Star of David

The hexagram is one of the easiest figures to draw. Two overlapping equilateral triangles fall out of any compass-and-straightedge exercise, and the shape turns up as ornament in Mesopotamian, Indian, Islamic and Christian contexts with no shared meaning between them. This matters, because it means the mere appearance of a hexagram somewhere old is not evidence of anything Jewish.

It does appear in Jewish settings in antiquity. A hexagram is carved on a stone from a late Roman synagogue in the Galilee; one occurs in the decoration of the Leningrad Codex of 1008, the oldest complete Hebrew Bible manuscript. What is missing in every one of these cases is any indication that it was understood as a sign of Jewish identity. It sits among rosettes, knots and interlace as one pattern among many.

The evidence for it as an emblem begins much later and in a particular place. In 1354 the Bohemian king Charles IV granted the Jewish community of Prague the right to a flag, and the flag carried a hexagram. Prague Hebrew printing used it on title pages from 1512. From Prague it spread through the Jewish communities of central and then eastern Europe over the following centuries.

Gershom Scholem gave the standard account of why. Writing on the history of the symbol, he argued that its rise as a general Jewish emblem belongs to the era of emancipation, when Jewish communities entering European civic life needed a single recognisable sign of the kind Christianity already had in the cross. The hexagram was available, unencumbered by doctrinal content, and easy to reproduce. Its adoption was, on this reading, a response to a modern situation rather than the recovery of an ancient one.

A persistent claim holds that the hexagram is a Kabbalistic symbol of great antiquity, encoding the union of upward and downward forces, fire and water, the divine and the human. The interpretation is real and is genuinely held; the antiquity is not established.

What the older sources do contain is the hexagram as a protective device. It appears in magical and amuletic use across the medieval Mediterranean world, frequently under the name Seal of Solomon, and it is used in that role by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, often interchangeably with the pentagram. The two names and the two shapes were not kept apart with any consistency, and the Arabic tradition of the seal is at least as rich as the Jewish one. Amulets are not emblems. A sign used to ward off harm is not thereby a sign of identity.

The name Magen David, shield of David, is attested in Jewish sources before the shape was firmly attached to it, and originally referred to divine protection rather than to a diagram. The joining of the name to the figure is medieval and gradual.

The symbolic readings offered today, the interpenetration of opposites, the six directions of space, the sefirot, were mostly supplied after the symbol had already become the accepted emblem, which is the usual order of events. It is worth saying plainly that this does not make them worthless. A community is entitled to invest a sign with meaning. But the historical claim and the devotional claim are different claims, and popular accounts routinely present the second as though it were the first.

The modern career of the symbol is compressed into a single lifetime and includes both its worst and its most public uses.

At the First Zionist Congress in 1897 the hexagram was placed at the centre of the movement's flag, on a design of blue stripes on white recalling the prayer shawl, proposed by David Wolffsohn. By then it was already the common emblem of European Jewish communities, so the choice was a recognition of established usage rather than an innovation.

From 1939, following the German invasion of Poland, occupying authorities required Jews to wear identifying marks. Practice varied by region before a decree of 1 September 1941, signed by Reinhard Heydrich, imposed the yellow star bearing the word Jude across the Reich. The same shape that the communities had adopted for themselves was turned into an instrument of segregation and, subsequently, of selection for murder. This is not an ambiguity of interpretation to be balanced against others; the ancient usage and the twentieth-century imposition are separate facts and both belong in any honest account.

On 28 October 1948 the flag of the new state of Israel was adopted, carrying the design substantially as proposed in 1897.

The consequence is that a single figure now carries, simultaneously, a medieval municipal charter, a nineteenth-century communal badge, a genocidal marker and a national flag. Readers encountering it in any one of those registers should be aware of the others.