposely mislead his followers. He asked
the Radziners to send him the process that they used to make
the dye and together with chemists, carefully studied it.
The ink from the squid was mixed "with iron filings and a
snow white chemical called Potasz. After keeping it on a
large powerful fire for some four or five hours until the
flames burn outside and inside as the fires of Hell the mix-
ture fuses..." Since all the chemicals added were colorless,
the dye master from Radzin was convinced that the blue color
must come from the squid ink (as Leiner himself must have
been). In fact, at that high temperature, the organic
molecules dissociate and the nitrogen and carbon form inor-
ganic cyanide - which mixed with the iron gave Prussian
Blue. Leiner had been duped by some unscrupulous Italian
chemist.
Herzog could not accept the fact that genuine tekhelet
depended on the hilazon in such a superficial manner, when
in fact virtually any organic material - blood or corned
beef for example - could be processed in the same way and
yield the same dye. He thus discounted the Radzin tekhelet
and sought an alternative. (As an interesting side note of
history, during World War II with the destruction of East
European Jewry, the tekhelet factories of Radzin were ruined
and the process lost. When the survivors of Radzin made
their way to Israel after the war, they asked Rabbi Herzog
for the correspondence between himself and the Radzin dye
makers, and through those letters reestablished a tekhelet
industry in Israel which still flourishes to this day. Thus
Herzog is responsible both for discrediting Radzin's tek-
helet and at the same time for rescuing their process from
destruction.)
Herzog was aware of the strong evidence for associating one
of the Murex species (Trunculus) with the hilazon. He knew
of Lacaze-Duthiers' and Friedlander's work. He had read
Pliny and Aristotle who indicated Brandaris and Trunculus
as the source of the ancient purple dyes. He also knew of
the archeological finds in Tyre and elsewhere which had un-
covered mounds of millions of Murex shells broken in the
exact spot necessary to obtain the dyestuff. Yet he could
not bring himself to unequivocally identify Trunculus as the
source of tekhelet for two reasons. Firstly, Murex Trun-
culus, also known as the banded rock Murex, has stripes of
brown against an off-white shell, hardly fitting the
description of the Talmud as domeh l'yam - similar to the
sea. Furthermore, the dye obtained from Trunculus is
purplish-blue, not pure blue as tradition had maintained.
Herzog proposed an alternative snail, Janthina, which has a
violet shell and produces a bluish liquid when stimulated,
though he never actually dyed with it. There are a number of
difficulties with the identification of the hilazon with
Janthina. The snail lives in the heart of the ocean in
floating colonies and washes up on shore very rarely, which
would make the snail so scarce as to be unattainable. It
would also mean that the tekhelet used by the ancient Is-
raelites was different than the blue dye the rest of the
world used, and that neither Pliny nor Aristotle knew of it.
But the main objection to Janthina is that it does not dye
well. The blue-violet color of the dye turns to black- brown
after a few days, and the dye is water soluble, hardly the
steadfast blue of true tekhelet.
All the evidence points in favor of Murex Trunculus, but
what of Rabbi Herzog's objections? As for the first, that it
is not similar to the sea, Herzog only saw specimens from
the British Museum, after they had been cleaned and
polished. In its natural state, however, Trunculus is
covered with a coat of sea fouling which has a blue-green
tint. Furthermore, since everything in the vicinity is
covered with the same fouling, it is almost impossible to
distinguish between a Trunculus shell and a neighboring
rock. In Biblical Hebrew, yam can mean either sea or sea-
bed. The Talmud may have meant that the hilazon is similar
to the sea-bed, an exact description of Trunculus in situ.
A short explanation of the chemical nature and origin of
the dye molecules is required to understand the solution to
Herzog's second objection, that the dye is not blue. Inside
the hypobranchial gland, only the precursors to the dye
exist as a clear liquid. (The indigo molecule contains a
substance called indole, which is also found in the in-
testines of animals, where it is a waste product of the
proteins which constitute most of meat. Indole is a poison
and does not pass out of the body directly. In order to get
rid of it, animals unite it with sulphur, and this harmless
combination is excreted through the kidney. In the snail, in
addition to the sulphur, bromine and potassium are also in-
corporated into the neutralized molecule.) When these are
exposed to air and sunlight in the presence of an enzyme
purpurase which also exists within the gland, they turn into
the dye material. Purpurase quickly decomposes, so in order
for this reaction to take place, the gland must be smashed
soon after being taken from the live snail, in accordance
with the Talmudic passage that the tekhelet is taken from
the hilazon while still alive. In Haemastoma and Brandaris
only dibromoindigo - Tyrian Purple - is produced, while in
Trunculus this process yields monobromoindigo and pure in-
digo as well, which is why its dye is purplish-blue.
About twenty years ago, Otto Elsner from the Shenkar College
of Fibers in Tel Aviv, serendipetously solved the riddle of
the tekhelet color. Elsner was researching the methods used
by ancient dyers and noticed that while on cloudy days Trun-
culus dye tended towards purple, on sunny days it was pure
blue. The dyes dibromoindigo and indigo are vat dyes, and in
order for them to bind tightly to wool, they must first be
reduced. Elsner and his colleague Ehud Spanier from Haifa
University found that while dibromoindigo is in its reduced
state, if it is exposed to ultraviolet light it will deter-
mine to pure indigo. Since dying is a very smelly process,
it would have been natural to dye outdoors, and in the
bright Mediterranean sunlight, ancient dye masters would
have quickly learned how to control the color of the Trun-
culus extract. (Elsner suggested a second possibility for
obtaining pure blue from Trunculus - by sex separation - as
the males produce primarily indigo while the females yield
dibromoindigo. This assumes that the ancient mariners could
tell the difference between male and female snails - not a
trivial feat since the Trunculus species is hermaphrodite,
or imposexual to be more precise, with many females growing
male sexual organs during their lifetime. Recent research
has cast some doubt as to the statistical significance of
sex as a factor in dye type, but Elsner maintains that a
difference does exist.)
When the dibromoindigo is completely determined to indigo
there is no way of telling it from the identical indigo
molecule of vegetable origin - kala ilan - as the Talmud
states. Does this mean that one could today use synthetic
indigo in place of the hilazon based chemical? Most Jewish
legal authorities rule not. As is often the case with ritual
objects, the source and process are as important as the
product. Jewish mystical tradition associates the sun with
God's fiery attribute of justice and the sea with His ten-
dency towards kindness. To the ancient Jews of Palestine,
tekhelet may have symbolized the mixture of the two; as the
sea and sunlight come together to form the blue dye, so too
man survives only through the mixture of both sides of God's
personality.
The chemicals needed for the dying process were all
available to the ancients. They probably obtained potassium
hydroxide (2KOH), the strong base necessary to reduce the
dyes by burning sea shells (CaCO3) and mixing the result
with potash (K2CO3).
CaCO3 -> CaO + CO2
CaO + H2O -> Ca(OH)2
Ca(OH)2 + K2CO3 -> CaCO3 + 2KOH
This provides the answer to another archeological mystery,
why ovens were found at the site of the ancient dye houses.
These must have been used to burn the shells in order to procure
the potassium hydroxide.
Over the last few decades, much work has been done to
reestablish the tekhelet dying process. Irving Ziderman,
from the Israel Fiber Institute has published a number of
articles describing the scientific aspects and religious im-
plications of the Trunculus dye. Rabbi Herzog's doctorate
has finally been published after nearly 80 years. Rabbi
Eliahu Tebger of Jerusalem was the first to actually apply
the process according to the prescribed ritual from
beginning to end, and prayer shawls - tallitot - with
authentic tekhelet can be found in Jerusalem today for the
first time in more than 1300 years.
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End of Volume 8 Issue 12