Star of David

Where it is first named

Scholem dates the name magen David to the early 14th century. The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 had found the sign under that name two centuries earlier, in the Eshkol ha-Kofer of the Karaite scholar Judah Hadassi, written in the middle of the 12th century, where “David’s shield” is drawn beside the names of angels on amulets. The same encyclopedia noted a six-pointed star on a Jewish tombstone at Tarentum, in southern Italy, that may be as old as the third century, and pointed out that rabbinical literature never mentions the sign, so it probably did not begin in rabbinic Judaism. In 1873 the American Jewish Publication Society took it as its device.

Is the Star of David in the Bible?

No. The Bible never mentions a six-pointed star, and neither does the Talmud: the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 observed that "neither the Bible nor the Talmud recognizes" symbols of this kind, and that the shield of David "is not mentioned in rabbinical literature". The name itself is medieval, first recorded in the early 14th century according to Gershom Scholem.

Two verses do name a star. Amos 5:26 rebukes Israel for carrying "the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves", in the King James Version, and Acts 7:43 quotes it as "the star of your god Remphan". Both condemn a star made as an idol; neither describes its shape or connects it with David.

The five-pointed star

The Star of David has six points, drawn as two triangles; the pentagram has five, drawn in a single line. The two were not always kept apart. In the Second Temple period the hexagram was used by Jews and non-Jews "alongside the pentagram", Scholem writes, and later, when both were called the seal of Solomon, "the hexagram and pentagram were easily interchangeable and the name was applied to both figures". The Jewish Encyclopedia records a pentacle carved on the ancient synagogue at Tell Hum (Capernaum) and in a Hebrew manuscript of 1073, and says the flag Charles IV gave Prague's Jews in 1354 carried "both David's shield and Solomon's seal".

Blue and white

On the flag of Israel the star is blue, on white between two blue stripes. The Encyclopaedia Judaica credits David Wolfsohn with designing the Zionist flag "on the model of the" tallit, the prayer shawl, which he called "the traditional flag of the Jewish people", and notes that a flag of this form had already flown at Rishon le-Zion in 1885. My Jewish Learning traces the colours to an 1860 poem, "Judah's Colors", by Ludwig August Frankl, with the stripes inspired by the tallit; the original dark blue was lightened later so the flag could be seen better at sea.

The yellow badge

From 1939 the Nazi regime forced Jews under its rule to wear a badge, most often a yellow Star of David. The first order came in the Polish town of Włocławek in October 1939; from 19 September 1941 every Jew in Germany aged six or over had to wear a yellow star on the chest, with the word Jude inside it. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum writes that the badge was used "to stigmatize and humiliate Jews" and to segregate and control them, and that it made deportation easier. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that this use of the Shield of David as a Jewish badge "was unknown in the Middle Ages", when the badges Jews were made to wear took other forms. On 4 April 1933, two months after the Nazis came to power, the German Zionist paper Jüdische Rundschau had told its readers: "Wear it with pride, this yellow badge."