Features
Moe Levy reminisces about the late Izzy Asper
By BERNIE BELLAN In March 2023 Moe Levy retired as executive director of the Asper Foundation, after 23 1/2 years in that position.
To that point Levy had been the only person to hold that position. In an April 2014 column about Levy I wrote about how he had come to fill that role. Prior to becoming executive director of the Asper Foundation, Levy had an extensive background in both the public and the private sectors.
After coming to Canada from his native Bombay, with a stop in Israel along the way, Levy entered university here, acquiring both a Bachelors and Masters in Business Administration from the University of Manitoba.
As I noted in my 2014 article, “Levy says that he began to work for the Manitoba government as soon as he graduated from university here. ‘I started off as a consultant, he explained. In two years ‘I created the first business incubator program in Canada,” he said with pride. ‘It was called ‘Enterprise Manitoba.’
“One of the programs that grew out of that particular initiative was something called ‘Business Start”,’which saw young entrepreneurs receive $5,000 grants from the government,’ ” Levy added.
Later, Levy was involved in various other enterprises, including joint ownership (with his brother) of what became two well known restaurants in Winnipeg (although both have since closed): Moskowitz and Moskowitz” (at the corner of Mayfair and Main), then Schmeckers (in St. James).
As I noted, however, Levy and his brother eventually sold the restaurants. “ ‘I couldn’t stand the restaurant business,’ Levy explained.”
In 1993, along with other investors, Moe bought a company known as the Northern Fur Exchange – which is where I first met Moe and his late wife Barbara (who was heavily involved in managing the company), when I went there to do a story about the business.
“But, by 1999, Levy says, he ‘wanted to take the company in a different direction than his partners, so he sold his interest to them and began to take stock of where he wanted to go
from there.
“ ‘I was 51 years old. I saw an ad in the Globe and Mail. It was an ad for a Jewish foundation (in Winnipeg). It didn’t say exactly which foundation. The ad was for an executive director for that foundation.’
“ ‘I threw my name into the hat,’ he said, without knowing that he was applying to be executive director of the Asper Foundation. Levy had met Izzy Asper only once before – in 1997, when Asper was in the process of endowing the Asper Centre for Entrepreneurship at the University of Manitoba. While the two men eventually forged a close relationship, it was as a result of Izzy’s sudden death in 2003 that Moe Levy found himself working hand-in-hand with Izzy’s daughter, Gail.
“While the Hebrew University was the major focus of the Asper family’s involvement in Israel for years, Gail paid tribute to the Asper Foundation’s work in Israel having ‘greatly expanded’ since Moe Levy became executive director of the Foundation,” I wrote in that 2014 article.
This past May 22, Moe Levy was the guest speaker for the Remis Luncheon group. His talk was advertised this way: “Moe will recount many compelling and funny stories of working with Izzy, one of Canada’s leading philanthropists and entrepreneurs. including the initial vision for the Canadian Mureum for Human Rights, the Asper School of Business, and many ground breaking projects in Winnipeg and Israel.”
Before he began his talk I asked Moe whether anything he was about to say would be off the record. He thought about it and replied that if he were going to say anything that he didn’t want recorded, he would let me know. As it was, he only thought of going off the record once – and even though he didn’t say: “This is off the record,” the fact that he even contemplated it led me not to repeat what he had said. (As you read on, you’ll find what it is that I withheld printing.)
Levy began by recalling sitting in Izzy Asper’s “beautiful back yard” one July evening in 2000. “He had just given away $50 million in the last 10 months. I started on September 1, 1999 and, in six months – $10 million to the Jewish Foundation, $10 million to the Winnipeg Foundation, $5 million to St. Boniface (Hospital), $5 million to the Hebrew U…”
“I had just come back from visiting the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. Izzy’s passion for human rights goes back to 1973 when he tabled the first Bill of Rights in the Manitoba Legislature.” (Asper was leader of the Manitoba Liberal Party at the time. I remember interviewing him for a paper I was writing about the Manitoba Liberal Party.)
During the course of that evening, Levy said, Izzy broached the idea of building a human rights museum in Winnipeg. “Later that night, around midnight,” Levy continued, “the phone rang.”
“It has to be Izzy,” Moe’s wife (the late) Barbara said.
Picking up the phone, Levy observed that Izzy told him, “You know that idea we spoke about tonight? After you left, I went downtown and I found the land that we’re going to build this museum on…It’s the same site on which the museum is located today,” Levy noted.
“But,” Levy added, Izzy also told him: “It’s Tuesday night. By Friday I want you to get the land – to tie up the land.”
“But Izzy,” Levy said he asked Asper, “there are a lot of levels of government to go through.”
“Don’t worry,” Asper replied, “Just tell the guys I sent you and it’ll get done.”
Levy told a story about the first trip he took with Asper. It was on Asper’s private jet; they were flying to Toronto. As you might expect, if you knew anything about Izzy Asper, “the cabin was full of smoke.”
The purpose of the meeting was to meet with “two of the most important Zionist figures” in the history of Israel, Levy said: “Smoky Simon – who created the Israel Air Force; and Harry Horowitz” (who had deep roots in right wing Zionist causes, according to information on the World Zionist Organization website). Simon and Horowitz wanted “to get a million dollars for the Menachem Begin Centre.” (Incidentally Levy also mentioned that Horowitz had once come to Winnipeg at Sid Halpern’s invitation. Sid Halpern is a regular attendee at the Remis Grooup Luncheons and Levy was looking right at him when he made that remark.)
(What I find so contradictory about Izzy Asper, however, was that, as a supposed staunch defender of human rights, his actions belied the notion that he was a champion of human rights. Anyone who admired Menachem Begin, for instance, could hardly have been considered an advocate for human rights – unless by human rights you meant the rights of certain groups, but not others. Oh well, we’re all full of contradictions, aren’t we?)
Levy went on to describe his “life with Izzy as nothing short of amazing, exhilirating, exciting, such as “putting together the jazz series…” Apparently, according to Levy, Asper would go so far as to choose the playlist for any jazz concert performer (sounds like Trump), but “come Monday morning,” Levy said, “I would receive a memo from Izzy saying they did not play the playlist in the order I gave it to them!”
Also, according to Levy, Asper couldn’t just sit back and enjoy the jazz concerts. Instead, he would head up to the top of the Berney Theatre (home to the Asper Jazz Series) and “count the empty seats.”
Again, in addition to complaining about artists not following his playlist instructions, Asper would complain about empty seats in that same Monday morning memo. Since the concert series was invariably sold out in those years, any empty seat signified a subscriber not having shown up.
In that same memo Asper would complain, for instance, that “there were 17 empty seats. Those subscribers could have given their seats to someone else!”
The subject of Holocaust education was also something that was very important to Asper, Levy noted. “Izzy recognized very early on that we needed to reach not the Jewish kids, but the non-Jewish kids, so that over the course of time we’ve sent 14-15,000 kids on trips to Washington” (to visit the Holocaust Museum).
Another memorable incident which had a connection to Asper and in which Levy played a part, albeit a minor one, was “the Concordia riot” of 2002.
“Concordia” (University, in Montreal) ” was a hotbed for antsemitism,” Levy explained.
Along with Rabbi (Joshua) Poupkow, who was from Montreal, Levy and Asper decided (in September 2002) that it would be a good idea “to bring BB Netanyahu to Montreal to speak at Concordia. He (Netanyahu) was in between jobs, after serving as Finance Minister (of Israel), then Prime Minister, he was on the speakers’ circuit. So, we paid him …to come for three lectures: Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg.” (Levy wasn’t sure whether the exact amount Netanyahu paid should be published, so I won’t repeat the figure here. Suffice to say, it was a huge amount.)
“We knew that” the pro-Palestinians had as their aim that, “if Netanyahu shows up, he’s never, ever going to speak at Concordia. So this became a major challenge for Izzy. ‘I’m going to bring him here (Montreal) and I’m going to make sure he speaks,’ ” Levy said was what Asper wanted to do.
“Of course, BB always wanted to fly on a private jet, so Izzy – who had other things to do, told me to take his private jet and go pick up BB.”
“So I flew on Izzy’s private jet to pick up BB. I’ll never forget – his wallet was about this thick (and here Levy gestured with his fingers showing how thick Netanyahu’s wallet was) and it was full of thousand dollar bills,” Levy observed.
“Anyway, by this time, the press is full of stories – about how students are going to stop him from speaking,” Levy said. “So we land – and Netanyahu has one security guy with him and, I’m not kidding, he was about this high (gesturing to show that he was very short). But he had a lot of guns on him. I don’t know how many.”
“There are about 20 police cars waiting for us and they wouldn’t let the security guy off the airplane with the guns, so we sat while” diplomats negotiated how many guns the guard might be allowed to take with him and, in the end, “he was allowed to take one gun with him.”
As one might have expected, there was a huge crowd of demonstrators surrounding the hotel where Netanyahu was staying (the Ritz-Carlton).
Netanyahu though, was determined to speak at Concordia. However, his “security guy got on the phone with the Mossad in Israel and they said there was no frigging way they were going to let him speak. So his security guy told him he’s not going anywhere.
“But BB, all of a sudden, decides he wants a haircut. Someone tells him there’s an Arab barber in the basement. He was asked whether he was okay with that?”
He answered, “absolutely.”
Levy described the ensuing scene: There’s BB sitting in a chair, with this “Arab guy giving him a haircut,” while BB’s security guy has his hand resting over his jacket where his gun is – ready to spring into action if needed.
The upshot was that BB “was not allowed to speak.” A riot did take place at the Sir George Williams campus of Concordia University. Levy noted that there were two documentaries made about the riot, (one by the National Film Board, titled “Dicordia,” and the other by filmmaker Martin Himel, titled “Confrontation at Concordia.”)
Another story Levy told was about a meeting held between Asper and then-Prime Minister Jean Chretien to discuss federal funding for the Human Rights Museum. (Levy says the meeting was held at the Prime Minister’s residence in Ottawa, but every other source that I was able to check referred to a meeting at Izzy Asper’s Palm Beach residence, in 2001. Perhaps there were two meetings.)
In either event, Levy said that, as the only other person in the room during that meeting, he was fascinated with the notion that the most powerful man in Canada at the time, Jean Chretien – according to Maclean’s Magazine, was meeting with the second most powerful man, Izzy Asper, again – according to Maclean’s Magazine,
As Levy described it, “there’s these two guys, arguing over how much money” the federal goverment would be willing to commit to the building of the human rights museum. “There was something explicit going on between these two guys. I thought: ‘You two guys use that kind of language with each other?’ “
Asper always liked to dream, Levy noted. For example, where the skating rink now sits on the Asper Campus, “he wanted to build a 500 seat concert hall,” Levy said.
He told another story about a trip Izzy and Gail Asper took one day in 1999 to Steinbach, where they were supposed to meet with Chuck Loewen of Loewen Windows. The purpose was to hit up Loewen for a contribution to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, which was still only a dream that Izzy wanted to bring to fruition at that point. Although one of Canada’s most successful businessmen by then – perhaps actually the most successful at that time, Izzy was not above doing the grunt work that was indispensable to raising enough money for the museum project – so that eventually the idea was that with enough privately donated money, it would leverage the federal government into contributing to the project as well.
Levy said that, while sitting in his oiffice, he got a call from Gail, who said, “Moe, we’re at Marion and Lagimodiere. How do we get to Steinbach?” It turned out they were in the wrong lane, but eventually, after much explaining which way to go, Izzy and Gail did make it to Steinbach, Levy observed.
Levy recalled the say he heard the news that Izzy had suffered a massive heart attack – and had died. “It was October 7, 2003, and we were on our way to Vancouver to launch an international architectural competition” for the design of the new museum.
Izzy Asper’s funeral was one of the largest ever held in Winnipeg. It attracted former prime ministers, the then-Prime Minister (Chretien), and a host of dignitaries from all walks of life. The day that Izzy died, Levy added, he was supposed to have received an honourary Indigenous title from Manitoba Grand Chief Phil Fontaine, which, translated into English, Levy explained, was “He who walks among the stars.”
Levy said: “What can I say about Izzy except that he was charismatic, a raconteur, bon vivant, had a great sense of humour, was an entertainer…he lived a hundred lives.”
Later in his talk, Levy added this about Izzy Asper: “He was the kind of guy who made you think you could accomplish anything. He made you sit there – and imagine and, before you knew it, you were doing things well beyond what you thought was your own capacity.”
In describing the effort that went into fundraising for the museum, Levy noted that “When you think about it, 75% of the money privately raised came from this little city (Winnipeg) – $115 million.” That fact was pivotal in then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s coming forward with a major contribution from the federal government: $100 million plus $21.7 million annually for operating costs.
Turning to Izzy Asper’s “passion for Israel,” Levy described Izzy’s support for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, saying that Izzy was determined to undertake the human rights museum project without sacrificing any of his commitment to the State of Israel.
Levy noted that “in a month the Hebrew University is going to celebrate its hundredth anniversary. Who was there (at its founding)? Einstein, Freud, Buber – the greatest minds that ever lived,” he suggested.
Features
Building Credit in College for Future Real Estate Deals
Most college students aren’t thinking about mortgages. But the students who buy their first investment property at 25 or 27 started building credit at 19 or 20. The two are directly connected.
Real estate is a game of capital access. Lenders don’t care how motivated you are – they care what your FICO score says. A 760+ score gets you prime mortgage rates. A 620 gets you higher interest and fewer options. The difference in monthly payments over a 30-year mortgage can be tens of thousands of dollars.
The window you have in college to build credit without major financial pressure is one of the most underused advantages Jewish students have.
Credit Foundations: Where To Start
Your credit score is built from five factors. Payment history makes up 35% – the largest single component. Credit utilization (how much of your available credit you’re using) accounts for 30%. Length of credit history, credit mix, and new inquiries cover the rest.
For most students, the first practical step is a secured credit card or a student credit card. Secured cards require a deposit that becomes your credit limit – typically $200-$500. They report to all three major bureaus and build history the same way unsecured cards do.
The rules are simple but require consistency. Pay the full balance every month. Keep utilization below 30% of your limit. Don’t apply for multiple cards in a short period. These habits compound over years – a student who starts at 18 has 7 years of credit history by the time they’re ready for a first mortgage.
One underused option: ask a parent or family member to add you as an authorized user on an older card with a clean payment history. You don’t need to use the card. The account’s age and payment history get added to your credit file immediately.
Researching Investment Options During Studies
Business, economics, and finance students regularly analyze real estate markets as part of their dissertation. That work isn’t just academic – it’s actual market research that doubles as preparation for real investing decisions.
However, balancing dataheavy analysis, market research, and exams often leads to extreme burnout. To survive the final semester, many students look for external support. Some of them use EduBirdie – best dissertation writing services for timely delivery and consistent quality on deliverables when the research load is heavy. Outsourcing the formatting and drafting frees up time to dig deeper into the actual market data that matters for real investment decisions. The analysis you build during college becomes your knowledge base before you ever make an offer.
Smart students treat every finance and real estate assignment as a portfolio of personal research. That perspective shifts the work from obligation to investment preparation.
How Student Loans Affect Your Future Mortgage
This is where many graduates get surprised. Student loan debt directly affects your debt-to-income ratio (DTI) – a key metric lenders use in mortgage approval. Most conventional lenders want your total monthly debt payments to stay below 43% of gross monthly income.
If you graduate with $40,000 in student loans at a standard repayment, your monthly payment is roughly $400. That $400 counts against your DTI before you add a car payment or rent. Managing your loan balance and making consistent payments not only builds credit – it keeps your DTI workable when you’re ready to buy.
Income-driven repayment plans can lower monthly payments but extend the loan period. For mortgage purposes, lenders typically use the actual monthly payment shown on your credit report when calculating DTI.
Practical Steps For Building Credit In College
Keep Utilization Low
Staying under 30% of your credit limit matters more than most students realize. If your card limit is $500, that means keeping your balance below $150 before the billing date. Paying in full each month handles this automatically.
Monitor Your Score Regularly
Free monitoring is available through Credit Karma, Experian, and most major banks. Checking your score doesn’t hurt it. Set up alerts for new inquiries, changes in balance, or any accounts you don’t recognize. Catching errors early prevents damage that takes months to fix.
Build Your Credit Mix Over Time
Lenders like to see that you can handle different types of credit. A student card, a small personal loan, and eventually a car loan create a credit mix in college that strengthens your profile. Don’t open accounts you don’t need, but don’t avoid credit out of fear either.
Here’s a practical credit-building checklist for college students:
- Open one student or secured credit card and use it monthly
- Pay the full balance before the due date every month
- Keep utilization below 30% at all times
- Become an authorized user on a parent’s old card if possible
- Check your credit report annually at AnnualCreditReport.com
- Make all student loan payments on time once they enter repayment
- Don’t close old accounts – account age matters
Understand What Mortgage Pre-Approval Requires
When you eventually apply for a mortgage, lenders will look at your FICO score, DTI, employment history, down payment, and reserves. The credit score threshold for a conventional loan is 620, but most competitive rates start at 740 and above. FHA loans allow scores down to 580 with a 3.5% down payment.
Starting to build credit at 18 or 19 means arriving at your first mortgage application with 6-8 years of credit history. That length alone adds 15% of your score. Combined with responsible utilization and clean payment history, you can realistically hit 740+ before you graduate.
The Long Game
Real estate investing after college isn’t a fantasy – it’s a planning problem. The students who pulled it off didn’t get lucky. They started building credit years before they needed it, kept their DTI manageable, and used their time in school to understand the markets they wanted to invest in.
The credit habits you build now are the credentials lenders will evaluate later. Start with one card, pay it in full, and let the history accumulate. Five years from now, that consistency becomes a mortgage approval and the keys to your first property.
Features
How Pioneer Families Kept Hebrew Alive on the Early Canadian Prairies
Canadian Prairies of the West and Jewish Pioneer Families
Early Western Canada boasted prairies and Jewish immigrant families’ settlements. Here is how they kept the Hebrew language alive and built makeshift schools.
Western Canada in the late 1800s was nothing more than plains. Wild grass and strong prairie winds covered the terrain. But that open land and freedom became a lifeline for thousands of Jewish immigrants. They were running from dangerous attacks in Europe to the safety of farm life in Canada. These families settled where there was nothing and the closest towns were miles away. They lived without electricity or running water. But even though every day was a survival for them, they managed to preserve their heritage and language.
Their effort to do so was enormous, but the information about it is mostly available in deep historical archives. If you need to write a detailed history paper on Canadian homesteaders, you’d probably be better off using the WritePaper academic help platform. Their experts have access to extensive knowledge bases, including numerous archives. If you just want to get a glimpse of how these families did it, here are some interesting facts.
Let’s start with the early farming towns these families built from scratch.
Early Farming Towns
Between 1880 and 1910, several Jewish farming towns started on the Canadian plains. These families left dangerous conditions in European countries like Russia, Lithuania, and Romania. They wanted a safe, fresh start on the land. They built farming communities with unique names like Hirsch, Wapella, Lipton, and Edenbridge in Saskatchewan. Other families started settlements like Bender Hamlet in Manitoba. When they first arrived, the land was completely wild and flat.
The weather was incredibly tough for the new farmers. The first winters were so cold that many families lived in sod dugouts. These were temporary homes dug right into the ground with roofs made of thick dirt and grass. Luckily, local Indigenous and Métis neighbors stepped in to help. They taught the newcomers how to build warm log cabins out of wood and clay. They also showed them how to survive freezing winter blizzards. Once the families had food and shelter, they focused on education. They knew that even though Yiddish was their everyday language, their kids still needed to learn Hebrew. Without Hebrew, their religious identity would fade away in the wilderness.
Classrooms out of Logs and Mud
How do you run a school when your neighbors live miles away? Several academic papers on this era show that starting a school required hard work and teamwork. One of the articles by Eric Stelee, who also writes for the best paper writing service WritePaper, points out that studying these early schools requires looking at deep community sacrifices. Farming families had to build everything with their own two hands. They set up Talmud Torahs. These were traditional afternoon Hebrew schools. Kids there were taught religious reading, writing, and daily prayers.
Building these schools, however, wasn’t the only problem pioneers came face to face with:
- Since trained teachers wouldn’t move to remote frontier farms, communities had to find and hire traveling tutors.
- Kids often had to walk or ride horses for many miles through deep snow just to get to a single lesson.
- Before permanent schoolhouses were finished, simple log cabins and small community halls had to double as schoolrooms during the week.
- Spring planting and fall harvest affected attendance significantly. Parents often needed their kids to help them in the fields.
Real Numbers of the Prairie Frontier
Old records show exactly how fast these prairie communities grew out of the wilderness. Between 1884 and 1912, Jewish families started 31 different farming communities across the Canadian prairies. The Canadian government offered 160 acres of wild land to any settler for a fee of just ten dollars. The only catch was that families had to clear the land and farm it successfully.
In 1892, a group of 47 families started the Hirsch community in Saskatchewan. Later, in 1906, another group of 56 pioneers started the Edenbridge community further north. By the year 1911, the official census counted exactly 2,066 Jewish people living in the province of Saskatchewan alone. These families proved that hard work could protect their language and history in a brand-new country.
The Tools of Prairie Learning
Books were very rare and expensive on the early Canadian frontier. Most families could only bring a few holy books packed tightly into their wooden trunks when they left Europe. These family treasures became the main textbooks for pioneer kids.
To keep their traditions alive without modern school supplies, families had to be creative:
- Parents spoke Yiddish at home, but they also repeated Hebrew prayers and holy songs aloud while cooking or feeding farm animals.
- They would gather kids around a single, worn-out family Bible to read the Hebrew letters together by the light of a lamp.
- Small towns shared their money to hire one person who worked as both the community butcher and the school teacher.
- Permanent wood synagogues, like the Beth Israel Synagogue built in 1908, became the centers for kids’ religious education.
Hebrew stayed alive as a sacred language on the flat plains because of these efforts. Kids learned the ancient alphabet and historic prayers while living thousands of miles away from big cultural cities.
Conclusion
Canadian prairie communities proved to the world that language and heritage can be preserved if you put your heart into it. Unfortunately, most of these farms disappeared during the Great Depression and the draw of big cities. But places like Edenbridge still exist today and have become important historic sites. These places keep memories of those mud and log schoolhouses alive.
Pioneer Jewish families that came to Canada in the 1800s had nothing, yet they still managed to pass knowledge down to their children. One candlelit lesson at a time.
Features
Why Modern Torah Scribes Still Mix Ink by Hand
It’s 2026 and Torah Scribes Still Mix Ink by Hand
Did you know that Jewish ritual scribes don’t actually use any of the modern printing tools? They still mix a 2,000-year-old ink recipe by hand and here is how.
Our lives are run by smartphones and computers. Everything can be typed or copied in a matter of minutes or even seconds. Yet, there is still a certain profession that rejects all these modern conveniences. They also reject the obsession with speed we have, exactly because of all these tools. These professionals are Sofrim. They are ritual scribes in Jewish communities. They are responsible for hand-writing Torah scrolls, holy books, and small mezuzah scrolls for doorways.
The contrast between their craft and the constant typing we are used to is striking. Just think of it. If a student or even a professional is pressed for time, they just go online and look for a writing service to help them out. A digital platform like PaperWriter can write and format an entire paper in just a few hours. But this same speed is the enemy of a holy Torah scribe. To write a sacred scroll, they must be deeply concentrated and slow about their process. Rush can’t be part of it. In fact, this special care begins before the pen touches the page. First, they gather the ingredients and mix the writing ink.
The Strict Rules of Sacred Ink
Why can’t a scribe just buy a bottle of high-quality black ink at a local art supply store? It all comes down to traditional Jewish law, which is called Halakha. A Torah scroll is a highly holy object with very strict manufacturing standards. A single scroll contains exactly 304,805 letters and takes a full year of daily manual labor to finish. If even a single letter fades, cracks, or peels off the page over time, the entire scroll becomes invalid. It cannot be used in a synagogue service until it is carefully repaired.
There is also a common myth that the ink itself must be “kosher.” But Jewish law actually focuses on durability and natural purity. While the parchment page absolutely must come from a kosher animal species, the ink simply needs to be permanent, deeply black, and made from scratch.
To make sure the holy words last for hundreds of years, the ink must follow these specific standards:
- Color. It must be a deep, solid jet-black color that is easy to read.
- Durability. The ink must bond with the skin page so it never flakes off.
- Texture. It must remain smooth enough to avoid cracking over the centuries.
Modern writers often focus on how much digital tools have changed our daily habits. As a blog writer for the paper writing service PaperWriter, Jacky M. points out, “modern text has become instant, temporary, and easily erasable.” Ritual scribes, however, take the opposite path. They preserve a slow, physical process that has remained unchanged for thousands of years. They make sure ancient texts endure for future generations.
The 2,000-Year-Old Ink Recipe
To get the perfect black color and long-lasting quality, scribes use a formula that dates back to ancient times. This traditional mixture is a special kind of iron gall ink. It creates a permanent chemical bond directly on the page.
The Raw Ingredients
Before beginning the brewing process, a scribe must gather a small collection of organic materials:
- Oak Galls. Round, woody bumps from oak trees that contain a natural acid.
- Iron Sulfate. A natural mineral salt that turns the liquid dark black.
- Gum Arabic. A sticky tree sap that acts as a natural glue.
- Pure Water. The liquid base for boiling the ingredients together.
The Preparation Steps
The process of turning these raw elements into smooth writing fluid requires a lot of patience and precision:
- The hard oak galls are crushed into a fine powder.
- The powder is boiled in water for several hours until it creates a dark, strong tea.
- Tea is strained to remove solid pieces of wood.
- The iron sulfate is then added to the warm liquid.
- The gum arabic is added last to give the liquid a thick, glossy texture.
The moment the iron touches the oak gall tea, a chemical reaction happens. The pale brown liquid instantly turns into a deep, pitch-black ink. The added gum arabic keeps the ink from dripping too fast off the tip of the scribe’s traditional quill or reed pen.
Why This Ancient Ink Lasts Longer
This handmade chemical compound is perfectly suited for parchment, which is made from processed animal skins. Modern factory inks are full of harsh chemicals and alcohols designed to dry instantly on wood-based paper. If you use factory ink on animal parchment, it will eventually ruin the surface. The letters will turn brittle, dry out, and fall off the page like old house paint.
Handmade iron gall ink works completely differently. It actually bites into the organic fibers of the animal skin. As the years go by, the iron in the ink reacts with the oxygen in the air. This chemical reaction causes the ink to get darker over time instead of fading away.
Conclusion
Some traditions are just too important to be simply replaced by automation. Yes, mixing the ink and writing a sacred text by hand takes time and focus. But the result is outstanding. The tradition is preserved, and these holy texts look and feel the same as they did a thousand years ago. It’s a way for people to touch and be closer to history, so to speak.