Besamim Box

The besamim box holds the fragrant spices used in Havdalah, the short ceremony recited at the close of the Sabbath and of major festivals that marks the transition back into ordinary time. Havdalah involves a cup of wine, a braided multi-wick candle, and the spice box in sequence: a blessing over wine, a blessing over the light of the candle, and a blessing over the spices, during which participants open the box and inhale its contents before the box is passed around so each person present can do the same. The spices are most traditionally cloves, though myrtle, cinnamon and various fragrant herbs are also used depending on community custom, and some communities use a fresh myrtle branch, hadas, directly rather than a filled container, a practice that predates the elaborate silver boxes that later became widespread.

The custom's stated purpose in rabbinic sources is consolation: the Sabbath is traditionally held to bring an additional soul, a heightened spiritual capacity, that departs as the Sabbath ends, and the sweetness of the spices is explained in later commentary as compensating the ordinary soul for that loss as the week's mundane demands resume. Havdalah itself is a required rite marking the Sabbath's formal end, and the besamim box, while not itself commanded by name in the earliest sources, became the customary vessel through which the spice blessing came to be performed across nearly all traditional Jewish communities.

Unlike many Jewish ceremonial objects whose form is functionally plain, the besamim box became, from the medieval period onward, one of the most decoratively elaborate items of Jewish domestic ritual silver, and its most recognizable traditional shape, a miniature tower with a spire, crenellations and small bells or flags, is thought by scholars to echo either contemporary church spires and civic towers in the European communities where the form developed, or Jerusalem's Second Temple architecture as medieval and early modern craftsmen imagined it; accounts differ and the form's exact origin remains debated among scholars of Jewish material culture. Fruit and flower shapes, particularly the pomegranate with its associations of fruitfulness and the Torah's six hundred and thirteen commandments, developed alongside the tower form as an alternative popular in Sephardi and some Central European communities, and filigree work, wood, and other materials also appear regionally.

Because Havdalah is a home ceremony performed weekly rather than a synagogue rite, the besamim box functioned historically as a family's own decorative investment in ritual practice in a way comparable to Sabbath candlesticks or a Seder plate, an object commissioned, inherited and sometimes given as a wedding or bar mitzvah gift, and surviving examples in Judaica collections range from simple turned wood pieces to elaborate silver towers by named European silversmiths, reflecting both the wealth of the commissioning family and the regional decorative traditions of the Jewish community that made or bought them.