Hamsa

Hand of Miriam, hand of Fatima

Jews call the hand after Miriam, Moses’ sister, and Muslims after Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter; Curationist records that it is sometimes called the hand of Mary too. Silva Santa-Cruz finds no documented episode in Fatima’s life that connects her with the symbol. One explanation of the name credits the French soldiers in North Africa, who called Algerian and Tunisian women “Fatima” with contempt; more recent studies, she writes, connect it with Fatima al-Zahra herself. Muslims read the five fingers in their own ways. In Sunni tradition they are the five pillars of Islam, and in Shia tradition the five holy members of the Prophet’s family, Muhammad, Ali, Fatima, Hasan and Husayn. Silva Santa-Cruz sees both readings as the Islamising of a belief of Berber origin.

The hand across faiths

Silva Santa-Cruz traces the hand’s spread with the expansion of Islam and then, in the late Middle Ages, into the Christian and Jewish worlds in contact with Islam; Sephardic Jews, she writes, have often used the open hand as an amulet to guard people and homes. In the 15th-century Spanish kingdoms, small hand-shaped pendants called gumças, a word that seems to come from khamsa, were pinned on children’s clothes to protect them. A group of glazed baptismal fonts made in Toledo in the mid-15th century, among them one from the church of Camarenilla and one now at the Hispanic Society of America in New York, alternate the hand with fleur-de-lis crosses and the monogram JHS.

Jewish and Muslim craftsmen made the same things. William Gross, quoted by JNS, found that “the folk art of Jews and Muslims was strikingly similar”. A gilded silver necklace from Tunisia, shown at the Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem, carries four filigree hamsas against the evil eye and a fish for fertility, on chains of flattened rings that were a trademark of Jewish goldsmiths in Tunisia.

The eye in the palm

Many hamsas carry an eye, and it is there for the evil eye. My Jewish Learning suggests Jews used the hamsa to counteract the evil eye with the eye in its palm, and Silva Santa-Cruz writes that the eyes sometimes set inside medieval hands of Fatima add to the hand’s power as a talisman against it. The open hand is itself a reply to the look: she notes that it has the same force as the words hamsa fi ʿayni-k, “five in your eye”, said against someone thought to be casting the evil eye. Red and blue, both said to thwart the evil eye, have found their way into the hamsa too, My Jewish Learning notes.

East and West

An outstretched hand was thought to stop the evil eye, the Encyclopaedia Judaica explains. It records that a metal amulet in the shape of an open palm, with blue paint, is still widely used against the evil eye in Mizrahi (“Oriental”) Jewish communities, while among Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews the custom is to follow any praise with keyn ayen hore, “may there be no evil eye”.

At weddings

In some Sephardic communities a bride may wear a hamsa at her henna ceremony, when she is decorated with henna before the wedding, as protection against the evil eye.

Worn today

The hamsa is sold in Judaica shops around the world and, My Jewish Learning notes, by department stores such as Sears and Saks Fifth Avenue; people hang it in their homes, and it dangles from the rear-view mirrors of taxis and trucks. It is worn on necklaces, bracelets and earrings. The Encyclopaedia Judaica describes silver hand amulets and jewellery as very common in Jewish communities in Islamic lands, especially for newborn babies, children and women, thought most open to the evil eye, and records that local rabbis read the hand and the fish as symbols with "deep Jewish meanings".

In 2018 the Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem gave an exhibition to 555 hamsas. Its curators, Shirat Miriam Shamir and Ido Noy, describe how a traditional object with a magical role in Muslim and Jewish culture became an icon of popular culture, on billboards, in shops and public buildings, on key rings and in cars, and write that it had become an integral part of Israeli identity. They bought hamsas made for tourists at market stalls in Jerusalem’s Old City, and hamsas for local buyers in the one-shekel shops of Jaffa Road and at the Mahaneh Yehuda market. Further afield, My Jewish Learning traces a new public for hamsas to the revival of interest in Kabbalah, due in part to celebrities such as Madonna, and Silva Santa-Cruz notes that people in the West now commonly wear the khamsa on necklaces and bracelets.

Medieval Jewish authorities disagreed about amulets. Maimonides warned against "the error of those who write amulets" in his Guide for the Perplexed, while other medieval authorities, Nahmanides among them, permitted them, the Encyclopaedia Judaica records.

A hamsa tattoo?

A hamsa inked on the skin meets a separate Jewish rule. The Torah forbids tattooing, in the words of Leviticus 19:28, "You shall not make gashes in your flesh for the dead, or incise any marks on yourselves". A responsum by Rabbi Alan Lucas for the Conservative movement, published by My Jewish Learning, keeps the prohibition but rejects a common belief: a Jew with a tattoo may still be buried in a Jewish cemetery.