Amulet Atlas

amuletsRed stringחוט השני

said khut ha-sha-NI, 'the scarlet thread'

also: scarlet thread · Kabbalah bracelet · khutt hashani

amuletThe LevantDiasporaNorth AmericaIsraelUnited States of America

A thin scarlet or crimson thread, usually wool, tied round the wrist as a bracelet or band. That is the whole object.

cited

When

the one dated recommendation is from the 1490s; the modern wrist bracelet is a thing of the late 1990s onward still carried cited

PeriodEarly modern to the present
How the date is knowntextual — a dated text describes it
NoteThe cited article states there is no textual requirement for the practice. Earlier mentions it gives — Genesis 38, Rabbi Shmuel ben Hafni Gaon, Aggadas Bereishis — are of red strings as omens or markers rather than of a worn bracelet, so they are not used as the floor here.

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

The thing itself

FormCord or string
Made ofThread and cord
GoesOn the wrist · On a finger
Made byno restriction recorded; sold by street vendors in Jerusalem's Old City and by the Kabbalah Centre and its imitators
Colourred
Retiredno — it is kept
NoteThin scarlet wool. No published measurement was read.

What its carriers say it stops

Reported, attributed, not tested here. Each row below is somebody's claim, with their name on it.

The story

The honest version of this record starts with an absence. There is no written requirement anywhere — not in the Torah, not in Halacha, not in the Kabbalistic texts — to tie a red string round a wrist. Sources mention red strings as a good omen, and it is not evident whether they were widely worn.

What there is instead is a scatter of references. Genesis 38 has a scarlet thread tied about a wrist, at the birth of Tamar's twins. Rabbi Shmuel ben Hafni Gaon noted that placing a red string on the hand may be a good omen, and some sources imply it could go round a finger. Aggadas Bereishis holds that Joseph's coat was the same as his brothers' and that Jacob marked it with a red string on the cuffs.

There is exactly one public exhortation to wear one, and it is dated. In the 1490s, when Jews were not permitted to wear tefillin, Rabbi Abraham Saba recommended that they wear a red string on their hands instead, to remember the commandment. A substitute object, recorded because the real one had been banned.

The modern trade is documented too. In Israel it is common to see elderly women selling scarlet thread to pilgrims and tourists, especially in the Old City of Jerusalem. Outside Israel the string became popular in the late 1990s with celebrities, most of them not Jewish — Madonna and her children, Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Jackson, Ariana Grande, Tucker Carlson, Jared Kushner — and that wave is usually linked to Philip Berg's Kabbalah Centre. Editors of a 2007 study of trend analysis recorded a surge in sales attributed to Madonna. Michael Laitman's public position is in the article's own critical links: practical Kabbalah has no use for red strings.

Inference — every other record in this batch can say what its object is made of and who makes it. This one cannot, because the object is a piece of wool and the thing being sold is the association. That is worth stating rather than dressing up, and it is also the reason the red string is the most-argued-about Jewish charm in the atlas.

The red string is not only Jewish. The cited article notes that Hinduism and Chinese culture wear a red string or bracelet for luck, love and to keep evil off.

cited

What this is near

motifThe red threadthe sign, and the one that runs from the Mediterranean to Mongolia without needing a textoriginTefillinthe commandment this stood in for in the 1490s, when Rabbi Abraham Saba told Jews barred from wearing tefillin to wear a red string to remember itparallelMartenitsathe Balkan red thread on a wrist, with a fixed season and a documented history where this one has an absencecontrastPractical Kabbalahthe tradition it is marketed under, and whose own teachers say it has no use for red stringsmaterialThread and cordthe whole material inventory of this objectpracticeKnottingthe practice — the tying is what there is to dokinEvil eye braceletthe shelf it now shares: a wrist, a colour, and a claim sold to people outside the traditioncontrastHamsathe other Jewish charm against the eye, and the one with a long documented object historystoryWho owns a charmthe long read; a custom with no textual basis, sold worldwide under the name of a restricted tradition

What names this one

Each in its own words, from its own page.

kinAzabachethe red bead on the end of the chain, which runs with black stone right across the MediterraneanparallelEvil eye braceletthe other thing tied to a wrist against the same harm, with no image on it at allkinKameathe one piece of this world that went fully public, and the one its own scholars are most dismissive ofparallelMartenitsathe other red thread on a wrist in this atlas — that one has no text behind it, this one has a UNESCO fileparallelTefillinin the 1490s, when Jews were barred from wearing tefillin, Rabbi Abraham Saba recommended a red string on the hand to remember this commandment — the one documented moment where one substitutes for the othercontrastPractical Kabbalahthe charm sold under this tradition's name that its own teachers say it has no use for, and for which no text anywhere sets a requirementcarried-byThe red threadthe amulet itself — the scarlet wool on a wristcarried-byThread and cordthe simplest object in this atlas: scarlet wool, a wrist, a knotcarried-byKnottingthe plainest form: scarlet wool at the wrist, and an argument about where it came from

Where this came from

Elsewhere

Record updated 2026-09-16. This record as JSON. Every field carries its own provenance; the tier chips above say which.

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