The etrog: the citron at the heart of Sukkot

From a verse to a fruit

Leviticus 23:40 lists the fruit of hadar trees, palm branches, leafy boughs and willows of the brook, and commands rejoicing for seven days. The Babylonian Talmud asks which tree is meant and gives several answers. One is a tree whose wood tastes like its fruit, which it says is the etrog tree. Rabbi Abbahu rereads hadar as ha-dar, “that which dwells”, a fruit that stays on its tree from year to year. Ben Azzai connects the word with the Greek for water. [1][2]

Outside rabbinic literature, the earliest clear witness is Josephus in the first century CE, who describes worshippers at the festival carrying myrtle, willow and a palm bough “with the addition of the pome citron.” The palynologist Dafna Langgut notes that the Bible itself never mentions the citron and that its link to Leviticus is attested only from the first century CE. [11][15]

A fruit from the east

Botanists count the citron among the three ancestral citrus species, with the pomelo and the mandarin; most other citrus fruits descend from crosses among them. Langgut places its origin in eastern India and southern China and describes it as the first citrus to travel west, apparently through Persia and the southern Levant. In the fourth century BCE the Greek writer Theophrastus called it the “Median” or “Persian apple” and remarked that it was fragrant but not eaten. [19][18][17][20]

The earliest physical evidence in the region comes from Ramat Rahel, just south of Jerusalem. Citron pollen was found preserved in the plaster of a pool in a royal garden of the Persian period, dated to the fifth to fourth centuries BCE. At first it was an exotic plant of splendid gardens; it reached the gardens of wealthy Romans about two centuries later. [16][19][17]

Coins, letters and mosaics

By the late Second Temple period the etrog was part of public worship, and sometimes of public protest. The Mishnah tells of a priest who poured the festival’s water libation over his feet instead of on the altar, and of the crowd pelting him with their etrogs; the Talmud calls him a Sadducee. Josephus tells of a crowd that pelted the Hasmonean king and high priest Alexander Jannaeus with citrons as he stood at the altar at Sukkot, and says that he had about six thousand of them killed in response. [6][4][12]

The fruit then became an emblem of national hope. Bronze coins of the fourth year of the revolt against Rome, 69 CE, show a lulav flanked by two etrogs on one side and, on the other, a chalice with the words “For the redemption of Zion.” Silver coins of the Bar Kokhba revolt, 132 to 135 CE, pair the façade of the Temple with the lulav and etrog. An Aramaic letter written in Bar Kokhba’s name and found in 1960 in a cave near the Dead Sea orders palm branches and citrons sent to his camp for the festival. [21][22][23]

In late antiquity the etrog joined the menorah, the shofar and the incense shovel in a recognisable set of Jewish symbols. The fourth-century mosaic floor of the Hammat Tiberias synagogue shows a lulav and an etrog beneath each of its two menorahs, and the sixth-century mosaic at Beth Alpha places a lulav and etrog to either side of the Ark. The etrog also appears on fourth-century Jewish gold glass, probably from Rome, and in the paintings of a Jewish catacomb at Villa Torlonia. [24][25][26][27]

What makes an etrog fit to use

The Mishnah sets out the basic rules. A stolen or dried-up etrog is invalid, as is one from a tree used for idolatry or from a tree in its first three years (orlah). So is an etrog whose surface is mostly covered by blemishes, whose pitam (the small tip at the top) has been removed, or which has been peeled, split, or pierced so that some of it is missing. The rabbis disagreed about the minimum size: Rabbi Meir said a walnut and Rabbi Judah an egg. [5]

The pitam is not always required. Rabbi Moses Isserles, in his sixteenth-century gloss on the Shulchan Arukh, rules that an etrog that never had one is valid, and a modern halakhic guide adds that such fruit is fully kosher because that is how it grows. What disqualifies is a pitam that grew and was then broken off entirely. [7][28][31]

Grafting is the later question. Commercial citrus is usually grafted onto a hardier rootstock, but the prevailing ruling is that an etrog from a grafted tree is invalid. Authorities give several reasons: the fruit may count as a different species or as an incomplete etrog, or using it may involve a transgression, though some, such as Rabbi Yehuda Amital, have argued that it can be used. Buyers rely on rabbinic certification that the fruit comes from inspected, ungrafted trees. [28][29][46][31]

How it is held, and what it is said to mean

The Talmud rules that the bound lulav is held in the right hand and the etrog in the left. On each day of Sukkot except Shabbat, a blessing is said over the lulav, and the four kinds are brought together and waved in six directions. The order of directions differs between communities. [3][32][33]

Since a blessing should come before the act it accompanies, the Shulchan Arukh suggests saying it before picking up the etrog, or else holding the etrog upside down until the blessing is finished. Some communities follow the second custom, holding the etrog with its tip down and then turning it upright. Chabad’s guide instead has the blessing said over the lulav before the etrog is lifted. [8][34][33][32]

The midrash Leviticus Rabbah reads the four kinds as four kinds of people. The etrog has both taste and fragrance, like Jews who have both Torah learning and good deeds; the willow, with neither, stands for those who have neither, and all are bound together so that each atones for the others. Another passage compares the etrog to the human heart. [9][10]

Choosing a beautiful etrog

Jewish tradition values hiddur mitzvah, beautifying a commandment, and the Talmud suggests spending up to a third more for it. For the etrog, beauty is part of the commandment itself, since the Torah speaks of the fruit of hadar trees, often understood as beautiful trees. Buyers examine the upper part of the fruit most closely: Chabad’s guide says that in the top third even one bubble or noticeable area of discoloration makes the fruit invalid. It also recommends a somewhat oblong, bumpy fruit with a yellow skin that has not yet turned brown. [37][38][31][30]

These standards make the best fruit scarce. One Israeli grower told a reporter in 2023 that about half his fruit is thrown out on the spot and another 20 to 30 percent later. Prices range widely: a JNS report for Sukkot 2026 gave more than 200 to 300 shekels for an etrog in Hasidic communities and 250 to 1,000 shekels for a Moroccan one, and said complete sets start at about $50. [40][41]

Where etrogim come from

Supply has long been a political matter. In 1744 the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa demanded an annual tax of 40,000 florins from the Jews of Bohemia for importing etrogim. Until the end of the nineteenth century the island of Corfu was the main source for European Jewry. In 1875 Rabbi Isaac Elhanan Spektor of Kovno ruled against Corfu etrogim because of their exorbitant price, and after the anti-Jewish riots that followed a blood libel on Corfu in 1891, a boycott movement turned buyers toward etrogim from Palestine, promoted by supporters of the new Jewish agricultural colonies. [14][13][42][43][44]

Several distinct traditions survive. Calabrian etrogim, from the Riviera dei Cedri on Italy’s southern coast, are preferred by Chabad and others; they are also called Yanover, from the Yiddish name for Genoa, and rabbis travel there each summer to select fruit. The large Yemenite etrog has almost no juicy flesh and usually lacks a pitam. Moroccan etrogim are grown by Berber-speaking farmers in villages of the Atlas mountains around Agadir, and about 600,000 were exported in 2022, according to a local Jewish businessman who runs an etrog farm. Since Corfu’s decline, fruit from the Land of Israel has dominated the international market; in 2014 Israel’s agriculture ministry put the country’s crop at about a million a year, a third of it exported. [35][45][46][13][48][49][44][47]

Silver boxes, jam and cloves

Because the fruit is fragile, it is kept in a protective case when not in use. Containers made specifically for the etrog are known from the late seventeenth century; some of the earliest used for it were made for other purposes, such as the costly silver boxes in which the wealthy kept sugar and tea, and some later boxes imitate the ribbed fruit itself. Museums hold many examples, such as a silver-gilt container by Johann Schlatter made in Vienna in 1759, now at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. [38][39]

Once Sukkot ends the etrog is no longer needed for the commandment, and customs grow around what is left. Some boil it with sugar into jam or fry it to eat on Tu BiShvat, the new year of trees. Others stud it with cloves and use it as fragrant spice for Havdalah at the end of Shabbat. Anyone planning to eat one should bear in mind how the crop is grown: a 2014 NPR report on an Israeli orchard said the trees must be sprayed with pesticides twice a day. [50][36][51][47]

One folk custom ties the fruit to childbirth. On Hoshana Rabbah, the last day of Sukkot, some pregnant women would bite off the etrog’s pitam and recite a prayer for an easy birth. The earliest known text describing the practice appears in the Yiddish Tsenah Ur’enah, in its earliest surviving edition, of 1622. [52][50]

Continue exploring

Holymap’s page on Sukkot covers the festival around the etrog: the sukkah, the water-drawing celebration of Temple times and the differences in observance between Israel and the diaspora. The etrog is a small fruit with a long history, from a Persian garden through revolt coins and synagogue floors to the market stalls of today.