Hennaed Drums, Part Two: North Africa

In our last blogpost, we explored the possible evidence for hennaed drumheads in medieval Spain. In the end, while there are many images of decorated drums, the lack of any textual or material evidence makes it difficult to say whether these decorations were in fact done with henna or not.

As we move towards the modern period, however, we come across another chapter in the history of hennaed drums which is much clearer: North Africa.

Musician with hennaed drum (tbal), Algeria,
1880s. Photograph by William Tupper.

The History of Harqus: Temporary Facial Decoration in North Africa

I’ve been swamped with thesis research and planning my upcoming move (!) so I apologize if posts have not been coming as regularly. My thesis (on demons in North African Judaism) has also brought up lots of interesting material on henna, so hopefully I can share some of that over the next few posts.

For now, though, I’d like to address an issue which has been floating around the internet for a while: the North African facial art known as ḥarqūs. I’ve seen a few posts on my tumblr referencing it with some misconceptions, so I thought I’d take some time to clarify things and offer some primary sources (both texts and images!).

The entry for ḥarqus from Belkassem Ben Sedira's Arabic-French dictionary (Algeria), 1882.

To begin with, how do we spell it? In standard academic transcription, the Arabic word حرقوس would be written as ḥarqūs, although in some areas of the Maghreb it was pronounced closer to hargus (or hargous in French spelling). Other spellings, like harkus (or harkous) or harkos, are encountered as well. Catherine Cartwright-Jones, who has put some material about it on her site, spells it harquus (with two u’s), following the transliteration system of al-Kitaab, the Georgetown Arabic textbook commonly used for Introductory Arabic throughout the United States, which recommends doubled letters to represent long vowels. While the “two u” spelling has become common on the internet, I prefer not to use it for two main reasons: it does not follow scholarly convention, and it confuses people about the pronunciation (I’ve heard people say “harkwus”). In this post I'll use ḥarqus, except in quotations, where I'll keep whatever spelling the author used. Basically it should be pronounced har-KUS, with a rough ‘h,’ a back-of-the-throat ‘k’ or ‘q,’ and a long ‘u’ as in goose.

Now that we've covered how to spell it and say it, let’s turn to what it is (and is not). Ḥarqus refers to a black ink used for painting the face and hands with small temporary designs. These designs are often very similar (or even identical) to the tattoo designs common in the same areas of North Africa… But ḥarqus is not a tattoo, and the word ḥarqus does not refer to tattooing! Tattooing is known generally as washm or usham in Moroccan Arabic, although many of the tattoos actually have their own names based on the placement and motif (see Herber 1948). It’s true that there is some relationship between them — many designs, as I mentioned, were done both with ḥarqus and tattoo, and tattoo artists also applied ḥarqus (although ḥarqus was also done by individuals at home).

"Fatima and Manoubia applying makeup," Alexandre
Roubtzoff, Tunis, 1917.

But before I get too distracted by tattooing traditions (which are well deserving of their own post), let’s get back to ḥarqus. The word itself is unusual in that it has four root letters; Herber suggests that the word itself ultimately derives from the Greek khalkos, ‘copper,’ although I suspect it is related to the root ḥrq, ‘to burn.’ In some Amazigh communities it was known as tanast.

Ḥarqus is essentially a gall ink, made from the tannic acid of oak galls and iron or copper sulfate, which produces a intensely deep black ink, lasting for a few days on living skin and permanent on parchment (a very similar ink is used in Jewish communities to this day for writing Torah scrolls). It was (and is still) used throughout the Maghreb, mainly Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia; a similar cosmetic was also used in the Arabic peninsula, known there as khiḍab (another subject for a future blogpost). When made at home, poorer women sometimes used just a simple mixture of soot and oil, but ‘professional’ recipes for ḥarqus show the variety of organic and non-organic ingredients:

Adorning the Bride: Henna, Revelation, and the Mystical Marriage of Shavuot

Next week is the Jewish holiday of Shavu‘ot, which commemorates the Revelation of the Torah. In biblical times the holiday was an agricultural festival celebrating the end of the wheat harvest, but in rabbinic literature it was associated with the moment when the people of Israel stood together at Mt. Sinai to receive the Torah.

Traditionally, it is celebrated by studying the Torah and other Jewish texts all night long in a ritual known as tiqqun leil Shavu‘ot, “the tiqqun of the night of Shavu‘ot.” If you’re wondering a) what the heck is a tiqqun, and b) what does all this have to do with henna, hold on to your horses and hopefully all will be explained. I'll first explain why it makes sense, given the symbolic meaning of Shavu‘ot, that there would be a henna connection, and then I'll explore a little-known North African Jewish custom to hold a henna ceremony and mock wedding for children as part of Shavu‘ot celebrations.

So: in mystical Jewish thought, the holiday of Shavu‘ot was interpreted as a kind of symbolic wedding between G!d and the people of Israel. After the Exodus / elopement into the desert, the people and G!d commit to each other at Sinai, a sort of wedding, and so the Torah is a sort of ketubba [wedding contract].

This mystical marriage, in fact, is a moment of cosmic unity, bringing together binaries like the heavens and the earth (through the Torah which descends from heaven and the mountain which reaches up from the earth), the night and the day (which join, through the all-night study, into one dizzying experience of Revelation), and male and female (in the Divine, understood as the mystical ‘groom,’ and the people of Israel, personified as the bride).

Two artists' imaginings of Sinai. Left: Joseph ben David, Altona Haggada,
18th century Germany. Right, Charlton Heston, The Ten Commandments, 1956. 

This idea of bringing together opposites and joining that which was separate is expressed in the idea of tiqqun, which means ‘to return to a state of completion’ or ‘to repair’ (as in the popular social justice slogan tiqqun olam, ‘to heal the world’). Thus the night of Shavu‘ot is a tiqqun, a restoration, a movement towards wholeness and bringing together those things which should be united but are now separate.

But tiqqun has another meaning: to adorn or decorate, especially in the context of marriage. Thus the night of Shavu‘ot is also a tiqqun in the sense that it is the night of adorning the ‘Bride’ (the unified people of Israel, or the Shekhina, the feminine and earthly Divine presence) before the marriage of Revelation. It is, if I may be so bold, the Shekhina’s henna party.

The Zohar, a central text in the Jewish mystical tradition of Qabbala, explains that the process of studying Torah on the night of Shavu‘ot is how we symbolically adorn the bride (Zohar 1:8a; see also the translation and commentary of Daniel Matt, 2004, pp. 51-53): 

On that night, before the Bride will be under the canopy with Her Husband the next day [i.e. the day of Shavu‘ot], all the Companions of the Bridal Palace [i.e. those initiated into the Qabbalistic tradition] need to be with Her all night, rejoicing with Her in Her adornments [tiqqunha] with which She is adorned, studying scripture, from Torah to Prophets, from Prophets to Writings, and biblical midrashim and mysteries of wisdom: for these are Her adornments [tiqqunin] and fineries.

Later in the Zohar we read that Rabbi Shim‘on would say, on the night of Shavu‘ot, “Let us go and adorn [letaqqna] the fineries of the Bride, so that She may be ready to appear before the King with Her fineries and adornments as is proper” (Zohar 3:98a). Thus, on the night of Shavu‘ot we are invited to take part in the adorning of the bride, by studying Torah and readying ourselves as a community, in preparation for the union of Revelation.

Ketubba for Shavu'ot, Tangiers, early
20th century.

But in some communities, the mystical marriage of Shavu‘ot was enacted in more than just a metaphorical fashion, but included actual wedding customs, such as putting up a huppah [wedding canopy] in the synagogue, or reciting a ketubba [wedding contract] between G!d and Israel during the service. Since henna is a primary symbol of weddings, it is not surprising that henna would appear at Shavu‘ot, and since this is a Jewish henna blog, it is not surprising that I’m writing about it! 

In North Africa, the custom arose to have young children commit themselves to Torah and a life of learning, by having them symbolically ‘marry’ each other and take part in the celebrations in the synagogue on Shavu‘ot. Generally, the children participating were those who would be starting school the following year, so around the age of 5.

This ceremony was known as kittab or kettab, from the Arabic word kuttāb [from the root meaning ‘writing’] used colloquially to refer to primary school (see Simon 2014). It served multiple functions at once: it was a rite of passage bringing the child into the world of schooling, it protected them during this time of transition, it incorporated them and their lifecycle event into the celebration of Shavu'ot, and the symbolic marriage was a good omen for a happy life and a successful marriage later in life.

This ‘marriage,’ like true marriages, had a long process of preparation. It began on the Mimouna (the last night of Passover), six weeks before Shavu‘ot — families with little boys would go to the homes of families with little girls to ask for their hand, bringing henna, a ring, and bowls of candies. They would visit again on Lag ba‘Omer (the 33rd day between Passover and Shavu‘ot), bringing cakes, perfume, and more cosmetics. The following Saturday they would dress up the ‘bride’ and ‘groom’ (the bride got a silk scarf, the groom a gold-embroidered belt) and carry them around the neighbourhood, stopping at each house to receive candy and well wishes (Brunot and Malka, 1939, pg. 313).

The day before Shavu‘ot, the children were taken to the bath and dressed in wedding finery. Their families hosted a feast with musicians and singers; in Algeria, the banquet included roasted goat testicles, which were consumed by all present (Briggs and Guède, 1964, pg. 29). 

A boy dressed and adorned for his kettab (note the facial
decorations in harqus and the amulets strung across his
chest), with a younger child, Ghardaia, Algeria,
mid-20th century.

The children’s hands and feet were hennaed, and their hair was cut (often for the first time — traditionally a Jewish child’s hair is not cut until the age of three). Their faces were painted with ḥarqus [a burnt soot ink] on their forehead, nose, temples, and chin, with a design like a row of crosses (+++++). 

The full intention and meaning of these decorations is unclear (Briggs and Guède report general perplexity regarding them, 1964, pg. 29) but they seem to be protective symbols for the children in their liminal state of transition, as well as part of their general adornment. Whether there is any influence from the similar-looking facial tattoos (washm) practiced by their Muslim neighbours is hard to say.

They were dressed in colourful turbans and gold-embroidered velvet coats (Briggs and Guède record that the boys’ shirts were also embroidered with a multi-coloured hamsa and an Hebrew inscription, ‘Long Life and Peace,’ 1964, pg. 29), and weighed down with silver chains, amulets, and protective jewelry. 

The youngsters, now fully adorned, were taken to the synagogue on the day of Shavu‘ot, where they were received with much joy. The rabbi wrote a ketubba [wedding contract] on paper with honey and handed it to the children, who licked off the honey to the sounds of ululation [“yu-yus”] and celebration (Brunot and Malka, 1939, pg. 314; Zafrani 2000: 56). “And if it is so decreed in Heaven,” the Moroccan woman recorded in Brunot and Malka concludes, “when those children are grown, they will be married to each other” (1939, pg. 314).

Children at their kettab, Ghardaia, mid-20th century.

The honey ketubba is not only the sealing of the symbolic marriage, it also represents the official entry of the child into the world of learning, and the ingesting of the words of Torah. This is not unique to North African Jews; there is a similar custom among Ashkenazi Jews that when young children first begin to learn to read, the teacher smears honey on the first page of the book, or on a page with the Hebrew letters written on it, and the child licks the honey off the letters, so that the words of Torah will always be sweet for them (Goldberg, 2003, pp. 85-87). This ceremony was often paired with the occasion of a child’s first haircut, known in Yiddish as upsherin or opshern (Marcus 1996).

Sienna family opsherns! Left: getting my first haircut (and
apparently not happy about it), 1992. Right: my brother Micah looking happy at his
opshern ceremony (probably because he sees candy coming), 1997. 

Unlike the opshern, which is still practiced, the kettab ceremony appears to have fallen by the wayside. Even in the late 1930s, Brunot and Malka already reported that “this custom is not followed except by certain families originally from Fes, of the middle class. It is disappearing rapidly. The people enamoured of modernity, who are numerous, reject this custom” (1939, pg. 314). In rural areas of southeast Morocco and southern Algeria, it appears to have continued into the 1960s. However, it is not widely practiced in contemporary Israel to my knowledge, although Shlomo Bar, the Moroccan-Israeli singer of HaBreira haTiv‘it, has a very well-known song about the ceremony (Etzlenu biKfar Todra, see lyrics here) which has become an iconic song of nostalgia for the lost ways of North African Jewish culture.

The kettab is a beautiful ceremony, and if any of my readers have small children who would like to revive this tradition or incorporate henna into an opshern: contact me and we’ll make it happen! And even if you’re not entering school for the first time, Shavu‘ot is a time for all of us to ‘renew our vows’ and recommit ourselves to the lifelong educational project. 

As a henna artist, I love the idea that tiqqun is both ‘adornment’ and ‘repair’ — that somehow, our work as henna artists can help bring the world closer to a sense of wholeness. I will be leading a henna ceremony in Toronto to prepare for Shavu‘ot, and I encourage other Jewish communities to think about how they can “rejoice with the Bride in Her adornments” and celebrate the joyous union that Revelation brings.

Hebrew letters in henna and ink, Noam Sienna, 2014

Bibliography

Briggs, Lloyd Cabot, and Norina Lami Guède. No More Forever: a Saharan Jewish Town. Cambridge: Peabody Museum, 1964.

Brunot, Louis, and Elie Malka. Textes judéo-arabes de Fes [Judeo-Arabic texts of Fes]. Rabat: École du Livre, 1939.

Goldberg, Harvey. Jewish Passages: Cycles of Jewish Life. University of California Press, 2003.

Marcus, Ivan. Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe. Yale University Press, 1996.

Matt, Daniel Chanan. The Zohar, vol. 1: Translation and Commentary. Stanford University Press, 2004.

Simon, Rachel. Kuttāb. Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World (ed. Norman A. Stillman), 2nd ed. Leidon: Brill, 2014.

Zafrani, Haïm. Two Thousand Years of Jewish Life in Morocco. Jersey City: Ktav Publishing House, 2000.

Ringing It In: henna traditions for celebrating New Year's

With 2014 fast approaching, I thought I’d look at some of the ways that henna has been used to celebrate the New Year.

Some of you may be familiar with the “Persian New Year,” Nowruz, celebrated at the Spring Equinox (March 21). This ancient holiday is Zoroastrian in origin but is celebrated today by many ethnic and religious groups, including also Muslims, Alevis, and Baha’is, throughout Central Asia. There are many fascinating customs associated with Nowruz, including a table set with seven symbolic items each starting with the letter ‘sin’ (in Persian); jumping over a fire as a celebration of the victory over darkness and a cleansing beginning for the year; and many delicious traditional foods.

A young Nasser al-Din Shah, ready for Nowruz

Henna is also a traditional part of the festivities! French traveller Gabriel Bonvalot noticed in Salyan (today in Azerbaijan) that men, women and children would get their hands, feet, beards, and hair hennaed for Nowruz (Bonvalot, 1889, pg. 27). British archaeologist James Theodore Bent noticed the same in Izadkhvast, Iran, describing how “no Persian however poor would enter on a new year without some new garment, and they all looked particularly clean, for it is the custom on the day before the feast for every one to go to the bath, to have his hair dyed black and his nails dyed yellow with henna” (1890, pg. 328). Similarly, the missionary Samuel Graham Wilson, whom we’ve met before on this blog, described the Nowruz customs he saw in Iran in 1895, including the “Haft Sin” plate; he notes:

As the great day approaches, every man says to himself, “Well, to-morrow is Noruz. I must get my head shaved, go to the bath, dye my hands, nails, and beard with henna, put on a clean skull-cap, and see if the tailor has my new coat ready. I must buy some sugar and tea, tobacco and candy, and then I shall be ready for all comers.”

This usage has continued into recent times. Ethnomusicologist Veronica Doubleday, who lived in Herat, Afghanistan, in the mid-1970s, describes how her friends hennaed their hands and feet for Nowruz (1988, pg. 66). And henna is still used to celebrate Nowruz today, as noted by Nasim Fekrat; and it’s not just people who get henna! Hushang ‘Alam wrote in the Encyclopedia Iranica that “the mane and tails of horses, donkeys, and mules were hennaed in Shiraz during the Nowruz until a few decades ago” (2003). I haven’t seen any sources describing Baha’i or Zoroastrian henna for Nowruz but I’m fairly confident they would share in these traditions.

Hennaed donkeys, Iran, 1956. Photo by Inge Morath.

"This Extraordinary Phenomenon": Algerian Jewish Henna via a Hebrew-Christian Missionary

While looking through some old files last month, I re-found an old story that I had come across years ago, about Jewish henna in Algeria! It was so interesting that I decided to write an article about it to submit to a journal! I’ll let you all know how that goes… In the meantime, here’s a little taste for you to see how my research happens.

The story was published in The Church of England magazine in March 1858, and comes from the correspondence of Rev. J.B. Ginsburg, who at the time was the representative for the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews (or London Jews’ Society, or LJS, for short) in Algeria.

Ginsburg was born Baruch Ginsburg — a Jew — in Kiev, around 1826. His father, Saul Ginsburg, was a rabbi, and trained his son for the same role. After his father’s death, Baruch left Kiev and traveled through Europe, seeking a spiritual home. He finally found it in a Hebrew translation of the New Testament; he converted to Christianity in Strasburg in 1847 and then moved to England to study in a theological seminary. In the 19th century, there was a widespread movement of “Hebrew Christians,” Jews who had converted to Christianity but maintained their ethnic identity as Jews, and often served as missionaries to their unconverted brethren (in this post, I mentioned another well-known Hebrew-Christian missionary, Joseph Wolff). 

A drawing of Ginsburg discussing religion
with rabbis, from  the missionary journal
"Jewish Advocate for the Young," 1877

Ginsburg, interestingly, didn’t go back to Europe, but instead to Africa! In 1857, he was appointed to the LJS Mission in Constantine, Algeria; this story takes place in September 1857, just after his arrival. He tells of coming across “four Jewish females, one of them carrying a plate filled with ‘henna,’ in the midst of which was a lighted tallow candle, surrounded with eggs. This extraordinary phenomenon, I thought, must be a religious ceremony” (pg. 246). He therefore stops to watch, and then proceeds to follow the procession, noting that the woman leading it uttered “loud shrieks… clamorous and frightful gesticulations” with her hand by her chin. They arrive at a small house, where a henna ceremony for a Jewish bride is taking place. This is, in fact, one of the oldest eyewitness descriptions we have of a Jewish henna ceremony; normally travelers only were able to see brides who had already been decorated. Unfortunately the utility of this source in reconstructing Algerian Jewish henna traditions is limited not only by Ginsburg’s unfamiliarity with his surroundings but also by his explicit ideological motives in retelling this story.

So what can we learn about 19th century Algerian Jewish henna traditions from Ginsburg’s narrative?

Hanukkah O Hanukkah: henna traditions for housewarmings

A couple of my dear friends have moved into a new house (just down the street! yay!) and asked me if I would do henna at their housewarming party… Little did they know that henna housewarming parties are actually an old Jewish tradition!

But what does this have to do with Hanukkah? Well, the holiday takes its name from the fact that the Temple was rededicated after the victory of the Maccabees: in Hebrew, hanukkat haBayyit, ‘the dedication of the House’ (which in modern Hebrew now refers to any housewarming).

So while I have never come across any specific henna traditions for Hanukkah in my research, there is a Jewish custom connecting henna with housewarmings, so I thought I’d present it here.

From the Henna Files: new discoveries in henna research

So I haven’t written a blogpost in a few weeks, not only because I’ve been super busy, but also because I’ve been trying to decide what to write about: I’ve made a few “henna discoveries” in the past few weeks and they’re each worthy of a blogpost… So I’ve combined them into a research update post, as it were, and if anyone’s interested in one of them in particular, let me know (just comment here or on Facebook, or email me) and I’ll expand! 

So, without further ado, a glimpse into the week of a henna researcher: 

Henna in Pylos: not so much…

For some time, when I teach about the early history of henna, I have been mentioning that some scholars have suggested that the Mycenaean dyeing industry, located on the Greek island of Pylos, used henna as one of the ingredients in their dyed/perfumed oils. Chief among them is Cynthia Shelmerdine, who first suggested the idea in her paper “Henna in Mycenaean Perfumery,” presented at the American Philological Association annual meeting in 1983, and expanded upon in her 1985 book The Perfume Industry of Mycenaean Pylos. Her suggestion is that the word e-ti (vocalized possibly as ertis) refers to henna (via a complex philological argument involving a 5th century botanist) and thus these oils were possibly dyed with henna (more likely than being perfumed with henna flowers, which would likely not make the long trip to Pylos from Judea or Egypt where it was grown). 

A Mycenaean tablet in Linear B from Pylos

But now, the discovery: one of Shelmerdine’s students, Mary Jane Cuyler, has published an article re-examining the evidence, which (although published in 2010) I just found now: “Rose, Sage, Cyperus, and E-ti: the adornment of olive oil at the palace of Nestor,” published in Kosmos: jewellery, adornment, and textiles in the Aegean Bronze Age (2010). She argues that the textual evidence is so weak that it would require really strong archaeological support, which it doesn't have: it is unlikely that the oil was dyed with henna, since henna doesn’t really dye oil (being a fat, rather than a protein). You’d think that would be self-evident, but that’s the way academia works (sigh). So she did an experiment, demonstrating that henna mixed with water (or even wine) will dye skin and wool, but henna mixed with oil essentially does nothing. Therefore, she concludes, “henna was probably not infused in olive oil, and therefore the identity of ertis is again open for interpretation. It is likely to have been an aromatic that works synergistically with sage and may have been a plant native to Western Messenia” (pp. 661). Nothing like a good old-fashioned experiment! I guess it’s time to revise my henna history presentation…

Resistance is Futile: Henna in Reverse, Part I

Inspired by a comment in an online group for henna artists, I thought I’d explore some of the historical records we have for what might be called “resist henna”: using a impervious substance to create patterns on the skin and then applying henna thickly over it, so that the pattern remains unstained against a darkly-hennaed background. This technique creates bold and striking patterns, since the thick henna ensures a dark stain, and is especially helpful if the henna is grainy or not well sifted.

This post is divided into two parts. In this week's installment I’ll offer some sources for sap and wax resists, and in the next part I’ll look at string and dough resists.

For sap and wax resists, designs are usually drawn on the skin with a stick dipped in some liquid mixture that, when dry, will block the henna stain. M. Vonderheyden observed in the 1930s that Ouled-Naïl women in Algeria patterned their henna by dropping candle wax on their hands and covering it with henna, so that they had “white spots against the brown stain” (1934, pg. 46). 

In 1949 Raymond Mauny, a French researcher at the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire in Dakar, published a brief comment in Notes Africaines, explaining that on his way to Kiffa, Mauritania, he saw women who hennaed their hands “not with a simple application as is the custom in most Islamic countries, but having made geometric motifs to a most beautiful effect” (1949, pg. 116). One of them described the process to him as follows:

We take a stick with ash, mixed with gum or the sap of euphorbia, and we draw with that mixture the spots that we want to stay white. Then we apply the henna over the whole hand, which we then wrap with the large leaves of the tourja (Calotropis procera).

Mauny supplies the following photograph, noting that the left hand had been doubly hennaed, and the right hand only once.

Woman with hennaed hands, Kiffa (Mauritania). From Mauny 1949, pg. 116.

It looks like the designs here were made with multiple techniques: sap resist for the stripes and triangular pieces on the sides of her hands, while the diamond/cross shapes on the top and bottom of the right hand appear to have been drawn on directly, probably with a stick; her fingers, of course, have been solidly dipped (with a nice sharp line from the resist defining them at the bottom). The designs are clearly visible and very striking — anyone want to give them a try? Maybe I'll recreate them for another post.