01x11 - True Blue

[bunniefuu]

[music]

I'm going on an adventure.

There's only one way to figure it out.

Unzip the archeology. Make it naked.

[SIMCHA]Once upon a time...

beneath the Mediterranean's deep blue waves,

swam a strange creature, the hillazon.

According to Jewish tradition...

...the hillazon is a harbinger of Messianic Times,

the end of the world.

But it wasn't just tied to the next world.

It also had earthly value.

Cloth dyed in the hillazon's blood...

...was worth times its weight in gold.

This dye, a royal blue, was called tekhelet.

But over a thousand years ago

this royal blue, tekhelet, disappeared.

And ever since then there has been a mystery.

Why, did tekhelet disappear?

Why is it connected with the end of the world?

And which, animal is the hillazon?

Ancient Hebrew texts give us just a few clues.

The first one is, his body resembles the ocean.

Kind of like a dragon or something.

You know. Some holy lizard or whatever.

Sign number two that the- -Shape.

The shape, it resembles a fish.

Now it has bones and cartilage.

It was a one of the great most precious treasures of antiquity.

It was the item of international trade and tribute..

...that one ruler gave to another one...

...when a country was conquered.

The fourth one, it- -It carrries a shell.

It carries a shell, and some shell that grows with him.

They can be right in front of you...

...and unless you kind of know what shape you're looking for,

and or maybe even know what movements you're looking for,

It's very difficult to find them.

It's very difficult to catch them.

It has legs in its head. Where it has its mouth,

and its eyes and everything, it has its legs, like you know.

Imagine a person would have legs up here...

and wants to catch some-

like he sh**t them out, it's terrific.

He sh**t them out and grabs them.

And grabs his prey.

I've just got a small amount. Offer. I refused.

I won't sell it. I wouldn't sell.

I wouldn't sell it for anything.

It's not a question even about money.

-It's priceless.

It is priceless, absolutely.

Number six:

It has to have certain parts of its body resemble a snake.

[SIMCHA] So the blood of the hillazon...

...makes a blue dye called tekhelet.

But why is a colour so important?

First of all, according to the Bible,

God, through Moses, commanded the Israelites...

...to wear a string, a fringe on the corner of their shirts.

The threads were to be white, except for one,

which must be blue.

Blue to remind them of the sea,

the sea of the sky, and the sky of God's holy throne.

But this thread was also tied to the end of days.

For the Jews' Messiah to come,

Solomon's temple must be rebuilt in Jerusalem.

The temple priests must wear robes dyed tekhelet blue.

I asked Toronto Rabbi Eliezer Breitovitz...

...what role this blue thread plays in the end of history.

Well, I mean some people say...

...this is the sign of the coming of the Messiah.

Well, let's put it this way.

Tekhelet is one of the necessary ingredients...

...for the rituals of the temple.

The vestments of the priests,

especially the high priest incorporated tekhelet.

Now they cannot manufactured without it.

And we would expect as the Messianic Age approaches,

we would expect that all the necessary ingredients,

all the accessories that we'll need will be restored.

[SIMCHA] But I had heard of two groups of people...

...trying to restore all the necessary ingredients...

...to bring about the end of days.

Doing the detective work to cr*ck this -year-old mystery.

I travelled into the desert outside Jerusalem...

...to meet Baruch Sterman, a man who has dedicated years...

...to finding the hillazon...

...and the dye made from its blood, tekhelet blue.

I wanted to know how something so valuable...

...could be lost in the first place.

As it turns out, the sheer value of ancient dyes,

not just blue, but purple and red as well,

their value as commodities was actually part of their downfall.

A downfall that started with the Romans.

So this was a big business.

Very big business.

And that's one of the reasons...

...why the tekhelet was eventually lost.

The Romans when they conquered this area,

they conquered Palestine.

They made an edict that nobody could be involved...

...in the dye of purple or blue except for the Roman dye houses.

They wanted the money.

And only there it was illegal to wear purple.

Exactly.

Unless you were a big sh*t in Rome.

Exactly.

[FEMALE VOICE] Royal purple. Royal Blue.

[SIMCHA] Augustus restricted blue and purple...

...to the ruling classes.

Nero decreed only the emperor could wear blue or purple.

The Romans passed laws...

...making it harder for people to make the dyes.

But tekhelet blue finally disappeared...

...when the Arabs conquered the area in the seventh century.

Every time Israel was conquered,

whether it be by Romans or the Christians or the Arabs,

one thing they all did, it was, m*ssacre the Jews.

So the poor Jews in that time could hardly keep any tradition,

let alone a secret tradition. And let alone a tradition...

...which had specifically been targeted for eradication...

...because this was associated with the Romans.

So there was basically no hope...

...for the secret of tekhelet to be consistent,

to be maintained over that period.

So whoever still had the secret recipes, the chain was broken.

Right.

[SIMCHA] Whatever happened years ago,

invasion, w*r, migration, the secret was lost.

The hillazon became a legend.

The trail lies cold until the s,

when a man who was part cowboy, part Sherlock Holmes,

and all Polish Rabbi, rode out of the north...

...on a quest for the hillazon.

[SIMCHA] So the secret of tekhelet...

...had been lost for centuries.

Then, in the s a Polish Rabbi...

...called the Radzyner Rebbe, took up the quest.

Today, his followers live in Tel Aviv.

There I met Rabbi Itzhak Englard and his brother Schlomo.

I asked them, what kind of man was the original Radzyner Rebbe

[ITZHAK] I would say, one of the most brilliant scholars...

...in his generation. He was known to be a genius.

He knew astrology, he knew medicine,

he knew mathematics,

he knew physics. He knew everything.

He was unbelievable person.

[SIMCHA] The Radzyner Rebbe...

...was the Rabbi for a town called Radzin.

-Radzin is a place on the border of Russia and Poland.

And he decided that he needed to find tekhelet.

It actually, his goal was Messianic.

He felt that the temple had to be rebuilt.

In order for the temple to be rebuilt...

...the priests had to have their clothes,

and you need tekhelet for that.

And that was the major reason...

...he decided to set out to look for tekhelet.

And he's trying to trigger messianic times.

Correct. That was his-

To him that was not a fashion statement.

Oh no, no, no. He had some leads.

He went and traveled all the way from Poland to Italy,

to look in the aquarium at Naples...

...to try and find which sea creature was the true hillazon.

Now what kind of fish does it resembles.

You know this, a million types of fish...

...and each fish has a different size,

a different figure, a different everything.

I can see it now.

The Rebbe in Naples standing in front of a fish t*nk,

the sun setting on another day without the hillazon.

Without the legendary fish...

...whose blood is going to trigger messianic times.

And suddenly he looks, he sees and he knows.

And he shouts, "eureka" or the Polish equivalent.

Today, it's called the cuttlefish.

On one hand, it has a shell, on the other hand,

it has fins on the sides of its stomach,

just like a fish has.

The fins that exactly meets the description,

given through the talmetic of its sources.

[SIMCHA] Could the cuttlefish actually be a harbinger...

...of messianic times and the end of days?

No matter what you believe the future holds,

it's amazing to remember what role colour played in our past.

Colour didn't just shade the ancient world, it shaped it.

Just like the silk routes or spice trade,

people crossed deserts, mountains, seas...

...for a new colour.

Red often came from ground up beetles.

Yellow from cows' urine.

Purple from snails.

And royal blue, called-

[SIMCHA] Tekhelet blue in the Bible...

...came from the blood of the hillazon.

There's faith and then there's archaeology.

Archaeologists have never found ancient tekhelet blue...

...in ancient fabric.

But they have found ancient purple made from snails.

So if you want to figure out how they make blue from cuttlefish,

you got to look to see how they made purple from snails.

I wanted to know more about the actual chemistry...

...of ancient dyes, so I went to see Zvi Koren,

a Tel Aviv chemist specializing in ancient colours.

He's researched tekhelet...

...but he's particularly perplexed by purple.

So you're trying to create a catalogue of all purple.

[ZVI] We're trying to catalogue every purple pigment, possible.

Purple pigment?

Purple, pigment, possible. -Purple pigment possible.

Thank you.

That's what you're trying to do?

We're trying to catalogue every single pur-purple pig- [laughs]

-One second. -[laughs]

Ok. Try again.

We're trying to catalogue every single purple pigment, in order-

Possible.

[Laughs.] You're going to stop that or not?

In in order to help archaeologists.

When we find for example a purple pigment...

...on an archaeological vessel, we want to fingerprint it...

...and therefore know exactly.

Not just that it's a real purple from a real snail,

but from which kind.

[SIMCHA] Zvi hopes his research into ancient purples...

...will throw some light on tekhelet, on the hillazon.

I want to know how the ancients measure up as chemists.

[ZVI] They were great scientists,

even though they didn't call themselves that.

But they were great emperical dyers.

And they knew exactly what worked and it was passed down...

...from father to son, and kept within the family.

So was it a secret. Like a kind of guild?

It was a guild, certainly.

Within a town and within a particular family.

Especially the most secretive of all: the royal purple dyeing,

what is known in the Bible as "argaman" and "tekhelet;"

a bluish purple, argaman being a reddish purple.

[SIMCHA] Argaman. Ancient Hebrew for royal purple.

[SIMCHA] The Talmud says tekhelet...

...must be taken from the hillazon...

...while the hillazon is still alive.

To this day we still do not know exactly...

...how they performed the dyeing,

which must have started about thirty-five hundred years ago..

...by the Phoenicians.

[SIMCHA] The name Phoenicians means the 'purple people'

since they were famous in antiquity for purple dyeing.

It was accidental of course.

All such great discoveries are accidental.

Yeah that's incredible.

I mean, you're eating your snail one day...

...and you're flipping it over your shoulder...

..and suddenly it's in a vat and you notice that there's colour.

I mean, how could they have even-

They must have had a number of snails...

...lying around after they fished them, they ate them.

As the snails die,

they vomit out the particular glandular extract.

And this extract, once it's open to the air,

it undergoes a transformation...

...right before your very eyes,

into, from white, to yellow, to green, to blue, to purple.

It's incredible. So what they must have found...

...as they were leaving these snails around,

there could have possibly been a fabric next to it...

...and all of a sudden they looked at it and say:

"I can't believe it, look at this.

Moishe! Come over here! Look at this!"

And that's when they discovered, most probably, purple colour.

Of course all this is conjecture,

but I believe that this is probably what happened.

[SIMCHA] Wait a minute,

all this archaeology and no mention of the cuttlefish...

...in ancient dye making. It's all snails.

Could the Radzyners have it wrong after all?

What I want to know is this:

[SIMCHA] Could the Radzyners be wrong?

Could the hillazon be something other than a cuttlefish?

Baruch Sterman believes it is something else.

He's pointing to the archaeology.

Thousands of ancient snails just like these...

...found piled around Iron Age dye vats.

But you're saying, "hey guys,

there's thousands of these things found in ancient digs.

No cuttlefish remains."

We know this was used in dye making.

We found dye installation at the Haftorah and...

...in , other places along the coast of Israel.

Right where the Talmud says the tekhelet dyeing happened.

We know this snail was used for dyeing.

We know this snail can produce a colour.

Right. So, the, the logical argument then says-

We're getting closer. -I mean, it's got to be.

It looks very fishy. A fishy story this one.

[SIMCHA] So is there something that smells a little fishy...

...about the Radzyner's cuttlefish theory.

On the one hand, the cuttlefish meets most of the ancient clues.

On the other hand-

The archeologist dug along the coast...

...and they found vast amount of shells of the murex trunculus.

So people say if the Radzyner Rebbe was ever alive today,

he would look and say oops, I goofed.

I made a mistake because if I was right,

they would have found vast amounts...

...of the soft shell of the cuttlefish.

They didn't find it. They found the trunculus.

If I would find all those shells: this was tekhelet. Okay.

But there were other dyes...

...and other colours being dyed through those years.

The Romans were there and they had vast used factories.

By the way, the tekhelet was used only for one thread...

...and this type of murex was use to dye entire garments,

head to toe, for the nobility of course.

And that's why he needed huge amounts of shells,

and that's why they found those kinds of shells.

Could be if you would check other sites,

you would find what we're using that archeology is very good.

It could help you, give you a, a clue.

But to say that what I found is tekhelet...

...and that was use as tekhelet, who says?

Nobody says that was tekhelet.

Maybe it was argaman maybe it was purple.

Same thing reminds me of a joke.

That, that they use to have cellular phones years ago.

How do you know?

He says, I have proof. How did you have proof?

I did not find any telephone lines.

While digging, no telephone lines were found in all those sites.

So they surely use cellular phones.

Isn't that a good proof? Right?

That's good. That's very good.

[SIMCHA] There is no archaeological evidence...

...supporting the cuttlefish.

No two thousand-year-old cuttlefish shells.

But as Itzhak just pointed out,

the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.

Over a hundred years ago,

the Radzyner Rebbe was convinced the cuttlefish was the hillazon.

And so-

-He went back to Radzin and set up a factory.

Within a year you had , people wearing tekhelet.

Wow.

All of his followers, and this caused-

They were singing and dancing.

-They were singing and dancing.

[SIMCHA] But not for long.

A hundred years ago,

many Rabbis immediately came out against the cuttlefish.

A tremendous amount of argument...

...broke out over this tekhelet.

Should you wear tekhelet, shouldn't you wear tekhelet?

If you wear the tekhelet, is it good, is it bad,

should you be stoned?

in Jerusalem for example,

there was giant arguments between those people.

Fist fights?

As a matter of fact,

one person took off a tallit off somebody who wore tekhelet,

threw it down in the middle of the courtyard and burnt it.

[SIMCHA] Tekhelet had been gone so long...

...there was no longer a tradition of wearing it.

And the Jewish establisment...

...came out against the Rebbe's discovery.

[ELIEZER] There was this very strong conservative tendency.

And really in religion, what we find is the exact opposite...

...of what we find in the case of technology.

You know technology newer is better, is progress.

Though in religion, especially a religion based on revelation,

we tend to think that with the passage of time...

...there is a loss of clarity, a loss of precision.

So it's not a bad thing that we exercise this caution.

[SIMCHA] There weren't just religious questions.

A young student in England named Isaac Herzog...

...had chemistry tests run on the dye.

And what he discovered appeared to sink the cuttlefish.

Could a chemist delay the Messiah?

[SIMCHA] So after years the mystery is solved.

The cuttlefish named as the harbinger of messianic times.

The end of days is that much closer.

But then a young student in England...

...sends the cuttlefish dye off for chemical analysis.

-Herzog wrote a doctorate on tekhelet in nineteen fourteen.

And he sent away to Radzin...

...to get the recipes and to get an example,

a specimen of the dyed tekhelet.

And he sent it off to the chemical laboratories...

...and those laboratories came back with the result that...

..the blue that was found in the Radzin tekhelet was synthetic.

Synthetic means it doesn't come from a living animal.

[SIMCHA] Chemical analysis...

...revealed the Radzyner blue to be Prussian blue.

A commercially produced painters colour

It turned out that you didn't need the cuttlefish to get blue.

You just needed all the other chemicals...

...in the recipe.

It didn't matter that the cuttlefish blood was added.

It could be anything's blood.

It could be ox blood, my blood-

Exactly.

You'd still get the blue.

Exactly. Ferric Ferrocyanide is Prussian blue,

which means it comes from iron and cyanide.

Iron was added, it was added as part of the chemicals.

So the iron is an integral part.

The cyanide comes from nitrogen and carbon...

...but that means that anything that has nitrogen and carbon,

if its raise in the proper temperature...

...and prepared correctly...

...would give you the same cyanide you need in order to-

But you still needed the cuttlefish.

But you could use cuttlefish, you could use chopped liver-

Okay. But, but that's different.

But the point was the hillazon is such an important part...

...of the tradition of the tekhelet.

It can't be that the hillazon was an incidental ingredient.

You could have just as easily use any other source of protein.

I heard people talking about the Prussian blue...

...and everything.

The Bible said we should use blue...

...coming from this fish had its reasons.

If it could be done from something else...

...does not prove that this wasn't used.

Just cause you can get it from something else...

...doesn't invalidate-

-doesn't invalidate the cuttlefish.

Right. Because, as an example,

there's alcohol that's derived from-

Wheat.

Wheat. There is alcohol derived from grapes.

Now, if you would drink alcohol on Passover from wheat,

it is a big sin.

But if you drink alcohol that comes from grapes-

From fruits, citrus- -It's % okay.

Chemically they are the same content,

the same alcohol if you put it through a chemist,

I don't think he will make a difference between A and B.

Just the Torah we do not understand.

The heavy thing for the question is where it comes.

So, which legendary sea creature...

...is the Biblical hillazon?

I'm not counting anyone out yet.

Ancient clues seem to indicate that it's the cuttlefish,

but the archeology seems to support the lonely little snail.

The chemistry- well I haven't figured that one out yet.

But I do know, is that once we find the hillazon...

...and once we recover that Biblical blue, the tekhelet,

we would have brought things that much closer...

...to the ends of days.