Community Magazine April 2014

NISSAN 5774 APRIL 2014 33 The Chief Rabbi’s Dissertation The next stage of the story of the Biblical blue’s rediscovery weaves together an eclectic group of figures, including a Hassidic Master/part-time pharmacist, a retired English engineer whose dabbling in natural dye chemistry was funded by the British Ministry of Defense, an eccentric millionaire from Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the Irish first Chief Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Isaac Halevi Herzog. In 1883, Rav Gershon Henokh Leiner, the brilliant Rebbe of the Radzyn dynasty, traveled from his hometown in Poland across the continent to the newly-opened aquarium in Naples, on the Italian coast. He spent a year there studying marine life in the Mediterranean, until concluding that the hilazon was the little cuttlefish. The Rebbe worked with chemists to transform the brown Sepia ink into a sky-blue dye, and triumphantly returned to Radzyn to produce his brand of techelet for his followers. Most of world Jewry, however, rejected the Radzyner techelet , for many reasons, not least of which was that it washed out with water and detergent. Ancient techelet was famous for its steadfast nature and was supposed to be impervious to cleaning or fading.  The next great rabbi to delve into the subject was Rabbi Herzog, a renowned Torah master who was also an exceptional scholar of secular disciplines. He devoted his 1913 doctoral dissertation at the University of London, “The Dyeing of Purple in Ancient Israel,” to the study of techelet . Herzog’s dissertation demonstrates a breathtaking expertise in academic subjects as diverse as chemistry, archaeology, philology, ancient Greek and Roman literature, Sanskrit and Chinese, along with an encyclopedic mastery of Biblical and rabbinic texts. All the evidence suggested to Rabbi Herzog that the most likely candidate for the authentic hilazon was the snail known as the Murex trunculus . But there was one problem. The scientific and academic community maintained that the murex snail could produce only a purple colored dye. The traditional Jewish sources, however, insisted that techelet was a pure sky-blue, evoking the vast, deep oceans, the boundless heavens, and, by association, the one infinite, unfathomable Gd of the universe. Rabbi Herzog, a man of deep faith as well as an impeccable scholar, straddled both worlds, and was unable to reconcile this intractable disparity. Sadly, his death in 1959 occurred prior to the scientific breakthrough that would solve this riddle. In 1980, Prof. Otto Elsner, a leading Israeli dye chemist, turned his attention to researching the ancient shellfish dyes. His work was funded by Sidney Edelstein, a millionaire from Tennessee who devoted much of his later life to promoting and funding research relating to the intersection of chemistry with the humanities. Achance conversation with IsraeliArmy General turned archeologist, Yigal Yadin, on the nature of Biblical techelet piqued Edelstein’s interest and led him to fund research into the topic. Prof. Elsner’s experiments with the murex yielded the same results as the scientists before him, namely, a purple color. But when he performed the exact same experiments in direct sunlight, he found the dyed wool turn the sky-blue that Jewish tradition required. Elsner discovered what the ancient dyers on the Mediterranean coast must surely have known – the effects of sunlight on the snail dye process, and how to produce a rich array of shades ranging from light blue to deep purple. The obstacle that had prevented Rabbi Herzog from definitively endorsing the Murex trunculus had finally been removed, and in an unforeseen convergence, science and religion ultimately came to the same conclusion. Diving for snails with Rav Tavger along the northern coast of Israel. Ancient Roman and Tyrian coins depicting the murex. Ari Greenspan and Baruch Sterman diving for murex snails along the Mediterranean coast. Catching murex snails in Croatia.