Indiana Jones and the lost snail

Professor Zohar Amar spends his days cracking the material culture of antiquity. Yes, “cracking” in the literal sense. Recently, he sat in a filthy port in Milan, cracking 5,000 snails from the Adriatic Sea with his bare hands, finally discovering the ancient purple dye. He is also the one who cracked, very gently, the carcass of a giraffe embryo and reached an unequivocal conclusion about its fitness to eat under the laws of kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws. He cracked the riddle of the persimmon oil, the secret recipe for the showbread in the Temple, several practical healing secrets of ancient times, and an extremely long list of research enigmas that he solved using a pair of walking shoes and a valid passport.

“Smell this,” he says as he sprays perfume on me from one of his hundreds of jars. The scent is savage and heavy, the sweat of a wild beast. Amar distilled it from a rare animal known as the musk deer. This may be the biblical myrrh. The fragrance reminds me slightly of my fabric softener, which has “fragrance of musk” written on the bottle.

Afterward, he holds out a jar of perfume that was produced from a whale. I make my way gingerly toward this surprisingly sweet-smelling perfume through the tiny workroom in his home in Neve Tzuf, passing medieval zoology texts written in Arabic and certificates in ancient Syriac, copies of Latin manuscripts and crumbling volumes written in Greek. I try to hold my notebook and pen straight inside the time tunnel inside this room, an ancient enchanted forest that contains a dried octopus from Zanzibar, hippopotamus teeth, jars full of seeds and powders and oils and solutions, deer bones, buffalo skulls, a stuffed starred agama lizard, dozens of dried scorpions, long rams’ horns, an enormous shark jaw, conch shells, colorful giraffe hides, semi-precious stones of the sort used on the High Priest’s breastplate, and a bundle of garlic.

And a man with a mustache and skullcap who never gets bored.

If what interests the historical researcher are the news headlines of the past -- wars, upheavals, the lives of rulers -- Zohar Amar studies the shopping and fashion pages. When one of our foremothers got dressed and put on perfume in her tent, she never imagined that 3,000 years later, a professor from Bar-Ilan University fascinated by her day-to-day life would be waiting for her, test tube in hand. With a great deal of humility and childlike curiosity, he tries to recreate the technology that enabled the Carrie Bradshaw of ancient Sodom to go out of her house: makeup and perfume, textile dyes, incense, spices and painkillers -- a pharmacy of antiquity.

This is no mad scientist with bills from a coffee shop on Abarbanel Street. This man has served as the director of the Tel Aviv Botanical Gardens, the head of the Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology Department at Bar-Ilan University, the author of some 20 significant works, and the man behind dozens of studies in various scientific fields in cooperation with colleges here and abroad. (It would be appropriate to mention them by name, and he also asks this with all his heart, but there is simply not enough paper.)

He is a religious man. In many of his studies, he harnesses science for the purpose of understanding Jewish subjects and to influence, often in original and daring ways, Jewish legal discourse. “I do not try to make things match up in a contrived way, but it seems that the tension between science and Torah is an imaginary conflict. The Torah is a Torah of life.”

Six years ago, a swarm of locusts invaded the Arava region. An ordinary person would probably have taken a camera along. Professor Amar took along a frying pan. With a bus full of his students, he set out after the clouds of insects down south. They stopped at Hatzeva, lit the gas stove and feasted on locusts fried in canola oil. Of course, that was just the beginning. Later on, Amar wanted to prove that the red deer, a European game animal, was kosher. The Agriculture Ministry began preparations to bring in herds of them and businesspeople smelled the potential, but then a rabbinic dispute began and the deer went back on the list of non-kosher animals. He shows me the skull of a deer -- for which he has a legal permit, as he does for all of his other findings -- and points to a small tooth on the upper jaw. This tiny crack puts in doubt the red deer’s ability to chew its cud. “We failed with the red deer,” he says, sighing, “so we were more organized with the buffalo.”

He interviewed hundreds of elderly people in various communities about the tradition of kosher slaughter for the buffalo. “The subject of the kashrut of animals is a race against time because we have to rely on vanishing traditions,” he explains. Amar called upon Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar to see a herd of buffalo in the Hula Valley, feel the jaws of a small buffalo and ascertain, with his own hands, the lack of teeth in its upper jaw. The rabbi took off his ceremonial robe and waded into the mud, but the little buffalo refused to open its mouth. Finally, the rabbi gave up and went back, tired and empty-handed. The next morning, Amar showed up at Rabbi Amar’s office, dragging a plastic box containing the heads of three slaughtered buffalo. The matter was solved. If you ever find yourself with a craving for some fresh buffalo, you should know that it now has the stamp of approval from the office of the Sephardi chief rabbi.

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“Do you eat giraffe, too-” I ask him, almost shouting. Recently, he analyzed a giraffe embryo (a small one, about 1.80 meters) that its mother had miscarried, and later on also analyzed the mother (5 meters), who died of natural causes. All doubt was removed: Giraffes are kosher, and the star of kashrut, Rabbi Shlomo Mahfoud, declared a giraffe was “a cow with unique proportions.” The reason that no giraffes have landed on Zohar Amar’s plate is that he has never found one at the supermarket. “Practically speaking, you can’t get a giraffe for slaughter. Even in Africa, the nature protection laws are very tough.”

Do you buy perfume in a duty-free shop? Not if your name is Professor Zohar Amar. Persimmon perfume, the most expensive liquid in antiquity, is one of the most fragrant mysteries in the world of research. Its traces in the Land of Israel vanished at the end of the Second Temple period and it was recently seen as a wild plant in the sands of Yemen. Amar was a major partner in attempts to bring the exiled plant back home. He planted seeds from Saudi Arabia that he obtained from a secret mediator, tried to raise seedlings from Germany, met in Ethiopia with the top expert in local botany, and looked for the plant along the Somalia-Eritrea border, which shifts due to the wars there.

Now he has one in his garden. It looks like ordinary verbena. The tough part is how the exclusive perfume is produced from the plant. “Look very closely, because it’s going to disappear quickly,” he warns me a moment before he pierces one of the branches with a sharp razor, and sap with an amazing fragrance runs down like invisible dewdrops. It evaporates within 10 seconds. How was it gathered? What kind of oil was used a fixative to make sure that the fragrance did not vanish? Give Amar a year or two and you’ll be buying it off the department store shelf.

He is an indefatigable researcher who will not pass over, for example, what the Canaanites used as a painkiller. “If they fire me from Bar-Ilan, I’ll start a career as a holy man,” he says. Of course, he is joking. After he carried out research on medicinal materials of the ancient world and practical healing in the Middle Ages according to prescriptions that were found in the Cairo Geniza, he could be thought of as a witch doctor, “but I don’t claim that everything found in ancient medicine is any better than that of Western medicine.” As part of a study of the medicinal herbs of Ethiopian Jewry, he found himself almost running after Ethiopians in the street. “These things have to be saved. Western culture is eradicating traditions wholesale. Within five years in Israel, hundreds of years of traditions disappear.”

I would tell him to relax if I did not realize how vitally important he was to us. He is the one who recreated the Temple showbread by studying baking techniques from ancient Greek and Roman sources. He disproved the identity of the stones that New Age stores sell as the stones that were used in the High Priest’s breastplate. He cut open a swordfish in an Italian fish market as part of the rabbinical sword-dance over its kashrut. He identified pigments in ancient textiles. He hunted manuscripts in libraries all over the world. He took an ethno-pharmacological survey in markets that specialize in medicinal materials in Jordan and Morocco. He investigated the ingredients of the biblical incense. He recreated the production of fabric from Sodom. He studied spices in the ancient world during a journey to Zanzibar. Using laboratory techniques, he identified the raw materials from which paper was made during the Middle Ages. “It’s much harder to correct errors after they have become entrenched. Today’s lily is not the lily of the Bible. This is part of education,” he says, shrugging apologetically as he waters the myrrh and frankincense plants in his yard.

The Gap’s collection this past summer included a rainbow of colors starting with sky blue, going on to orange and finishing with red. Color options in the ancient world were similar. The garments of royalty, the priesthood and prostitutes were dyed in one of the three exclusive colors: sky blue, purple and crimson. Later, we will get to that mischievous crimson-producing worm. Regarding the two former colors, Amar believes that they were produced from the same murex snail. “In Israel, murex snails are protected. Since I needed a lot of them, I went to Milan,” he said. Five thousand murex snails were brought in using special refrigerators. Amar removed the subcutaneous dye glands of each of them, one by one, while they were still alive. After experimenting with fleeces that he dyed, with natural additives that he copied from recipes from ancient Greek writings, he discovered that it was true: Exposure to the sun resulted in the production of both blue and crimson-purple.

“There is a law in Jewish tradition that people with dyed hands may not lift their hands to recite the priestly blessing over others, but in a village where everyone’s hands are dyed, they may do so. I looked at my hands after dealing with the snails, and suddenly I understood this subject. My hands were completely purple. You cannot understand the sources without getting out of the study hall. A yeshiva student who recites the section about the incense every day at morning prayers but does not know the botanical ingredients of the incense is missing out. I want my grandchild to understand what this is about.”

Through all his journeys, research and discoveries, he always had, deep inside him, one particular dream that ran like a crimson thread through all he did: the secret of the crimson-producing worm. In ancient times, the eggs of the traditional insect known as the “kenimah,” hidden inside her body, produced the rare orange dye that colored some of the fabrics in the Temple, that Josephus referred to as “the color of fire.” Some researchers claimed that this insect, a type of aphid, was extinct, while others claimed that it had never existed in the Land of Israel but had been imported from across the sea. Without even blinking, Amar set out to find out.

A meticulous survey that lasted for four years and went through Turkey, Europe and the Middle East, ended fruitlessly. Disappointed and exhausted, he returned home. He will never forget that afternoon in his yard. On an oak tree, the kind that grows in every forest here, five steps from his enchanted workroom, sat the crimson-producing worm, the greenfly aphid. In the yard of his home in Neve Tzuf. Of all the places on earth.

Amar breaks off a piece of dried sap from a frankincense tree. “There’s a lot more to crack,” he says, nodding energetically as I remind him of another enigma that ought to keep this Indiana Jones awake at night: the shamir worm of antiquity. Right now, he is busy doing research on ancient wine in the Land of Israel, completing an encyclopedia of flora and fauna in Jewish sources, and pondering the establishment of a visitors’ center that will contain exhibits about the material culture of the Land of Israel in antiquity. “My wife thinks that I was born in 1960 by mistake, that I should have been born during the time of the Mishnah. My goal is not to eat giraffes or live as our ancestors did. If there are things that can be adopted, well and good. The persimmon will be a wonderful perfume, but there are dangerous boundaries that should never be crossed. We must never live in the past.”

One more spray of the African perfume (it comes from an animal -- don’t ask) and I go, leaving him in the enchanted workroom. Why are you resting now? he is doubtless asking himself. There are more biblical mysteries to solve. For him, that is the way things are.

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