Thread by @DrKatieTurner

The yellow Magen David is one of the most well-known symbols of the #Holocaust (tho not the most well-understood).
Intended to stigmatize & degrade, AND also to aid in segregation & deportation, this Nazi-era Jewish badge followed a long history of similar forced markers.

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In 1215, spurred by a growing concern that good Christians might accidentally "mingle" w/ Jews & Muslims (which could be ruinous!), the 4th Lateran Council decreed that Jews & Muslims living in Christian provinces must be made distinguishable in public "by a difference of dress"

In 1217, England became the first nation to pass a corresponding law: England's Jewish population was to wear a white badge shaped like the two tablets Moses carried down from Mt. Sinai.
The badge colour was changed to yellow in 1275, under Edward I.

Depictions of the badge can be found in marginal
illustrations of Jewish figures from the Pleas of the Forest, Essex, 1277 (E 32/12, m.2d)

The badge wasn't necessary for long, however. Jews were expelled from England in 1290 (after centuries of violent persecution).

In 1227, the Synod of Narbonne ruled: "That Jews may be distinguished from others, we decree & emphatically command that in the centre of the breast (of their garments) they shall wear an oval badge, the measure of one finger in width and one half a palm in height..."

A circular badge, which was the most common shape, was mandated in Rome in 1257.
Historian Barbara Wisch theorizes that the circle may have represented a coin (stigmatizing Jews as accomplices of Judas or as usurers) or the Eucharist wafer (reflecting the Blood Libel).

Yellow badges were implemented in France in 1269, but were changed to particolour (half red, half yellow) in 1363. A circular yellow badge with a red bull's eye was required of any Jews in Barcelona in 1397.

In 1391, Portugal changed their star badge from yellow to red. In Florence and in German-speaking Alpine regions, badges came into effect in the fifteenth century.
But badges weren't the only forced markers of Jewish identity.

Laws proscribing special hats - usually pointed and often yellow - were passed by the Synod of Breslau in 1266, in Vienna in 1267, Augsburg in 1275, Nuremberg in 1290, Erfurt in 1389, and Recanati in 1499.
In N. Italy, Jewish women had to wear a yellow veil.

In the Swiss region, Jewish badges took the shape of the yellow hats required elsewhere.
Yellow badges endured as persecutory insignia for Jewish people until the end of the 18th century in Rome, France, and under the Austrian Crown.

These badges (and hats) weren't part of contemporary life alone. Christian artists imported them into biblical scenes marking Jews across time as "undesirable" and drawing immediate parallels between biblical figures & their actions, and the Jewish people of Christian Europe.

In Christ Crowned with Thorns, a late-15th century metal-cut by the Master of Jesus in Bethany, one of the tormentors wears a circular yellow badge on his chest, identifying him, and his fellow tormentors by association, as 'Jews'.

metmuseum.org/art/collection…

So much Christian art decorating churches, public buildings, museums, & elsewhere, was influenced by anti-Jewish thought/culture and the desire to identify, demarcate, and denigrate, not just Jewish people, but behaviours, characteristics, & events perceived as "Jewish".

The Jewish badge (+ hats, etc) is a product of the long-present Christian fear of Jewish invisibility. And its very existence reveals a contradictory antisemitic fallacy: that Jews are in some way physically distinguishable *by virtue of their Jewishness*.

It is important, when we think about the Holocaust, that we see it's connections to what came before. It was not an aberration in time. The German people who participated were not uniquely evil. It (and antisemitism more broadly) did not come from modern racism alone.

For me, this is central to #NeverForget and to #HolocaustRemembranceDay. Without truly grasping the long pre-history, the connections to other forms of racism, & how even the tools the Nazis utilized are deeply embedded in Western culture, we will struggle to ensure #NeverAgain.