Jewish hat
Modern distinctive or characteristic Jewish forms of male headgear include the kippah (skullcap), shtreimel, spodik, kolpik, and kashkets; see also Hasidic clothing.
In the fourteenth century a ball or bobble appears at the top of the hat, and the tapering end becomes more of a stalk with a relatively constant width.
Hats worn (by Pharaoh's advisors, among others) in the illustrations to the Old English Hexateuch, a manuscript of around 1030, have been seen as an early form, and they appear in the Mosan Stavelot Bible of 1097.
According to Sara Lipton, "The few surviving early medieval references to Jewish clothing likewise suggest that Jews dressed no differently from their Gentile neighbor".
Under Jewish law, observant Jews should keep their heads covered almost all the time,[7] and indeed men of all religious groups tended to wear hats when outside in the Middle Ages to a much greater extent than today.
In order that the crime of such an accursed mingling shall not in future have an excuse and an evasion under the pretext of error, we resolve that (Jews and Saracens) of both sexes in all Christian lands shall distinguish themselves publicly from other people by their dress.
Pope Paul IV ordered in 1555 that in the Papal States it must be a yellow, peaked hat, and from 1567 for twenty years it was compulsory in Lithuania, but by this period it is rarely seen in most of Europe.
[16] As an outcome of the Jewish Emancipation its use was formally discontinued, although it had been declining long before that, and is not often seen after 1500; the various forms of the yellow badge were far more long-lasting.
These dress codes became a normal part of what it meant to be a Jew living inside Catholic dominated European societies.
In the Birds' Head Haggadah (Germany, c. 1300), the figures wear the hat when sitting to eat the Passover Seder.
In one extreme example in a manuscript of the Bible moralisée, an illustration shows the rod of Aaron, which has turned into a serpent, turning on the Pharaoh's magicians (Exodus, 7:10-12); Moses and Aaron do not wear the hat but the Egyptian magicians do, signifying not that they are Jews, but that they are like Jews, i.e. on the wrong side of the dispute.
[26] In another scene showing the conversion of Jews and other non-Christians at the end of the world, a series of figures show different stages of removing their hats to signify the stages they have reached in their conversion, so that "the hat does not just identify Jews; it functions independently of its placement to signify infidelity and recalcitrant Jewishness".
Its obverse portrait shows a man with a pointed beard wearing a Judenhut, which the populace took as depicting a typical Jew.
Naomi Lubrich claims that the pointed hat was transferred in iconography to criminals, pagans, and other non-Christian outsiders, in particular sorcerers[30] and dwarfs.
Islamic scholars cited the Pact of Umar in which Christians supposedly took an obligation to "always dress in the same way wherever we may be, and… bind the zunar [wide belt] round our waists".
Al-Nawawi required dhimmis to wear a piece of yellow cloth and a belt, as well as a metallic ring, inside public baths.
In the late twelfth century, Almohad ruler Abu Yusuf ordered the Jews of the Maghreb to wear dark blue garments with long sleeves and saddle-like caps.
His grandson Abdallah al-Adil made a concession after appeals from the Jews, relaxing the required clothing to yellow garments and turbans.
In the sixteenth century, Jews of the Maghreb could only wear sandals made of rushes and black turbans or caps with an extra red piece of cloth.
