Among the things we must not start on Friday afternoons, the eve of Shabbat, are haircuts. The Mishnah makes this clear:
שבת ט, ב
לֹא יֵשֵׁב אָדָם לִפְנֵי הַסַּפָּר סָמוּךְ לַמִּנְחָה עַד שֶׁיִּתְפַּלֵּל
A person may not sit before the barber adjacent to the time of mincha until he recites the afternoon prayer.
As Rashi points out, this ruling also applies to the other days of the week, when we may also not start complex acts that may cause us to forget our afternoon prayers. But this ruling is much more important with regard to Friday afternoons, because we might become so involved in the process that we could forget that Shabbat had begun.
The Talmud explains that this ruling applies even when the hairdresser begins early in the afternoon, if it involves a lengthy and complex hairstyling called “a haircut of Ben Elasah”:
לְעוֹלָם סָמוּךְ לְמִנְחָה גְּדוֹלָה — וּבְתִסְפּוֹרֶת בֶּן אֶלְעָשָׂה
According to Rashi, Ben Elasah was the son-in-law of the editor of the Mishnah, Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi. Elsewhere, the Talmud notes that these kind of hairstyles meant a great deal to Ben Elasah:
נדרים נא, ב
מאי בן אלעשה דתניא לא לחנם פיזר בן אלעשה את מעותיו אלא להראות בהן תספורת של כ"ג
דכתיב (יחזקאל מד, כ) כסום יכסמו את ראשיהם תנא כעין לולינית מאי לולינית א"ר יהודה תספרתא יחידתא היכי דמי אמר רבא ראשו של זה בצד עיקרו של זה והיינו תספורת של כהן גדול
It is taught in a braita: Ben Elaah did not spend his money on his special haircut for nothing. Rather, he spent it to show others what the haircut of a High Priest looked like.
As it is written with regard to the priests: “They shall poll their heads” (Ezekiel 44:20), and it is taught in a baraita: This haircut is like a luleyanit. The Gemara asks: What is a luleyanit? Rav Yehuda said: It is a unique haircut. The Gemara asks: What is this haircut like? Rava said: The edge of this shaft of hair is by the roots of that shaft of hair. The hair is cut so that it does not overlap. And this is the haircut of a High Priest, for which ben Elasah paid a large sum.
The hairstyle called luleyanit has been translated as “Julian” or in the style of a roman official by the name of Julianus. As the independent scholar Eli Gurevich explains:
It is important to note that in the Hebrew/Aramaic text of the Talmud the word Julian is spelled Lulian (לולינית). It has been already pointed out by many scholars, including Marcus Jastrow in his dictionary, and by Alexander Kohut in Aruch Hashalem that Jews modified the Roman name Julianus and pronounced it Lulianus in a later time. This can be proven from the fact that the Jerusalem Talmud (Nedarim 3:2, Vilan Edition Daf 9a) in its vague description of the invasion of Persia and the Battle of Ctesiphon by the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate, in 363 CE, calls him King Lulianus, and so from there we know that Lulianus is defintiely Julianus, as well as Lulian is definitely Julian.
All of which leaves the reader to wonder, just what did that haircut actually look like?
“Alexander the Great, whose famous anastole, i.e., ascending locks from a central parting, became the model for the Hellenistic kings.”
Greek and Roman Hairstyles Revealed
To help figure this out let’s turn to a helpful 2005 paper published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology titled Hairstyles in the Arts of Greek and Roman Antiquity. It turns out that thanks to lots of pottery shards and terracotta head that survived from this period, we can reconstruct the hairstyles of the day. For example, “Nero’s curls were corrugated with crimping tongs and carefully piled on each other in several rows.” The central greek god Zeus “typically has his hair aligned in an upward, followed by a downward sweep, which then radiates outward, forming a corona of individual strands. Asclepius, the healing god, is the only god to wear his hair similar to Zeus! He also appears as a mature bearded man, but with a milder expression…. Hera, Zeus’ wife and of royal stature, had shiny, perfumed locks covered by a veil. Athena, the city protectress, wore a helmet, with fine curls protruding from underneath.”
Eli Gurevich notes that from today’s page of Talmud and the source from Nedarim, we can deduce four points about the Ben Elasah hairstyle:
It was called Julian Style.
It was very expensive.
It took a few hours (at least two) to cut.
The hairstyle was shaped in such a way that the tip of one lock of hair touched the root of the next.
This may have been the very haircut of the Emperor Nero, whose hair we have already noted, appears to have been cut and layered vertically, with the tip of one curl touching the root of the curl below it.
A bust of Bust of Nero from the Musei Capitolini, in Rome. Notice how the bottom row of his hair on the forehead comes out directly from the tips of row above it. Just like the cut of Ben Elasha.
Another example of this hairstyle is from a fresco of the Roman Emperor Domitian (c51-96 CE). His hair is clearly shown as being layered, again with the tips of the top layer touching the roots of the layer below it. Like this:
Domitian’s hairstyle on the Palazzo Della Cancelleria.
Gurevich concludes that
this hairstyle lasted for about a decade from about 64-73 CE, during the reigns of Nero and Vespasian, coinciding with the last years of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, where it was most probably was worn by the High Priest, who tried to copy the Roman Emperor, who in turn copied a street performer. How ironic life can be.
So the High Priest of the Temple in Jerusalem had his hair cut to mimic the trendy style of his day. It’s disappointing, given how much effort we put into protecting our children from the influence of the surrounding culture of the celebrity. Just make sure they don’t read this.
