The Star of David: History of a Symbol, in The Messianic Idea in Judaism

Gershom Scholem was the foundational modern scholar of Jewish mysticism, and this essay, collected in his The Messianic Idea in Judaism, is his standard scholarly account of how the hexagram, a widespread geometric figure with no distinctively Jewish origin, came to be adopted as a specifically Jewish emblem only in the medieval and early modern periods. Its authority rests on Scholem's own documentary tracing of the symbol's actual appearances rather than on the popular but false assumption of ancient biblical origin. Its limit is that the essay first appeared in German considerably earlier than this 1971 English collection, so a claim needing the argument's original publication context should note that the citation here reflects the later collected edition.