ABSTRACT
Relating to skin colour this way was as common for the Jewish scholar of the thirteenth century as for the American author of the nineteenth and the Jewish author of the twentieth century – the result of a common system of primordial associations that distinguish between white and black as colours. In western culture in general, including Jewish culture, an associative tendency identifies black with negative phenomena, as something dusky, dark, blurred and hidden, thus threatening and frightening, and dirty (i.e. not white), ugly and repulsive. By contrast, light colour – white – has a wealth of interrelated positive associations with cleanliness, purity (Song of Songs 6: 10), lightness, clarity, that which is open and exposed (Joel 1: 7), purged of dross (Dan. 11: 35), and so necessarily beautiful, good and hopeful. Not by chance does the black garment symbolize mourning and widowhood, or moral baseness as in the Babylonian Talmud (BT) Kiddushin 40a, Bamidbar Rabbah 9: 42.1 White, on the other hand, represents purity and virginity,2 and hence is proper for a bride at the wedding canopy and for Hassidim on the Sabbath and on holidays. The black-plumed raven, not to mention the black cat, are signs of evil and of impending doom while the white dove represents peace and hope. Angels are identified as white and the Messiah will come riding on a white ass, but Satan is described as black.3 Above the gates of the inferno Dante found the following inscription written in dark characters (di colore oscuro): ‘Abandon every hope, ye that enter’ (Inferno 3: 9-10). Youth is associated with black hair, as in Mishnah Avot 3: 12: ‘those whose hair is black (tishkoret)’, interpreted by Maimonides as ‘When his hair was black that is, when he was young’,4 while old age is represented by white hair. Premodern culture unequivocally preferred age to youth, which was identified with the ‘bad’ colour and age with the ‘good’ one. Youth, associated with lust and desires of the flesh, was shown as black, i.e. bestial and wild, while age, identified with control of these appetites and the achievement of intellectual perfection, was represented as white, i.e. pure. As the Midrashic author states: ‘What a man does in his youth blackens his face in old age’ (BT Shabbat 152a). Hair colour changing from black to white serves as a metaphor for a positive change in the human condition. Falaquera gives this the clearest expression
in his Book of the Seeker, where he represents the positive transformation from youth to age by associating the hair that grows white with the change of the black (defiled) clothing of youth for the pure white garment of age:
As wave-like, youth’s years slip away, Signs of old age swiftly appear. When thy hair turneth hoary and gray Sin’s crimson stains must disappear. Remove, hence, the filthy garb of youth. Thy adornment, instead, the white garment of truth.5
