เครื่องรางด้ายแดงRed stringחוט השני

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.