In the 15th and 16th centuries, it was common for armorials to include the arms of notable people from around the known world both past and present. The fact that these people wouldn’t have actually had arms was a matter of small importance – anyone can be an armiger if you want it badly enough! So the practice of making up arms, and then attributing them to historical figures, was born.
Among the people often attributed arms were the Nine Worthies: Hector, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Joshua, David, Judah Maccabee, King Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon.
Attributed arms in different armorials only sometimes agreed with each other – it depended on the traditions of the time and place, who was copying who, and possibly the whim of the artist. The arms attributed to Judah Maccabee are an excellent demonstration of this.
Many depictions show a lion with the head of a man, wearing a Jew’s hat (images 1-4), sometimes just a lion with hat (images 5-6), or sometimes a hoofed animal of some sort in place of the lion (images 7-8).
Other depictions include ravens, anywhere from 1 to 3 (images 9-14), typically in black on gold, but there is a Portuguese example on a red field with brownish birds (image 14).
Occasionally one finds a griffin (images 15-17); note that images 15 and 16 are from the same armorials as images 4 and 3 respectively.
Other monsters that turns up are the dragon (images 18-19) and the basilisk (images 21-22). The arms in image 20 split the difference between a few, quartering griffins coloured like the dragons with martlets in place of ravens.
And sometimes, the arms don’t seem to have any connection to any other examples, seemingly made up for a single armorial (images 23-24).
Chag Sameach!
