The novelist Dara Horn participates in daf yomi, the worldwide daily-page-of-Talmud-study program. This prompts her to ask:
In the tractate of Sanhedrin recently, we came to a discussion of what the Mishnah calls a kippah, a domed or vaulted chamber in which convicted criminals were kept. In considering the opinions of various commentators about this now-obsolete use of the Hebrew word, I found myself thinking of its better-known meaning of “skullcap” and sometimes “hood” (as in kippah adumah, Red Riding Hood), as well as that of “dome” (as in kippat barzel, the Iron Dome anti-missile system). From there my mind, no doubt influenced by ongoing pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel activism in the United States, wandered to the Arabic word keffiyeh and to my question for you. Might keffiyeh be a cognate of kippah?
As sister Semitic languages, Hebrew and Arabic do share a large number of cognate words, but kippah-keffiyeh would not seem to be among them. Kippah first occurs in the Mishnah, where it signifies both a dome and a skullcap (although it’s obvious why one should suggest the other, it’s unclear which suggested which); it derives from the Hebrew verb kafaf, to bend, its root meaning being of something bent or rounded over something else. Arabic has no corresponding verb or noun. It does have two nouns with Hebrew cognates that are related to kafaf and kippah: kaf or kaffa, “palm of the hand,” the same as the Hebrew word for palm, kaf or kaf-yad (palms form domes when hands are bent), and akaf, “saddle blanket,” akin to Hebrew ukaf, “saddle.” Neither of these words, however, can have anything to do with keffiyeh, nor does Arabic have other words that might.
This makes the origins of keffiyeh a mystery. Two derivations have been proposed for it. One links it to late Latin cofia (pronounced co-FEE-ah), a head covering of some sort, from which comes Italian cuffia, a cap or bonnet. These go back to caput, “head,” from which also descend our English words “cap,” “cape,” and “coif.” But although the phonetic fit is good, such an etymology fails to explain why cofia or cuffia would have been borrowed. While Arabic does possess Latin loan words due to the Roman empire’s having ruled much of the Middle East in the early centuries of the Common Era, plus a few Italian ones from later Mediterranean commerce, why would a people that wore keffiyehs have chosen to call them by a word taken from a people that didn’t wear them?
The second proposed etymology has been favored by Arab sources. It traces keffiyeh (in some places pronounced kuffiyeh) to Kufa, a prominent city in southern Iraq. The keffiyeh, according to this view, was first worn there and was named accordingly, just as the frankfurter was named for Frankfurt and the hamburger for Hamburg.
This theory, too, is problematic. The keffiyeh, a cloth draped around the head and neck to protect them from sun and dust, and held in place by a circular headband called an aqal, is generally thought to have originated among the nomadic Bedouin of the desert, to have spread from them to peasants and farmers, and to have reached the urban centers of the Arab world relatively recently, if at all. In the Ottoman times that ended with World War I, Arab city dwellers wore tarbushes, not keffiyehs, and even after the tarbush’s abandonment, the keffiyeh was never popular among them. Moreover, the cloth-and-headband combination is known by different names in different part of the Arab world, such as shmagh, ghutra, and ḥatta, of which keffiyeh is not necessarily the oldest. (Even among the Palestinians, whose national symbol it has become, ḥatta is the more common word for it.) What proof is there that Kufa was its birthplace?
There isn’t any. There is, though, an intriguing passage that may link the keffiyeh to the Kufa area in, of all places, the pages of the Talmud that Dara Horn has been studying. The page in question is 111b of the tractate of P’sahim.
Before we get to P’sahim, however, let’s look at another page of the Talmud: Shabbat 120a. There, in a discussion of the objects that it is permissible to rescue from a fire on the Sabbath, Rabbi Yosi enumerates eighteen items of clothing, the last of which is “the sudar for the neck.”
The word sudar occurs several times in talmudic literature, together with its Aramaic form of sudra. It denotes a cloth used in head coverings, and the medieval commentary of Rashi, which connects it to the Latin word sudarium, a handkerchief or towel (from sudor, sweat), says of it, “it has ends [hanging down] in front of him [the wearer] to wipe his mouth and eyes with.” While this etymology is rejected by Morris Jastrow’s classical dictionary of rabbinic Aramaic, and along with it, presumably, the sudra’s supposed function of wiping away perspiration, Rashi’s description does seem to be of a keffiyeh cloth.
And now for the passage in P’sahim. It occurs in a discussion of imps and demons (whose existence the rabbis of the talmudic period did not doubt) in which a warning is issued against contact with sorb trees, where such creatures were believed to reside. Once, it is related in the name of the talmudic sage Rabbi Ashi, “A local officer who stood near a sorb tree outside of town was attacked by 60 demons that took possession of him. He went to consult a [young] rabbi who, not knowing that the demons in a sorb tree number 60, wrote him an amulet against just one. Before he knew it, he heard the demons inside him reveling and singing, ‘This young rabbi may wear the sudra, but he doesn’t even know the barukh.’”
By “the barukh,” early commentators on the Talmud observe, is meant the blessing from the morning prayer, “Blessed [barukh] art Thou, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who crowns Israel with glory [oter yisra’el b’tif’arah],” traditionally recited when donning a head covering. What the demons were cackling about, in other words, was that though the amulet writer was indeed a rabbi, he didn’t know the first thing about his job—from which we may deduce that the sudra was considered distinctive rabbinical garb in Rabbi Ashi’s time and place.
Rabbi Ashi’s time was 352–427 CE; his place was the Babylonian town of Sura, whose famed yeshiva he headed. Sura lay on the east bank of the lower Euphrates, some 80 kilometers south of present-day Baghdad and 90 kilometers north of Kufa, which was founded in 637, two centuries after Ashi’s death. Can we be reading here about a type of non-Bedouin, non-peasant keffiyeh—one that was, on the contrary, a sign of social prestige—that originated in the Kufa area? Can kuffiyeh once have designated a specific way of wearing a head cloth associated with this area, just as “frankfurter” designates a specific way of serving a sausage and “hamburger” a specific way of serving a meat patty, and only later come to refer to a keffiyeh in general?
Or not. The passage in P’sachim may be referring not to a keffiyeh but to a turban, which is also a piece of cloth wrapped around the head and which—unlike the keffiyeh—is known to have been worn as a badge of office by rabbis in the Arab east, just as it is worn today by Muslim, and especially Shiite, clerics. (And, on ceremonial occasions, by the Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel.) Or else it might refer to a hybrid turban-keffiyeh of a type in which the end of the cloth is not tucked into the turban’s folds but dangles down over the neck. One might even speculate this was the original kuffiyeh, one that lacked an aqal and was held in place by its own tight wind. Unless some of those demons are still in the sorb tree, there’s no one to ask.
