The Untold History of the Swastika and the Star of David

Two ancient symbols, misunderstood for millennia, reveal the hidden connections between Hinduism, Judaism, and the modern battle over identity and ideology.

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This is a guest essay by Ruth Vanita, the author of two novels and several books.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Six years ago, a small group of students, some of them Jews (ironically but predictably, they were anti-Zionist Jews), demanded that the swastika symbol be removed from decorative tiles on a 1924 building on the campus of a state university where I was a professor in the Humanities and South Asia programs.

The student council voted in favour of removal.

After a lengthy debate, in which I pointed out that the swastika predates Nazism by millennia and was placed on the building as a Hindu, Buddhist, and Native American symbol, not as a Nazi one, the university finally agreed to let the swastikas remain and to place a plaque near the building explaining their provenance. The local rabbi was in agreement with this solution.

In 2025, a new Canadian legislation, Bill C-9, proposed to ban certain hate symbols under the penal code. Bill C-9 was a response to the 600-percent increase in anti-Jewish attacks in Canada, as well as to attacks on Hindu temples there. Unfortunately, however, the bill proposed to ban the swastika among other symbols. Hindu organizations, allied with Jewish organizations, successfully campaigned to remove the term “swastika” from the bill. Hindus in Germany and other European countries have had to fight similar battles.

In the West, the six-pointed star (which Jews call the Star of David) and the swastika are often viewed as diametrically opposed to one another. This is because the swastika is commonly misunderstood as identical with the Nazi hakenkreuz (hooked cross), and the six-pointed star is wrongly viewed as only a Jewish symbol.

Both the six-pointed star and the swastika are ancient Hindu symbols. They also appear in the iconography of the other three Indic religions, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, which grew out of Hinduism.

In Hinduism, the six-pointed star, known as shatkona (literally, six angles) in Sanskrit, stands for the union of the divine masculine and feminine principles in every individual being and in all existence. This hexagram is formed of two triangles, the upward pointing one standing for Shiva (the masculine principle) and the downward pointing one standing for Shakti (literally female power).

Both symbols are also found in other ancient cultures that predate the Nazis by millennia; for example, the swastika in ancient Ireland, Greece, Rome, and in Native American cultures, and the six-pointed star in ancient Sumeria around 2500 BC.

The most ancient versions of the swastika are found in the 5,000-year-old Indus Valley cities in north India (some of these sites now in Pakistan), which are among the cradles of world civilization. Swastikas are found there on stone seals and on pottery. They signify well-being and good fortune. Some of them are on display in the National Museum, New Delhi.

The swastika remained in continuous use in most parts of India as an auspicious symbol. For example, archaeological excavations at the ancient site of Jhunsi, in Prayag, found a first-century stone seal with a swastika, which is now on display in the museum there. Prayag is an ancient city on the banks of the Yamuna River in north India, and is the site of the Kumbha Mela, the world’s largest Hindu pilgrimage gathering. (More than 660 million people attended the most recent one in 2025.) Mughal Emperor Akbar renamed the city after Allah, and it came to be called Allahabad. In 2018, it was officially renamed Prayagraj.

“Swastika” is a Sanskrit word. It breaks down into su (good) plus asti (it is), referring to universal well-being and the goodness of existence. It represents the endless cycle of time, the wheel of life, and the rebirth of all things. Both the swastika and the six-pointed star appear on yantras, sacred geometric designs associated with different Gods and Goddesses. They are employed as aids to meditation and as good fortunate talismans. Yantras may be inscribed on metal, paper or stone, or created in flower petals or coloured powders. Today, in India, you will see the swastika in shops, in temples and home shrines, and on the backs of vehicles.

Both the swastika and the six-pointed star, along with other symbols such as the trident, the lotus and the bindu (literally, dot) are widely used in Hindu worship and iconography and in Indian architecture more generally, including in buildings built by Muslim kings, where the architects were often Hindus (as were most of the workers).

When my grandfather, an orthodox Christian, had his house built in Delhi, six-pointed stars and three vertical lines (a long one between two short ones) appeared built into the stone mantelpieces and terrazzo floors. They were seen at first as decorative emblems but later recognized as Hindu symbols that the builders habitually used. The three lines represent Shiva’s trident, which also appears in India from the Indus Valley civilization onwards, as a symbol of triads — the three worlds, the three states of consciousness, the three divine principles, and so on.

The swastika was appropriated by the Nazis, tilted to an angle of 45 degrees and turned into the hakenkreuz (hooked cross). The black hakenkreuz appeared in 1920 on a flag designed by Adolf Hitler. It was enclosed in a white circle on a red square. Red symbolised the socialism and white the nationalism of National Socialism (for which Nazi is an abbreviation in German).

The Hindu swastika can be any colour, but it is often red or gold. It may be made of metal, stone or wood, embroidered or printed on fabric, or drawn in red powder. It often has a dot (bindu) within each of the four open squares created by the swastika. The dot symbolises many things, including cosmic oneness. The swastikas on the 1924 building have these dots and therefore are clearly Hindu symbols. The bindi worn by many Indian women on their foreheads is a form of the bindu.

After World War II, the swastika was banned in many Western countries. Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain communities in these countries have had to fight to be able to employ and display their ancient symbol.

Many well-meaning people genuinely do not know that the swastika is a Hindu symbol. They know it only as a Nazi symbol. However, some anti-Israel activists are opposed to the swastika for more sinister reasons. They want to use their anti-Nazism to establish their ideological purity. If they oppose the swastika, they think, then their “anti-Zionism” cannot possibly be antisemitism — even if it involves burning Israel’s flag with the Star of David on it, or obstructing entry to synagogues in the United States, UK, or Canada, or surrounding and yelling at identifiable Jews on the street.

A less obvious but powerful reason is that, today, almost anyone who hates Judaism also hates Hinduism, and vice versa.

New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is a famous example; he is constantly condemning Israel and India, the only two functioning pluralist democracies in their regions, while saying not a word against theocratic tyrannies that kill homosexuals and women and dissenters. There are hundreds of thousands like him at universities and in the arts, cinema, literary, and NGO worlds. Some of these activists claim that Hinduism cannot exist without caste discrimination and that it needs to be demolished. They would not mind banning the swastika even if they knew it was a Hindu symbol, just as they do not mind displaying posters that show the Star of David being thrown into a trash can.

The hatred of Hinduism and Judaism has deep historical roots. Hinduism and Judaism are the two ancient non-conversion religions that survived the onslaught of later religions which aimed to convert the whole world. Hence the particular animus against them. Purveyors of this hatred inherit it from the past, but are generally unaware of that past and would deny its impact because they are also unaware of how the past influences the present.

Many Christians today have developed an appreciation for Judaism and are supportive of Israel. A few, since the late-18th century, have also learnt to appreciate Hinduism. But there are still plenty of Christians and many atheists who view Hinduism as a primitive, backward religion while remaining largely ignorant of its philosophy, and many who view Judaism as an exclusivist, supremacist religion. Inevitably, numbers of Hindus and Jews also espouse these views, which they imbibe at school, in college, and from the media and from influencers.

Many anti-Israel activists believe that only white supremacists are capable of Jew-hatred. Non-white people are inherently incapable of it because they are, by definition, part of the “oppressed” class (unless they are Asians or Jews).

Last year, I wrote to a former friend, an artist who is Canadian and British, sending him a report on the astronomical increase in attacks on Jews in Canada, including at McGill University in Montreal, his alma mater. He responded with the statement that, many decades ago, McGill University had an admission quota for Jews, and “that was antisemitism.” Any attacks by leftists on Canadian Jews were and are “anti-Zionism.”

American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Anti-Israel activists seem incapable of holding in their minds the surprising fact that Jew-hatred now emanates from vast swathes of the mainstream Left.

Likewise, intelligent people can hold in their minds the fact that the six-pointed star is both a Jewish and a Hindu symbol, and that the swastika is an ancient and modern Hindu symbol even though it was misused by the Nazis.

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