Cover Story

One day after shul, Leon Levine asks his rabbi: “How do we know we’re supposed to wear yarmulkes?” The rabbi instantly replies with a verse from Genesis, “And Jacob left Beersheba” (Gen. 28:10):

Levine: But that doesn’t say anything about Jacob wearing a yarmulke!
Rabbi: You think Jacob would walk around with his head uncovered?!

The rabbi gets the last word, but it’s his congregant who makes the better point: The yarmulke, or kippa, one of the most recognizable symbols of Jewish identity, is backed by neither a biblical source nor a clear rabbinic requirement.

As a piece of clothing announcing Jewish identity, the kippa is remarkably flexible. Subtleties in style, material, and color announce denominational and ideological affiliations. Meanwhile, capitalism has turned the kippa into a tiny billboard emblazoned with sports teams, superheroes, and luxury brands. In an age of constant self-curation, the kippa, with its American and Israeli flags, watermelons, and pride rainbows, has become a platform for personal and political expression. But where did it come from?

The Babylonian Talmud says that Rav Huna refused to walk four cubits (six to eight feet) without a head covering “because the Shekhina [divine presence] is above my head,” (Kiddushin 31a), an act the text marks as an extraordinary expression of individual piety rather than a universal practice. In fact, during late antiquity and the Middle Ages, there is hardly any mention of head coverings as expressions or requirements of Jewish identity. At times, as in the early Islamic world and the Holy Roman Empire, Jews were forced to wear identifying “Jew hats,” but that was a mark of exclusion, not pride or piety.

It wasn’t until the sixteenth century that Rabbi Joseph Karo codified Rav Huna’s practice for all Jewish males, writing that “one should not walk four amot with one’s head uncovered” (Shulkhan Arukh, Orach Chayim 2:6). In the next century, the Polish halakhist Rabbi David HaLevi Segal, in a way, reversed the logic of the medieval Jew hat by arguing that it was obligatory for Jewish men to cover their heads precisely because Christians bared theirs while praying.

Still, later authorities worried that this Jewish visibility could invite danger and discrimination and made room for exceptions. For instance, in 1974 Rabbi Moshe Feinstein allowed a job applicant named Hillel Erlanger to take off his kippa when he worried that it would prevent him from being hired. Part of his reasoning was precisely that in the Talmud, covering one’s head seemed to be an act of piety (midat hasidut) rather than, strictly speaking, a halakhic obligation.

In ancient Israel, hats were not a regular part of the male wardrobe. When head covering does show up in the Bible, it is in descriptions of priestly vestments or rituals of mourning, when mourners don sackcloth, go barefoot, and cover their heads in grief. But things started to look different in Roman Palestine. Like other Eastern Mediterranean men, Jewish men went without head coverings while women, or at least elite women, covered their hair. The rabbis of Roman Palestine explained:

For what reason does a man go out with his head uncovered while a woman goes out with her head covered? Rabbi Joshua said to them, “[This is analogous] to one who sinned and is embarrassed before other people and therefore leaves with their head covered.” (Genesis Rabbah17.8)

The passage grounds the gender coding of headdress in the biblical story of creation, attributing the norm of hair covering for women as a mark of vicarious shame for Eve’s indiscretion. Interestingly, this midrashic explanation has a close parallel in the New Testament, where the apostle Paul protests:

Any man who prays or prophesies with something on his head disgraces his head, but any woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled disgraces her head. . . . For a man ought not to have his head veiled, since he is the image and reflection of God; but woman is the reflection of man. (1 Cor. 11:4–8)

For Paul, men’s bare heads affirmed their privileged proximity to the divine, whereas women were, according to Genesis 2:21–24, created from and therefore secondary to men. The rabbis focus instead on a few verses later, explaining women’s head covering as an expression of lingering shame over Eve’s transgression. Both sources make clear that in Roman Palestine, men tended not to cover their heads.

Even if head coverings were not part of the everyday dress of Jewish men in the Roman world, the rabbis expected men to “wrap” themselves in a cloak, toga, or tallit on certain occasions. Above all, this gesture was performed at the beginning of prayer. Even God, when showing Moses how to pray on Sinai, is said to have first wrapped himself in a tallit (Rosh Hashanah 17b). Rabbis likewise wrapped themselves when welcoming the Sabbath, before sitting in judgment and before engaging in mystical study. Though these different acts may seem unrelated, their underlying logic is the same: In each case, one is imagined as standing before God and therefore must wrap oneself.

Rabbinic texts never spelled out the choreography of “wrapping,” probably because they took it for granted. Several sources suggest that it involved not only covering the torso but also drawing the cloak over one’s head—fully enveloping oneself within it, as one still sees wearers of tallitot do in prayer. The original purpose was probably to imitate the ministering angels, who veiled themselves before the divine presence: “With two [wings] he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet” (Isa. 6:2).

Roman men, too, normally remained bareheaded and even uncovered their heads as a sign of reverence when appearing before the emperor. Yet, in specific ritual settings, they would likewise draw their togas up over their heads—a gesture known in Latin as capite velato (with covered head). One finds descriptions of this in Livy, Virgil, and Ovid, who describes the legendary second king of Rome, Numa, at his inauguration addressing Jupiter with “his head covered (caput . . . velatus) in a white robe”—and it appears frequently in artistic depictions of Roman sacrifice. Emperors adopted the gesture as well, commissioning statues of themselves piously covering their heads with togas to project their piety across the empire. In fact, according to Josephus, when the newly victorious emperors Vespasian and Titus returned to Rome after suppressing the Great Revolt of the Jews, they called for silence, covered their heads, and prayed (Josephus, War 7:128).

Rabbis living in Babylonia, the other great rabbinic center in late antiquity, continued to cloak themselves before praying. But Babylonians dressed differently from Romans. Persian men typically wore caftans and other tunics, which were tied with a belt and had trousers underneath—garments made to be worn, not wrapped. So the rabbis gradually modified the pious act of wrapping and substituted it with standalone head coverings. Thus, in one talmudic passage about reciting grace after meals, we learn that some Babylonian rabbis maintained the old custom of wrapping while others insisted on “spreading a sudara over the head” before reciting the blessing.

It’s hard to say what a sudara was; in Palestine it was a kind of kerchief or cloth, but in the Babylonian Talmud, the word can refer to other head coveringsor a turban. Such head coverings were hardly in short supply—they were a standard feature of Persian men’s attire, even outside ritual contexts. The Greek geographer Strabo, writing at the dawn of the Common Era, noted that Persian dress “was distinguished from that of the Greeks” by, among other things, its many head coverings, which could signal class, kinship, rank, or status and might even display clan insignia.

Presumably it was some kind of turban or other Persian head covering that Rav Huna wouldn’t walk without because “theShekhina [divine presence] is above my head.” But here we encounter a second Babylonian novelty:It would seem that for Rav Huna, the divine presence was no longer confined to ritual settings; it was always near. He wasn’t alone in this conviction. In another talmudic anecdote (Shabbat 156b), Rav Nahman’s mother was warned by astrologers that her son would grow up to be a thief. To prevent this from happening, she told him to always “cover your head so that the fear of heaven may be upon you.” But once, while resting under a tree, the covering on his head slipped off, and, feeling peckish, he helped himself to a few dates that didn’t belong to him.

For Rav Huna and Rav Nahman, the constant nearness of the divine could be conceived without fanfare, in the ordinary rhythms of daily life. Remarkably, a similar notion of God’s constant presence appears in the near-contemporary Aramaic incantation bowls. These artifacts, which were buried beneath the floors of homes, have been unearthed in some of the same towns where the Babylonian rabbis lived and taught— some even invoke rabbis by name. They date back to the fifth to seventh centuries, precisely when the Talmud was consolidated. More than a dozen of these bowls record variations of an incantation that in one version reads:

Gabriel is to my right and Michael is to my left, Susiel is in front of me and Azriel is behind me, and the Shekhina [divine presence] of YHWH Seba’ot the God of Israel is above my head.

Scholars call this invocation the “angels all around” formula, the purpose of which was to surround the bowl’s owner with divine figures to protect them against demonic forces. In some versions of the formula, the angels switch places, but the divine presence always appears above the owner of the incantation bowl’s head, as it did above Rav Huna’s. In fact, the incantation on some of these bowls says verbatim what Rav Huna said: “The Shekhina [divine presence] is above my head.”

The “angels all around” formula eventually found its way into the earliest surviving Jewish prayer book, where it is prescribed for “when one goes out alone at night.” Two centuries later, in the eleventh century, the formula became a standard part of the bedtime prayer. Here, too, the language echoes Rav Huna’s declaration.

Taken altogether, these sources reflect a Babylonian Jewish theology of everyday divine immanence. Rav Huna transformed the ritual gesture of covering one’s head into a constant discipline, testifying to the perpetual nearness of the divine, a novel practice he was able to perform because of the particular dress standards of Sasanian Babylonia. In the bowls, and later in Jewish nighttime prayers, spoken words activated a protective ring of heavenly forces that watched over the individual. Rav Nahman’s mother seems to have regarded head covering both as a reminder of God’s ever-watchful gaze and as a form of protection. What unites all three is a shared conviction that the divine presence does not merely visit the pious when they perform sacred acts; it always hovers just above their heads.

The Jewish tradition of covering one’s head emerged from a tangle of local fashions, imperial cultures, and daring theological intuitions about the nearness of God. It took shape where Roman Palestine met Sasanian Babylonia, where cloaks gave way to turbans, and where a God previously encountered only in special moments came to be seen as hovering constantly overhead. By the time Rabbi Joseph Karo and other early modern authorities decided that head coverings were obligatory, the cloaks and turbans, not to speak of the protecting angels and threatening demons, had been set aside. But a piece of cloth, lightly set on the head, was again a way of making the invisible presence of the Shekhina felt.

Jacob did not leave Beersheva wearing a yarmulke. The practice of Jewish men covering their heads echoed Roman ritual postures, transformed according to Babylonian clothing styles, and finally recovered in a time and place where memory of these late antique contexts had vanished. What would eventually become a badge of Jewish difference began as cloth woven on shared looms.