Tablets of the Covenant

The familiar shape, two tablets with rounded tops joined side by side, came from Christian art. The art historian Ruth Mellinkoff called it a “medieval Christian invention”, and Rabbi Ari Zivotofsky, writing in the Orthodox Union’s Jewish Action, notes that the earliest surviving rounded tablets are in an 11th-century manuscript. Until the Middle Ages Jews rarely drew the tablets at all. Christians used them as a sign of Judaism first: Henry III of England, who ruled from 1216 to 1272, made Jews wear a badge in the shape of two tablets. Zivotofsky dates their use as a Jewish symbol to about the 15th century. In New York in 1850 the tablets divided a congregation. Anshi Chesed dedicated its new synagogue with the Ten Commandments in a circular stained-glass window, one commandment to a pane. Members objected, and about a year later a traditional pair of round-topped tablets in Italian marble was put above the ark.