The modern career of the symbol is compressed into a single lifetime and includes both its worst and its most public uses.
At the First Zionist Congress in 1897 the hexagram was placed at the centre of the movement's flag, on a design of blue stripes on white recalling the prayer shawl, proposed by David Wolffsohn. By then it was already the common emblem of European Jewish communities, so the choice was a recognition of established usage rather than an innovation.
From 1939, following the German invasion of Poland, occupying authorities required Jews to wear identifying marks. Practice varied by region before a decree of 1 September 1941, signed by Reinhard Heydrich, imposed the yellow star bearing the word Jude across the Reich. The same shape that the communities had adopted for themselves was turned into an instrument of segregation and, subsequently, of selection for murder. This is not an ambiguity of interpretation to be balanced against others; the ancient usage and the twentieth-century imposition are separate facts and both belong in any honest account.
On 28 October 1948 the flag of the new state of Israel was adopted, carrying the design substantially as proposed in 1897.
The consequence is that a single figure now carries, simultaneously, a medieval municipal charter, a nineteenth-century communal badge, a genocidal marker and a national flag. Readers encountering it in any one of those registers should be aware of the others.