COTTON

COTTON, plant mentioned under the name karpas (derived from the Sanskrit karpasa) in the Book of Esther (1:6) in the description of the magnificent ornamentation of Ahasuerus' palace. In the Mishnah cotton is called ẓemer gefen ("vine wool") as its leaves resemble those of the vine (gefen). Mentioned several times in rabbinic literature, it was apparently an important crop. This is attested by the Greek scholar Pausanias, who in the second century C.E. wrote (5:5) that "the only Greek country that raises cotton is Elea. There it is delicate, like the cotton that grows in Judea, but less yellow." Kutnah, the modern Hebrew term for cotton, is derived, as is "cotton" itself, from the Arabic. In talmudic Hebrew and in Aramaic, however, its meaning is "flax" (cf. Shab. 110b). It is evident from the Mishnah (Kil. 7:2) that the cotton grown in Ereẓ Israel was a perennial, probably the species Gossypium arboreum. The annual or biannual species, Gossypium herbaceum, of Indian origin, began to be cultivated at a later date. Varieties of American cotton, though introduced to Israel only in the late 1950s, are grown extensively, and constitute one of Israel's major crops. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Loew, Flora, 2 (1924), 235–43; J. Feliks, Olam ha-Ẓome'aḥ ha-Mikra'i (19682), 285–7. (Jehuda Feliks)