Jewish religious clothing

[1] Classical Greek and Roman sources, that often ridicule many aspects of Jewish life, do not remark on their clothing and subject it to caricature, as they do when touching on Celtic, Germanic, and Persian peoples, and mock their different modes of dress.

[2] Cultural anthropologist Eric Silverman argues that Jews in the late antiquity period used clothes and hair-styles like the people around them.

[3] In the Mishnaic period, as well as in many Islamic countries until the mid-20th century, Jewish men typically wore a tunic (Hebrew: חלוק, romanized: ḥaluq), instead of trousers.

[4] In the same countries, many different local regulations emerged to make Christian and Jewish dhimmis look distinctive in their public appearance.

In 1198, the Almohad caliph Yaqub al-Mansur decreed Jews must wear dark blue garb with very large sleeves and a grotesquely oversized hat;[5] his son altered the colour to yellow, a change that may have influenced Catholic ordinances some time later.

[5] German ethnographer Erich Brauer (1895–1942) noted that in Yemen of his time, Jews were not allowed to wear clothing of any color besides blue.

The Shulhan Arukh and the Arba'ah Turim, following the legal opinion of Nahmanides, require burying the dead with their tallit,[15] and which has become the general practice amongst most religious Jews.

[19][20] Some progressive Jewish women choose to take on the obligations of tzitzit and tefillin,[21] and it has become common for a girl to receive a tallit when she becomes bat mitzvah.

[24] Jews in Arab lands did not traditionally wear yarmulkes, but rather larger, rounded, brimless hats, such as the kufi or tarboush.

[citation needed] A kittel (Yiddish: קיטל, romanized: kitl) is a white, knee-length, cotton robe worn by Jewish prayer leaders and some Orthodox Jews on the High Holy Days.

In subsequent years, the Sages of Israel forbade Jewish women from wearing any predominantly red colored accoutrement, as it attracts undue attention to themselves.

[35] Evidence drawn from the Talmud shows that pious Jewish women would wear shawls over their heads when they would leave their homes, but there was no practice of fully covering the face.