Tekhelet in Recent Generations

Background to the Period

Over the last two hundred years, researchers and rabbis have labored to uncover the lost Tekhelet and its vanished marine source, the chilazon. Contradictions between the historical record, scientific research and Jewish sources made the mystery hard to solve. In recent decades, however, breakthroughs have resolved the ancient puzzle and reconnected the scattered pieces. The new discoveries have revived the mitzvah of Tekhelet and made it possible to keep the mitzvah of tzitzit in its completeness.

Rondelet and Colonna

5261–5461 (16th and 17th centuries)

In the 16th and 17th centuries, the naturalists Rondelet and Colonna followed the writings of the ancient naturalists Aristotle and Pliny and identified the snails that had been the source of antiquity’s prestigious purple dyes.
They connected the ancient “purpura” with the sea snails of the murex family — a discovery that set in motion the solution
to an ancient riddle: the riddle of the purple dyes that had always been considered a precious treasure. Their findings shed fresh light
on a forgotten chapter of history that had lain in obscurity for centuries.

Henri de Lacaze-Duthiers

5361–5661 (17th to 19th centuries)

In the centuries that followed, scientists experimented with murex snails and examined the properties of the dyes that could be extracted from them.
The most prominent among them was the English naturalist William Cole, who succeeded in producing a purple dye from snails he collected on the shores of southern England in the late 17th century.
Another important discovery was that of the 19th-century Italian chemist Bartolomeo Bizio, who pointed to the similarity between the purple dyes produced from murex and the indigo dyes produced from plants.
But the most important discovery of all was that of the French zoologist Henri de Lacaze-Duthiers, who identified three specific species of murex — Murex trunculus, Murex brandaris and Thais haemastoma — as the sources of the prestigious dyes of antiquity.

Napoleon

5461–5661 (18th to 19th centuries)

Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt sparked great interest among European archaeologists in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Researchers followed the French general across the Middle East in search of treasures and finds that would shed new light on the lives and cultures of the ancient peoples.
Roman coins bearing reliefs of murex, alongside enormous heaps of murex shells found in the Phoenician city of Sidon, proved convincingly that these sea snails were a central part of the process of producing prestigiously dyed cloth in antiquity.
The many finds indicated that Murex brandaris and Thais haemastoma, known as the source of a reddish-purple dye, are the source of the argaman of the Tanach, while Murex trunculus, known as the source of a blue-purple dye, was identified as the source of the Tekhelet of the Tanach.

The Return to Israel

5561–5661 (19th century)

In the mid-19th century, with the rise of the movements for return to Eretz Yisrael within the religious Jewish community,
the renewal of Tekhelet — the ancient blue of the Tanach — became an urgent question.
The urgency arose from the belief that the return to Israel would lead to the rebuilding of the Mikdash,
a vision that could not be realized without the appropriate garments for the Kohen Gadol, which consisted largely of Tekhelet.

Rabbi Yisrael Lifshitz

5620 (mid-19th century)

In the mid-19th century Rabbi Yisrael Lifshitz, author of the “Tiferet Yisrael” commentary on the Mishnah, became the first of the rabbis to recognize the new discoveries regarding the source of the Tekhelet of the Tanach — the murex snails.
Rabbi Lifshitz engaged with the work of the German scholar Gesenius and agreed with his conclusion that the Tekhelet chilazon is indeed a sea snail found in the Mediterranean. However, the Tiferet Yisrael strongly disputed Gesenius’s claim that the Tekhelet of the Tanach was purple in hue, and on the basis of Jewish tradition insisted that it was a clear sky blue, with no purple tone at all.

The Radzyner Rebbe

5648 (1888)

At the end of the 19th century, Rabbi Gershon Henoch Leiner, the Radzyner Rebbe, set out on a search for the lost chilazon in order to renew the lost mitzvah of Tekhelet.
Given the prevailing assumption that only purple dye could be extracted from sea snails, Rabbi Leiner traveled to the southern tip of the Italian peninsula in search of a different marine source — and he identified a kind of cuttlefish, Sepia officinalis, as the chilazon.
Ingeniously, he managed to extract a blue dye from the cuttlefish’s brown ink, and so supplied the chassidim of Radzyn with Tekhelet for their tzitzit.
But the Rebbe’s search for Tekhelet met with considerable controversy, and few outside his own camp accepted the Rebbe’s new Tekhelet as the genuine article.

Rabbi Yitzchak HaLevi Herzog

5674 (1914)

In 5674 (1914) Rabbi Yitzchak HaLevi Herzog wrote a doctoral dissertation examining the question of Tekhelet both from a halachic-Talmudic and from a critical-academic perspective.
Herzog’s chemical analysis of the Radzyn dye led him to reject the claim that it was the true Tekhelet.
By then, secular researchers largely agreed that the true source was the Murex trunculus.
Herzog, however, remained skeptical, chiefly because the murex was known to produce a purple hue, at odds with the traditional understanding of Tekhelet as sky blue.
Out of due caution, Rabbi Herzog proposed that the Janthina was the Tekhelet chilazon, but later research led to that theory being rejected, since no fast dye can be produced from the Janthina.
For all his lifelong devotion to the question, Herzog never managed to identify the chilazon conclusively, and his aspiration to understand this mitzvah of the Tanach remained unresolved.

Prof. Otto Elsner

5745 (1985)

It was the Israeli chemist Otto Elsner who broke open the question of producing Tekhelet, in 5745 (1985).
In the course of experiments with murex, Elsner discovered that exposing the dye mixture to the sun at a particular stage of the dyeing process transforms the final color from purple to a pure sky blue.
He suggested that the ancient dyers, working under the bright Mediterranean sun, knew the method, but that it had escaped modern researchers who carried out their experiments in laboratories, far from sunlight and its effect.
Elsner’s discovery finally solved the riddle of Tekhelet: the Tekhelet chilazon is the murex, and the color of Tekhelet is indeed sky blue.

Rabbi Eliyahu Tavger

5747 (1987)

In 5747 (1987), just two years after Otto Elsner’s decisive discovery, Rabbi Eliyahu Tavger used the theoretical insight to dye ptil Tekhelet in practice.
After trial and error, Rabbi Tavger succeeded in producing a sky-blue dye from the secretion of the Murex trunculus.
He used the dye he had produced to color Tekhelet strings, which he tied onto his tallit — and so became the first Jew in 1,300 years to place genuine Tekhelet on his garments.
Once again it was possible to keep in its completeness the mitzvah of the Torah, “וְנָתְנוּ עַל צִיצִת הַכָּנָף פְּתִיל תְּכֵלֶת” — “and they shall place upon the tzitzit of each corner a thread of Tekhelet” (Bamidbar 15:38).

Ptil Tekhelet

5751 (1991)

Amutat Ptil Tekhelet was founded in 5751 (1991) by Rabbi Eliyahu Tavger, together with Dr Ari Greenspan, Yoel Guberman and Dr Baruch Sterman, in order to spread the mitzvah of Tekhelet widely and to produce Tekhelet strings from the dye extracted from the true chilazon — the Murex trunculus.
The halachic landscape is changing before our eyes, in no small part thanks to the great contribution of Amutat Ptil Tekhelet. Discussion of the mitzvah of Tekhelet and its details fills batei midrash and research institutes and occupies rabbis and scholars alike.
The hundreds of thousands of Jews around the world who once again place Tekhelet on their tzitzit are perhaps the best example of the revival of this mitzvah in our generation.