|
|
|
What's in a name? By Estee Rieder
Our surnames are an inseparable part of our identities, but it wasn't always like that. Ever wonder how we wound up with such doozeys?
At the end of the thirteenth century, only fifty-four Jewish families
resided in the German city of Magentza; in 1380 Frankfurt's
Jews numbered 681. In some Eastern European villages
at that time, there were not enough Jews to form a
minyan; people would travel to a neighboring
town in order to pray.
In settlements that contained so few community
members, there was no need for family
names, just like the Eskimos living near the
North Pole do not have surnames even today. For
bureaucratic convenience, the Canadian authorities
issued a serial number to each Eskimo which
is engraved on a wooden disc which he
carries with him. The number, which essentially
serves the same purpose as a surname,
is used only by the government authorities
and not by the Eskimos
themselves.
When there was only one Yosef the
Smith in town, everyone knew who
Yosef Schmidt was. But when the town
grew to 30,000, and included hundreds of
smiths called Yosef, it became nearly impossible
to accurately identify one's fellow
townspeople.
RAPID GROWTH OF COMMUNITIES
By the sixteenth century all of English
non-Jews had a family name, by the turn
of the nineteenth century some European
countries had passed a law requiring
surnames. But until the end of the
nineteenth century, especially in the
smaller towns and villages, the use of
surnames wasn't universal.
In The Origin of Words, a literary
trove of historical, sociological, and folkloristic
treasures culled from throughout
Jewish history, Avraham Stahl, who
authored many books on the topic, writes that it was also among
the Jews that the more prominent families
of rabbis, wealthy merchants, or people
holding senior positions were the first to
take family names. There are some well-known
Jewish families who were called
by surnames as early as the Middle Ages,
like the families of Rabbi Don Yitzchak
Abarbanel (fifteenth-century Spain), Rabbi
Yaakov Weil (fifteenth-century Germany),
and Rabbi Shaul Wahl (sixteenth-century
Poland). But most Jews did not
have surnames until much later.
Surnames were adopted by Jews in
Spain, North Africa, and Italy long before
other European countries.
In Italy, non-Jews began taking surnames
towards the end of the fifteenth
century. The Jews, starting to feel somewhat
conspicuous — especially when
they had to affix their name to a legal document
— soon followed suit. A look at
documents belonging to Italian Jews during
the sixteenth century attests to the
gradual change. A circular dated
1443, from a community in
Rome, is signed by twenty-three
people. Only two of
them signed with a family name;
the rest used only their first name. In
later documents we find the
number of family names
increasing.
In the middle
of the sixteenth century,
there are many
promissory notes,
dowries, and divorce
documents signed with
Jewish last names.
In Germany though, surnames
assumed popularity in the seventeenth
century. The exponential growth within
communities was one reason that necessitated
the addition of surnames; there was
also an external factor that contributed to
this need. Central and Western Europe
was becoming increasingly organized into
neat districts and countries, and the fact
that their Jewish citizens lacked surnames
bothered the authorities.
CHOICE, COERCION, AND ERROR
When the judges formulated the verdict,
they tried to clarify exactly who the
indicted man was, and what they found
only confused them further. They came
across documents belonging to this man
bearing several more names: Yussif, Yossel,
and Yoske.
Due to the lack of consistency in the
usage of Jewish names and the Russian
authorities' unfamiliarity with Jewish
names, the same person often appeared on
different lists under various names. Moshe
could have been Moyshe on the birth registry,
Moishel on the recruitment list, and
Moshke on the university's student list.
After drafting Moishel into the army, they
would later return to his family and demand
the recruitment of Moyshe as well.
Protests or attempts to explain usually did
not help much; the officials were adamant
that there was some escapee here who was
evading recruitment and the family was
forced to pay a fine. This happened with
the tax authorities and Jews paid double
taxes more than once because their name
appeared differently on different lists. Nor
did the Russian officials, who were without
a doubt ignorant, but primarily anti-Semitic, expend much effort in
trying to uncover the truth.
Eventually the authorities
decided to implement
family names among the
Jews, a custom that was by
now widely accepted among
the non-Jews. This happened
gradually, at different times
in different places
The new laws
did not always take
effect immediately,
making it necessary
to add accessory
laws to enforce
them. This was the case in
Russia in 1835, after it became
known that in certain districts many
Jews still did not have family names.
A date was designated as the final day for the
list of surnames to be completed. When
one Jew failed to arrive in time to submit
his surname, the official in charge gave
him the name "Shpeter" (Yiddish for
"later") as a consequence for his tardiness.
The process of assuming surnames
was liberally sprinkled with strange,
even comical scenarios. There were
many Jews who underrated the significance
that this law held for them and their
descendants, thinking it was only a temporary
decree, a phase that would surely
pass and fade into oblivion.
In the German city of Chassell, there
was a father named Heim, the German
version of Chaim. His four sons chose
separate names for themselves, but they
all shared a common theme, choosing the
names Ustheim, Westheim, Zidheim,
Nordheim, each choosing one of the four
directions and attaching it to the suffix
"heim." Such instances create difficulties
for researchers of Jewish genealogy, since
they have to keep in mind that different
offshoots of the same family may have
been called by different family names.
Professor Heinrich Elyokim Lew was
an assiduous pioneer in Jewish Genealogy
research. In his book Stories about Jewish
Names (published in 1929, Berlin) he recounts
many stories about the committees
that issued surnames to Jews.
Dr. Paul Yakobi, a renowned genealogist who has researched more than 400 German families,
divided the first thousand years during which Jewish surnames were used (700-1620) into
four parts.
Dr. Chanan Rappaport, a member of the committee directing the International Institute of Jewish
Genealogy, recorded these four groups in Etmol magazine (September 2005).
The first group, which includes families whose names first appear between the years 700 and
1000, is called "the founding families." In this category one can find names such as Klonomodes, Shimonodes, Shaltiel, Alfasi, and Birdugau, among others.
The second category, called "the ancient families," includes family names which appeared
between the years 1000 and 1450. Listed here, one can find illustrious names
such as Luria, Abulafia, Abarbanel, Rappaport, and Shapiro as well as Sasoon,
Tzarfati, Trebis, Amar, and Cohen.
The third group, called "the old families," contains families whose
names appeared between the years 1450 and 1515. In this group
are names like Bachrach, Weil, Eiger, Kordova, Algaranti, Ginzburg,
Meisels, Rothschild, and Thumim.
The fourth group, "the early families," include families whose
names appeared between the years 1515 and 1620. Here one can find
names such as Isserles, Brody, Klausner, Openheimer, Schor, Terepero,
and Rivlin.
In the rural areas of Germany at that
time, ties between the Jews and their non-
Jewish neighbors were considerably
good. The Germans therefore did not impose
offensive names on the Jews, as was
the case in Austrian Galicia. Lew tells of
one Jew from the city Hiaasen who, upon
being asked by the naming committee
what he would like to be called, answered
"Widerbach." The officer misunderstood
this as three separate words "Wi der
bach," which means "like the river" in
German. Since the closest river in the
vicinity was called Rilf, the Jew's surname
was now Rilf. Another Jew in the
same city could not come up with a name
for himself and asked the committee
head to "guess" a name for him. In German
he said "Rutten Zus," ("Guess
please") and the committee head promptly
registered his name as "Ruttenzus."
There were quite a number of Jews
who asked the local official in charge to
choose a name for them. The result was
sometimes a name that alluded to their
lowly professions. This was, however, a
rare phenomenon in the Western countries
as compared to the Eastern European
countries, where the surname laws were
used by the authorities as an opportunity
to express their blatant anti-Semitism.
NAMES FOR SALE
"Expensive" names were words associated
with flowers or metals such as
Rosenthal (valley of roses) or Goldstein
(gold stone). Names with more mean connotations
were the cheapest: Holtz
(wood), Stein (stone), Stahl (steel). Those
who could not afford even the cheapest
names received a name from the Emperor
himself, a name with an absurd meaning
that would make him the subject of
mockery every time he came in contact
with the authorities.
Such names were
Azelkopf (donkey head), Auksenschvantz
(ox tail), Shleicher (crawl),
Unglick (misfortune), or Wanzenknicker
(bug crusher). Most of these names became
extinct during the course of years;
bearers of such names got rid of their unrespectable-
sounding identities either by
bribing legal authorities or by changing
their names when they emigrated to different
countries. And yet, if you open an
Israeli phonebook today, you can still
come across names like Hazenfartz (rabbit
face), Langnuz (long nose), or Hazenshprung
(rabbit leap).
The onomastician (onomastics is the
study of proper names) Alexander Bader
stated that he was not able to track down
even one legal document from the Austrian
government that gives credence to the
claim that differential prices were
charged according to a name's quality.
His conclusion was that this phenomenon
only occurred in certain small
villages where the officers in charge succeeded
in wheedling money out of the
Jews under their rule.
The most derisive names were given
in the Galician vicinity, located far from
the central authorities and containing a
large Jewish population.
In Hungary, which under Austrian rule
spoke German, the name-giving procedure
was very simple. The officer in
charge divided the local Jews into groups.
Those with black hair were called
Schwartz (black), the blondes were
named Weiss (white), and everyone else,
either redheaded or bald were named according
to height, either Gross (big) or
Klein (small).
A British tourist who visited
Hungary between the two world wars
noticed that store signs bore their Jewish
owners' names as Kish, Nugh, Faher, and
Fekete which mean big, small, white, and
black in Hungarian.
Some Jews wore the names that were
issued to them with pride, adding some
spiritual connotation to their new name.
Take, for example, one Jew who complied
with the authorities' commands to take on
a German name and chose the name Becker
for himself. Although the German
meaning of Becker is baker, this righteous
Jew chose to interpret it differently than
his community peers and children. The
acronym for Becker is "bnei kedoshim
v'rabbanim, children of holy ones and
rabbis." Or how about the Russian Jew
who chose the name Bick? The Russian
translation of Bick is a fir tree, but for this
Jew the secret code in his name was its
acronym "bnei Yisrael kedoshim, the children
of Israel are holy."
One Jew who was not permitted to
keep his name "ben-Moshe," because it
wasn't a German name, ingeniously asked
for the name Wassertzug which means
"drawn from water" (the transliterated
equivalent of Moshe).
"TRADE" MARK NAMES
There is one common denominator between
the names Metzger, Katzav,
Resnick, Resnickovitz, Schechter,
Shechtman, Shochet, Fleisher, Fleishman,
Fleishocker, Schlachter, Miasnick, and
Miaskovski; the origin for these is one and
the same — these were all names in various
languages assigned to butchers and
ritual slaughterers.
Following the "noble" and "less-than-noble"
names came a phase during which
Jews were named according to their professions:
Bader (bath attendant); Druckman
(printer); Gewirtzhandler (spice merchant);
Gartner (gardener); Lederer
(tanner); Lehrer (teacher); Peltzman (furrier);
Russhandler (horse merchant);
Schnitzer and Schnitzler (wood carver);
Schuster (shoemaker); Teitelman (date
merchant); Wagner (wagon builder);
Wexler and Chalfon (exchanger); Wohlshlanger
(wool manufacturer), Tischler and
Nager (carpenter); Blecher and Koznitz
(tinsmith); Schmidt, Kovel, and Kovitz,
(blacksmith); Sabag, Muller, and
Malerosky (painter); Zaltzman (salt merchant);
and many more.
Names that connote professions can
be found not only among people of European
descent; there are Yemenite families
as well whose names are rooted in trades:
Elendaf (mattress weavers); Greidi (locust
gatherers); Meborat (explosives
manufacturer); Madar (potter); Manjam
(stargazer); Chadad (smith); and Mashat
(wool comber).
Some names allude to professions that
are exclusive to Jews. One such name appears
in various forms: Kister, Klausner,
Templer, Schuldiner, and Shamash, all of
them meaning shamash, a synagogue sexton.
Likewise, we have names such as Kantor,
Singer, Schulsinger (which may have
morphed into Schlesinger), Chazanov,
Chazantzik, Chazanovski, Chazanian,
Chazanski, all of them meaning chazan,
a cantor.
Sometimes you can tell the geographical
origin of a name by its ending. Names
that end with "yan" (Chakakyan) usually
stem from Persia, "ski" (Abramski) originates
from Russia and Poland, "er" (Posner)
and "son" (Jacobson) usually suffix
German names, and "itzki" (Koshitzki)
and "sko" (Hirsko) come from Romania.
But there are exceptions to every rule.
Avraham Stahl once asked a Jew of Moroccan
descent if his name, Lavski, with
its Eastern European suffix, might testify
to Ashkenazic roots. But what Stahl
learned was that the name Lavski was
formed from the words "al Vaski," referring
to the city Vaska in Northern Spain.
The name Aptaker, which means pharmacist
in German, is of Eastern Europe
origin but has a very similar counterpart,
Aptakar, in India where it is a "geographical"
surname.
In many Jewish names one could find
the name of the person's hometown
(Frankfurter, Toledano, Posner, Heilpern,
Alfasi), names that were given based on
the father's first names (Abramowitz,
Davidson) and sometimes the mother's
(Sirkis, Rivkin, Eideles). There are
names that hint at their original bearer's
personality: Abulafia (big man), Gutman
(good man), Altman (old man). There are
some that are even an anagram of an
earlier family name; the name Weil in
Hebrew (vov-yud-lamed)is an anagram
of Levi (lamed-vav-yud).
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes inspiring articles. Sign up for our daily update. It's free. Just click here.
Estee Rieder writes for Mishpacha Magazine, where this article first appeared. Comment by clicking here.
© 2007, Mishpacha Magazine | ||||||||||||||||
