32 Rev. Isaac Herzog on 



composed in Palestine about 760 C.E., all mention of tekelet is 

 omitted. The disappearance of tekelet from the Jewish ritual 

 thus falls between the final redaction of the Talmud (c.E. 570) 

 and the composition of the Sheltot (c.E. 760). 



The Arab conquest of Palestine about the year 638 entailed 

 the total destruction of the purple dye-houses administered by 

 the imperial officials.! The final extinction of tekelet would 

 also seem to have been one of the effects of the Arab conquest. 



The great Jewish traveller, Benjamin of Tudela (C. 1160), 

 makes mention of the dyeing of red-purple on the Tyrian Coast. 

 It would thus appear that the industiy revived some time after 

 the Arab occupation. The interval must have been a fairly long 

 one, seeing that the Jews who in Benjamin's time played an 

 important part in the industrial life of Tyre* had made no 

 attempt to resuscitate the dyeing of tekelet for ritual purposes ; 

 the chain of tradition must have been too long broken. 



The art of purple-dyeing in general, which, dating from hoary 

 antiquity — the mention of tekelet and argaman in the Cuneiform 

 texts occurs already about 1600 B.C. — passed through a long and 

 checkered career, finally becoming extinct, at least in the Old 

 World, on the fall of Constantinople, May 29th, 1453. 



It is worthy of note that the remarkable researches carried 

 out by Gentile inquirers from William Cole to Lacaze-Duthiers 

 found no echo in Jewish circles. 



It was not until 1887, some 28 years after Lacaze-Duthiers' 

 famous experiments that an attempt was made by a certain 

 Rabbi, Gershon Enoch Leiner, of Radzin, Poland, to restore ritual 

 tekelet in Israel. 



He carried out investigations along the Adriatic coast, and 

 eventually arrived at the conclusion that the tekelet species was 

 identical with Sepia officinalis. In 1888 he established a factory 

 for ritual tekelet in Radzin, dying a few years afterwards. The 



tSee Amati, De Restitution Purposes. 

 *See Benjamin of Tudela's Itinerary, cd. Asher, pp, 29-30. 



