- The humble hat,
keeps you cool on a hot day, and as if that's not enough,
it's often a symbol of personal identity.
In the Jewish community there are certainly
many such identifying hats to choose from,
unique, charming, dramatic.
This goes back a long way back.
In Medieval Europe, you could tell someone was Jewish
because they wore this unique hat, or did they?
How did this strange hat come to be
THE identifying symbol of Jews
for hundreds of years in some places?
Around the year 1000, Jews started to be depicted
in Christian art as wearing versions of this hat.
In the newly illuminated manuscripts
and in Church stained glass windows,
these hats were the very first images
of "what Jews looked like."
It was called a "Jew's Hat" or a "Judenhut", for 500 years.
And then it all but vanished.
Was this a Jewish hat? Well, it's complicated.
Known as the Phrygian hat,
which you might recognize from The Smurfs,
it was originally a marker of Eastern learning,
antiquity, and authority.
In the late 11th Century, a Brother Goderanus from Belgium
took a version of the hat
and used it in his illuminated bibles.
These bibles contained overlarge, illustrated initials,
many with images of Jewish prophets.
You might notice a pattern here.
But also, there were other prophets without that hat.
It's likely the good Brother used the Phrygian hat
to respectfully signify
the authority and antiquity of these prophets,
and not specifically their Jewishness.
But the image of Jews wearing the pointed hat
now began to spread across Medieval Europe.
It showed up in stained glass church windows,
on an English plaque. It got to Russia.
It showed up in illuminated prayer collections,
in books of Psalms.
And then, it took a dark turn.
It began to portray the Jews as violent.
Depictions of the piercing of Jesus's side
were originally illustrated like this,
at the hands of a Roman centurion.
By 1166, the scene had changed to this.
Now a Jew, identified by this hat, is stabbing Jesus,
while other Jews look on and smile. And again, here.
It soon became a default image in Catholic iconography,
and this hat now became associated with the Deicide charge,
the idea that Jews killed the Christian God,
and that all Jews throughout history bear that guilt.
In the meantime, this pointed hat was still, in fact,
the fashion among 12th century aristocracy,
and the population at large had been wearing them.
We don't know, for sure,
if Jews were actually wearing the hat at this point,
or if it was simply how they were depicted
in Christian manuscripts.
But after it became associated with the Jews,
and then with the Deicide charge,
both Jews and non-Jew stopped wearing it.
Toward the end of the 13th Century,
what once defined Jews with pictures in a book
leapt off the page
and became law.
In 1267, a church council in Breslau
concluded that since Jews have stopped wearing
the pointed hats they "used to wear,"
now, a hard hat with a knob on it would be made mandatory.
They claimed to "definitely" know Jews wore them
because they'd seen all those pictures!
The demarcating Jew's hat, the Judenhut, was now law!
It went from a symbol used to represent Jews in art,
to a required piece of clothing
that then haunted the Jewish community
for the next 400 years.
This knobbed hat then started to show up
in representations of contemporary Jews,
not just ancient ones.
Here it is in 1340, Emperor Heinrich VII
grants the Jews permission to live in his lands.
Here a famous Jewish poet engages in a recitation.
Here is a religious dispute.
Surprisingly, the knob hat now starts showing up
in Jewish manuscripts, not just in Christian ones.
Here is a Festival Prayer Book from Germany
around the year 1300.
The Israelites wear conical hats,
Aaron wears a bishop's miter and Moses wears the knob hat,
with the knob, perhaps deliberately, blocked.
Later in the same book,
a man clearly wears the mandated hat.
And this, at last, brings us back
to the image we started with.
What is arguably the most famous book
to feature the Judenhut, "The Birds' Head Haggadah."
This puzzling haggadah raises more questions
than it answers.
Was the hat now considered formal dinner wear?
Were the Jews of Rhineland Germany now proud
of their demarcating hat, embracing it on their own terms?
Were they sometimes ashamed of it?
Why would Jews draw themselves this way?
Some speculate that Jewish books in Germany
were governed by censors who oversaw the drawings.
Others suggest that the drawings are just documentation.
like it or not, they were wearing these hats.
And of course there's the question-
What's the deal with all the birds' heads?!
Honestly, we're not sure... It remains a mystery.
A hat that began as imagery in old manuscripts
eventually became the mandated marker
for the Jewish population of Rhineland Germany.
It later stigmatized the Jews of Italy as well,
before fading from popularity around the 17th century.
Now the imagery of the Jewish hat
is in the historical dustbin,
very few would even recognize it.
And yet there is that dreamy hamlet today in Austria,
a quaint town called Judenburg, meaning Jew's Castle.
You can't blame a town for its historical name.
But their town logo and coat of arms,
it's all over their city website.
Yup, there it is, the Judenhut,
with a clear "Jewish nose" thrown in for good measure.
It's a testament to the power of imagery,
whether in the distant past, or today.
It was a humble hat,
but it managed to define Jews and Judaism
for so many centuries,
before finally being all but forgotten.
We use many resources here at Unpacked to create our videos,
but we do wanna give a special shout out
to Professor Sarah Lipton
who focused our attention on this story
and whose research was instrumental
in helping us put this together.
You can find a link to her website and to her books
here in the description below.