สัญลักษณ์ด้ายแดงThe red threadחוט השני

The thread's Jewish version is a folk custom, and the sources are careful about how thin its textual footing is. A scarlet thread tied about the wrist appears at Genesis 38, when Tamar gives birth to twins. As early as Rabbi Shmuel ben Hafni Gaon, commentators noted that a red string on the hand may be a good omen, and some say it could go round a finger; one early commentary, Aggadas Bereishis, says Joseph's coat was the same as his brothers' except that Jacob put a red string on the cuffs. But there is no written requirement in the Torah, in halacha or in Kabbalistic texts to tie a red string on a wrist, and it is not clear the mentions of red string as a good omen describe a widespread practice. The one public exhortation on record is from the 1490s: when Jews were barred from wearing tefillin, Rabbi Abraham Saba recommended wearing a red string on the hand instead, to remember the commandment.

The modern trade is documented. Elderly women sell scarlet thread to pilgrims and visitors in Israel, especially in the Old City of Jerusalem. Outside Israel it became popular in the late 1990s with celebrities, many of them not Jewish — Madonna and her children, Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Jackson, Ariana Grande, Tucker Carlson, Jared Kushner — and the wider popularity is often linked to Philip Berg's Kabbalah Centre. Whether that is the same object as the thread a Jerusalem woman sells is an argument with named parties on both sides; the Kabbalah Centre's critics include the Kabbalist Michael Laitman, who holds that practical Kabbalah has no use for red strings.

The Balkan thread runs on a calendar instead. Martenitsi are given, never bought for oneself, from Baba Marta Day on 1 March, and worn pinned to clothing or at the wrist or neck until the wearer sees a stork or a swallow back from migration, or a tree in blossom — then taken off, and in some places tied to the branch of a fruit tree to give the tree health and luck. Red and white are read as a wish for good health; white for the purity of melting snow, red for the setting sun and for life. Both martenitsa and mărțișor are inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Inference — the red string is worn on wrists in Jewish, Hindu and Chinese practice, and the Jewish source itself says so without claiming a link between them. This atlas reports the three and does not draw a line between them, because nothing read here draws one.