Why is the star called david

In , it was incorporated into the design of the flag of the new State of Israel, and it is used today to symbolize everything from Israel Air Force planes to the local version of the Red Cross, the Magen David Adom Red Star of David emergency paramedic service. After Jews were emancipated following the French Revolution, many of their communities selected the Star of David as their emblem.

The hexagram associated with the Star of David has throughout history been used by other religions as well. In Hinduism, it is referred to as the shatkona, with the upward triangle in the star shape representing Shiva the masculine side of God and the downward-pointing triangle representing Shakti the feminine side of the divinity.

The symbol thus generally represents the merging of the male and the female, and, the elements of fire and water, respectively. The Star of David also appears in the architecture of Mormon places of worship, where it symbolizes the union of heaven and earth, with God reaching down to man and man reaching up to God. The Star of David became officially associated with Judaism when it was chosen as the symbol to appear on the flag at the First Zionist Congress in At that time, it became the symbol of the Jewish people, Zionism, and the Jewish communities throughout the world.

David Wolffsohn designed the flag for the First Zionist movement, which became the flag for the State of Israel when it became a country in He wrote,.

Among many other problems that occupied me then was one that contained something of the essence of the Jewish problem. What flag would we hang in the Congress Hall? Then an idea struck me. We have a flag—and it is blue and white. The talith prayer shawl with which we wrap ourselves when we pray: that is our symbol. Let us take this Talith from its bag and unroll it before the eyes of Israel and the eyes of all nations. So I ordered a blue and white flag with the Shield of David painted upon it.

Though today the symbol popularly communicates Jewishness, its associations with Judaism are newer than one might think. Some historians trace it to Jewish communities in the Middle Ages, but these claims are neither fully substantiated nor widely accepted.

What we do know is that in the 17th century, the Jewish quarter of Vienna was marked with a hexagram, to distinguish it from the rest of the city. Around this time, the star also became part of synagogue architecture both in Europe and in the Middle East and North Africa. A Magen David Adom ambulance in Israel. Wikimedia Commons. It was during the 19th century, when European Jews became more integrated with Christian communities, that Jews began to use the star as a religious symbol.

The star had become so ubiquitous that during the Holocaust, the Nazis tried to subvert its significance by forcing Jews to identify themselves by wearing variations on a yellow six-pointed star , intentionally designed to serve as a perversion of the Jewish symbol. Unlike symbols such as the menorah and the Lion of Judah, the six-pointed star is not a unique image to Judaism. Other religions, including Hinduism , also use the shape as symbolic of the merging of spiritual elements such as the male and female and as God and humanity, Shnidman writes.