The main thing about Torah ink is that it has to be black and it has to stay black. If it changes colour within fifty years, it wasn’t kosher to begin with.
Generally, Torah ink (דיו, in Hebrew, like dye) is what’s called an iron gall ink. Iron gall inks have been used in a great many places during a great many periods in history. They last a long, long time (think Dead Sea Scrolls kind of longevity). They have an unusual property among pigments in that they form chemical bonds with the parchment, which makes them symbolically very appropriate for use on Torahs. They are lightfast, the ingredients are cheap, and they are very indelible.
I don’t make my own; making good ink is hard, and I don’t have anyone willing to share their recipe. Anyway, it’s supposedly rather a pain, so I buy it in bottles, as shown. I don’t know if it’s also available in cake form – cake is much easier to transport, of course, and lasts longer, and is entirely traditional. I suspect perhaps not, because I have a feeling that buying ink like this is kind of For Dummies, and real hardcorers, the kind who would want cake ink, probably do make their own.
As you might expect, there are hundreds of different recipes for this kind of ink. However, they have some things in common, viz.: gallnuts, iron (II) in solution, something runny, and something sticky. The following descriptions are indebted to an excellent article by Cyntia Karnes.
Gall nuts
See the Wikipedia entry, but basically gallnuts (also called oak-apples) are a sort of arboreal tumour. A gall wasp comes along and lays its egg on the tree, and the tree goes “whoa” and swells up around the egg, into this little hard ball. The larva sits inside the swelling, munching away, and when it grows up it eats its way out and leaves the ball on the tree.
The balls have to be turned into a gloopy solution. This basically involves grinding, dissolving, and fermenting, and there are about a zillion ways of accomplishing this. Depending how it’s done, what you end up with is a liquid containing tannic acid, gallotannic acid, or gallic acid.
Iron (II) sulphate
This is where the iron comes from. It tends to be known as copperas, or coppervasser if you are the Mishnah Berurah, because iron sulphate and copper sulphate tended to come out of the ground together, but the copper isn’t important and the iron is.
This is why some recipes call for boiling up nails with the gallnuts. In an acidic solution, you get the right sorts of reactions. It’s apparently quite dangerous if you do it properly.
Runny and sticky
Fairly obviously, ink needs to be runny, but it also needs to stick to the page. Gum arabic, the sap of certain sorts of acacia tree, dried, ground, and dissolved in water, is commonly used as a binder in all sorts of things – ink, paint, food – and has been for centuries. It stops the ink being too runny, and helps stick it to the parchment when it dries.
Runny can be distilled water, but it can also be wine (including idolatrous wine, isn’t that interesting?) or vinegar, or presumably most other sorts of liquids. Vinegar helps to make the ink shiny, I am told (the gum arabic goes on shiny, and the vinegar helps keep it shiny, something like that), and indeed one of the shiniest brands of ink out there smells very vinegary indeed.
Chemistry
This is the fun bit. You mix all these things up, apply them to parchment, and let the oxygen in the air do its thing. It’s incredibly complicated and I don’t understand it all, but basically what goes on is: the gallotannic acid bit reacts with the parchment; part of it grabs onto the parchment, and part of it floats about. The floaty bit reacts with that iron solution, and iron (II) oxide gets precipitated. Iron (II) oxide is black.
Iron-gall ink made like this is pale grey in colour, and it gets darker when these reactions have had time to happen – about a day, I understand, but I’ve not tried it.
Incidentally, iron (II) oxide isn’t terribly stable, and over time it tends to turn into iron (III) oxide. This is the same stuff rust is made of, and it’s red. This is why letters in old Torahs go brown or orangey-red, as the black iron (II) compound oxidises to the red iron (III) one. They’re just starting to go brown in the picture here.
Soot
For whatever reason, the inks I buy have had stuff added to them so that they are black when they go on, and presumably they get blacker with oxygen, but not so’s you notice. I think this is soot – burnt olive oil is referenced in one source, or just burnt wood. They say specifically you mayn’t use burnt ivory (ivory-black), since elephants aren’t kosher.
Non-iron-gall inks
The rule is that the ink has to be black and permanent, and for the longest time the way to make permanent black ink that would work on a scroll (wouldn’t fall off when rolled) was like this. However, these days we have all manner of funky synthetic blacks that are entirely lightfast and suitably adherent and flexible. Can we use those?
The discussion then takes two paths.
a) The sources talk about using the ingredients for iron-gall ink, so this must be part of what kosher ink is, and to use kosher ink is a requirement from Sinai.
b) That is by way of description, it’s true that in those days they couldn’t make good ink without iron galls etc. But the point is that the ink be indelible and black; synthetics accomplish this just as well, and there are times when they’re a better tool, in some ways.
Interestingly, the right of the denominational spectrum seem to be more okay with b) than the left. The left wing and the ultra-right seem to share a visceral aversion to b), I’ve noticed.
To finish, here’s the Keset ha-Sofer, the scribes’ handbook, on basic laws pertaining to ink.
eBay Torah
Today’s parchment: a bit smooth and slippy, so I want to treat it with gum sanderac before writing. It’s a resin that you grind finely and rub into the parchment.
Grinding gum sandarac in a cereal bowl with a spoon is annoying, because so much of the gum sandarac sticks to the surface of the bowl that you end up with not very much left for yourself. It’s also not great for the bowl or the spoon.
So I have finally got around to buying a small lab-type pestle and mortar on ebay. It is rather amusing how I can get ALL THE SUPPLIES on eBay except for parchment and ink.
In a spirit of procrastination, I searched for “gallnuts” on ebay, to see if one could at least get the ingredients for ink. It altered the search to “walnuts,” which is not quite the same thing. “Gall nuts” it changed to “gill nets” (something to do with basketball).
“Oak galls” actually scored a result: OAK GALL INK 100% HAND MADE ECWS* WICCA. The description says it “darkens to a lovely, rich black/brown colour,” which doesn’t sound too good for us, since we can’t use brown ink.
The “Wicca” bit is viscerally more disturbing, although actually ink doesn’t HAVE to be made for the specific purpose of holy scrolls, and you CAN technically use idolatrous wine in it, so you COULD use Wicca-specific ink…but it looks like “Wicca” is just there to boost his search results, seems the maker is a historical re-enactment nerd.
No raw oak galls though, at least not today. I’ll do you a post sometime soon about how oak galls work in ink; it’s extremely interesting.
* English Civil War Society, apparently.
Bo and parchment
This week’s parsha contains the phrase “The Torah of God shall be in your mouth.”
Rabbinic tradition expands this concept: if we are to put the Torah in our mouths, it obviously cannot be made of things that we may not eat. So all animal products used on Torahs are made from the kosher species.
Quills – swan or goose feathers, turkey or duck, but no peacock or ostrich, eagle or crow. Glue – before synthetic glues, sticky stuff was mostly made from animal products, did you know that? – fish glue or cow-hoof glue, but not rabbit-skin glue or horse-hoof glue. Thread, which is made from tendons and glue – cow tendons, but not horse tendons. And parchment.
Torahs are written on parchment, in Hebrew klaf, קלף, (with a kuf). Proper parchment is really a type of leather – here’s a site which talks about how klaf is made. Nowadays most Torah parchment is made from cows, because the meat industry mostly deals with cows; older Torahs are often goat, one also sees deer and occasionally sheep; you could use bison, or chicken or turkey (but that would make very small pieces, and probably not be worth it). You could even use a giraffe, if you could find one.
And yes, I have this dream that one day someone will give me a dead giraffe and I will be able to write a Megillah on it, because you could fit the whole Megillah on one giraffe skin* and that would be unbelievably amazing so if you do know anyone with giraffes that are looking a bit tottery, do introduce me, or if you know a parchment-maker who’s up for an adventure, likewise.
I digress.
The one kosher animal you may not use is a fish. Klaf can be made out of fishskin, but the rabbinic sources say that it smells truly terrible, and for that reason you can’t use it for sacred scrolls – you don’t want your holy books to be stinky. This I like very much.
Goat parchment retains a distinctive goaty tang for a Very Long Time – goats are like that, very assertive – and you can usually identify a goat Torah because it smells like a goat. I like this too, it is a pleasing reminder that the scroll is not just a text, it is a physical object as well.
The picture at right is a piece of klaf held up against a window. You can see very clearly where the cow’s backbone was. Sometimes you can also see where the kidneys were, and if it had a fat bottom, sometimes you see that as well.
The two images at left are close-ups of the surface of klaf. The top picture is the front side, and the bottom picture is the back side. A word about that, first: if you’re processing parchment for a book, you make both sides the same, because you want to write on both sides of the page. But we only write on one side for our scrolls, so we only bother processing one side. That means that the front side is beautifully smooth and silky, almost like very very fine suede, but the back side is rougher and generally less “finished.”
You can see that the front side has lines on it. All Torahs have to be written with lines – it’s both a scribal aid, to keep the lines straight, and an halakhic (legal) requirement – i.e. even if you’re really good at keeping your lines straight, you still have to have lines. You probably didn’t notice them last time you read Torah, but they’re almost certainly there – you just don’t notice them because you’re looking at the letters.
The lines are scored in. One can score one’s own lines, with a ruler and some kind of scoring tool, such as an awl, or one can have the lines put in by the klafmachers (people who make the parchment). That’s very clever – they have a grid of wires, and they set the wires to the appropriate positions, and then they press it hard into the klaf, bang, and that makes lines. Sort of like when your socks leave a line pattern in your ankle, only the klaf is dead so they don’t fade away quickly like they do on ankles. Sometimes they will fade with extreme age, hence that “almost” above.
So anyway, on the front side of this particular piece you can also see the veins. The front side is generally bleached quite white and nice, but sometimes hints of animal-ness remain.
On the back side of this piece, you can see the hair pattern quite distinctly. The back will often keep some of the colour of the cow – greyish, brownish, whatever. Sometimes it’s splotchy. I think that’s rather lovely.
On most older scrolls, you won’t see the splotching, because for a long time it was the fashion to paint the backs with a substance called log, to make them uniformly white. This undoubtedly makes the backs of the scrolls attractively white and shiny, but unfortunately it also makes the scrolls extremely heavy. Log is some variety of sticky substance mixed with some variety of white powder, for instance boiled klaf and powdered chalk, so when coating, you’re effectively adding a layer of stone to the Torah, and of course that’s going to be heavy.
So these days we don’t coat the backs, we whiten the parchment by bleaching it, and any remaining discolouration serves to remind us of the complex relationship between animals and Jewish ritual worship. We generally get one sheet of parchment per cow, which works out to about sixty-five cows per Torah; that’s a lot of cows.
I have explored the ethical implications of this in two related blog posts, here and here, but the intertwined ethics of the contemporary meat industry and the Jewish community’s response have only just started to develop, so that particular aspect of Torah-making is one which will evolve in the direction we choose to take it.
* Technically you would have to cut it into sheets because you mayn’t have more than eight columns on a sheet, but that’s okay, I’m very good at tiny neat seams, so the pattern wouldn’t be too obviously disrupted.