$1DPH*LYHQD1DPH7DNHQ&DPRXIODJLQJ5HVLVWDQFH DQG'LDVSRULF6RFLDO,GHQWLW\

/HR6SLW]HU

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Volume 30, Number 1, 2010, pp. 21-31 (Article)

3XEOLVKHGE\'XNH8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cst/summary/v030/30.1.spitzer.html

Access provided by Columbia University (24 Mar 2016 16:35 GMT) A Given, a Name Taken: Camouflaging, Resistance, and Diasporic Social Identity

Leo Spitzer

begin with a brief, perhaps apocryphal, story:

At one point, early in the twentieth century in London, two Jewish merchants, partners in the same textile business, both decided to change their . You must understand them — they were called Zoberman and Moscovi! And that combination didn’t look at all well on the sign over the door! . . . After much thought, Zoberman decided to call himself Smith. Yes, Smith! What could have been more unobtrusive? Then Moscovi thought for a long time and had an equally marvelous inspiration: he would call himself Smith too! “Smith and Smith!” What a happy coincidence! How could one be more sociably acceptable? Find a sign more discreet? Only here is how it worked out in the course of their daily routine: A client called on them: “Hello? I would like to speak to Mr. Smith!” “Smith? Yes, he’s here . . . but which one do you want? Zoberman or Moscovi?”1

Being (Re)Named 2 The following is based on the life account of Joseph Boston May, Liberated African: of He was born, probably in 1817, in a town named Iware, a few miles from the banks of the Studies river Ogun, in the southeastern district of the Old — in the predominantly Yoruba- ­speaking area of what is now the Republic of . His father, Loncola, a diviner-priest (ba- and baláwo) dedicated to the Yoruba god of divination, Ifá, named him Ifacayeh in honor of the Africa Asia, deity. This name, which in translation means “Ifá covers the world,” was indeed prophetic. South East In the late months of 1825, during one of the many raids for slaves and ransom Comparative that Middle became endemic during the decade of unrest and civil war now associated with the disintegra- the tion of the Old Oyo Empire, Ifacayeh, together with his mother, brother, and two sisters, was 1, 2010 No. -2009-047 taken captive by the warriors of Ojo Amepo, a renegade Muslim Yoruba chief. Separated from 30, x Vol. Press his kinfolk, he was marched to “a place far from home” and sold into domestic slavery.3 But 10.1215/1089201University after a year of service in a situation of relatively benign subordination — a period in which Ifa- doi Duke by 2010 1. Albert Memmi, The Liberation of the Jew, trans. Judy Hyun in Zion Church, Freetown, on Sunday, October 25, 1896 (Freetown, ©

(New York: Orion, 1966), 51. 1896). The latter is largely based on Joseph May’s oral account of his life history to his son. See also Leo Spitzer, Lives in Between: 2. Main sources for May’s life history can be found in the Meth- The Experience of Marginality in a Century of Emancipation (New odist Missionary Archives, London, Sierra Leone box (hereafter York: Hill and Wang, 1999), especially chap. 2. MMA/SL); and Claudius May, A Brief Sketch of the Life of the Rev. Joseph May, Native of the Yoruba Country, and Late Wesleyan 3. MMA/SL, Joseph May, 1838; Claudius May, Brief Sketch of the Minister of the Colony of Sierra Leone, Read at the Service of Song Life of the Rev. Joseph May, 8. 21 cayeh continued to cherish the hope of possibly tended destination. Instead, the slave ship was 22 being ransomed by his father — his master took intercepted on the high seas by a British naval the boy to a distant town and sold him once warship belonging to the antislavery squadron, again, this time to a merchant involved in the and its human cargo was released in Freetown, long-distance slave trade to the coast. capital of the British West African colony of Si- For Ifacayeh, the shock of this nightmar- erra Leone. There, having become a “Liberated ish experience — his forced passage from one African” — as slaves freed and resettled in Sierra existence into another — was profound. Later Leone came to be known — the cultural imprint in life, he vividly recalled how bitterly he had that Ifacayeh had carried with him from his land

wept during these months after being left “a of birth began to be altered almost at once. of helpless child among perfect strangers” and His transformation was multifaceted and

Comparative stressed the deep longing he had felt for his par- stretched over time. But acts of naming — the Asia, ents, relatives, and native country on realizing occasions when he was given a name or was Studies the 4 and that he would never see them again. He and renamed — continued to highlight milestones South Africa other slaves destined for service abroad were along a path of change that had led from child- East then marched in a guarded caravan down to hood in a land he would come to identify as a Middle the coast, to the lagoon and the port of “heathen nation, a country full of Idolatry,” to Badagry. On the way, having quashed his fading an adulthood as a teacher and idol-smashing hopes of return, his captors proceeded to strip Wesleyan missionary in colonial West Africa.5 him of the most distinctive remaining element Through the names bestowed on him, he was of his past identity as well: his name. They re- brought symbolically into the realm of the dom- named him Ojo, a Yoruba name normally given inant, interpellated as subject within its ideo- to a child born with the umbilical cord twined logical assumptions and rules. When he was around his head. In Ifacayeh’s case, this was an released in Sierra Leone from the slave ship, obviously cruel joke referring to the cord of cap- Ifacayeh was inscribed in the Liberated African tivity with which he was tied to other slaves by registry book as “Joseph, a Liberated African the neck. male” — a change from an African to a Euro- At the coast, he was sold once again, pean name that marked the start of the con- this time to a Portuguese slave trader, and for versionist process into which he had entered.6 months was confined in a barracoon along with Upon his acquisition of fluency in English some hundreds of other captives while awaiting the time later, and his “wardship” residency with a arrival of a slave ship for overseas transport. British missionary couple, the Bostons, he be- In January 1827, before their embarkation on came known as “Joseph Boston.” When he was the Brazilian slave-brigantine Dois Amigos, how- subsequently baptized into Methodist Christian- ever, Ifacayeh/Ojo and his captives suf- ity, he was given an additional , “May,” fered yet another painful indignity: they were in honor of John May, a British missionary who all branded on the right arm or chest with a had labored and died in Sierra Leone colony a red-hot iron — imprinted with a burn mark few years earlier. that identified both their owner and their sub- Naming a person, as we know, makes him ordinate status. Ifacayeh’s letter, T — t h e fi r s t or her a part of the social world — a name gives initial of the name of a person he would never the person a social identity. At the same time, a meet — became visible and indelible in a few name stands for the person, it symbolizes per- days. It remained distinct on his chest to the day sonal identity. It indicates to members of soci- of his death. ety who the named one is and, to the named Yet Ifacayeh and the more than three one, who he or she is expected to be. By 1847, hundred other captives packed aboard the Dois twenty years after his arrival in Freetown, the Amigos never reached Salvador, Brazil, their in- young man who had once been named Ifacayeh

4. MMA/SL, Joseph May, 1838. 6. “Liberated African Register,” in the Sierra Leone Ar- chives, Fourah Bay College, Freetown, Sierra Leone, 5. MMA/SL, Joseph May, 1838. document no. 238. appeared to have rejected his earlier identity their version of “Europeanization” — remained and to have become a successful member of the the primary ideological justification for the exis- 23 “black elite” in a colonial society ruled by the tence of the colony when the British Crown took British. He had changed into what his white con- over its administration in 1808. And it contin- temporaries in and Sierra Leone would ued to be so until British ideas about Africans, describe as a “civilized African” — a person dis- and particularly about African “educability,” tinguished from the “common African” masses were modified by the rise of pseudoscientific by education, conversion to Christianity, and his racism in the 1860s. outward conformity to a pattern of life that was Implicit in the conversionist assumption

Europeanized in essence, if not totally European was a belief in the Idea of Progress and in faith Taken Spitzer in detail. The boy from Yoruba who had been that “civilization” could be communicated to Leo branded and marked with a letter T, and whose any human being through education. In this Name a initiation into adulthood in his native land was context, the purpose of the Sierra Leone colo- interrupted by the ordeal of enslavement and nial experiment was to wean Liberated Africans Given, communal separation, was born again in Sierra like Ifacayeh away from the “darkness of super-

Leone colony as a renamed Christian man. He stition” and the evils of slavery and to change Name had become Joseph Boston May. them through schooling and less direct forms of A The process that had led to Ifacayeh’s tuition into Europeanized and, whenever pos- changes, and to the transformations undergone sible, Christian subjects of Great Britain.8 by numerous other Liberated Africans who had “Conversionism,” however, as an ideol- been landed in Freetown, had its ideological ogy of “transformative change” accompanying roots in the nature of Sierra Leone colony — in emancipation — and as a vehicle for access into the curious combination of philanthropy, hu- the realm of the dominant, and mobility within manitarianism, idealism, economic self-interest, it — had its counterparts in other areas of the and cultural arrogance that defined what came world.9 Thus in the German states and Austrian to be known as Britain’s “civilizing mission” in territories of Central Europe, the stretched-out this part of Africa until the latter half of the process of Jewish emancipation that began in nineteenth century. Sierra Leone, after all, had the 1780s, and that was not completed until been established not only as a haven for liber- the 1860s, was closely tied to a notion of Jew- ated slaves and black freed men and women ish transformation termed Verbesserung (im- from Britain, America, and the West Indies but provement). Before Jews could hope for civil as a social experiment as well. The directors of acceptance in the dominant mainstream, the the Sierra Leone Company, including the noted advocates of Verbesserung argued that the very Clapham Sect evangelicals and abolitionists character of Jews as a group needed to be trans- William Wilberforce, Granville Sharp, Thomas formed and modified, “uplifted” from ghetto Clarkson, and Henry Thornton, conceived of and shtetl degradation and changed for the the colonizing venture for which they had re- better. As was true in British Sierra Leone, edu- ceived a royal charter in 1790 as a means to cation in the language of the dominant group provide “the Blessings of Industry and Civiliza- (here, in German) was seen as a central vehicle tion” to Africans “long detained in Barbarism.”7 to bring about cultural transformation. And, They, like many of their European contempo- here too, it was demanded that the members of raries, considered Africans to be deprived by the populations undergoing emancipation — in their environment, the slave trade, and reli- this case, the Jews — adapt and conform in some gious error. But they also considered Africans degree to the values, outlooks, and ways of the to be “redeemable.” Their assumption that the emancipators. “heathen” should and could be converted to the Both in the Hapsburg Empire and the benefits of European culture — based on a chau- German lands in the late eighteenth and early vinistic conceit that equated “civilization” with nineteenth centuries, the reform measures asso-

7. “Instructions to the Sierra Leone Company Direc- 8. Elizabeth Melville, A Residence at Sierra Leone 9. Adapted from Spitzer, Lives in Between, chaps. 1 tors,” in Sierra Leone Collection, Fourah Bay College (London: Norton, 1849), 252 – 53. and 3. Library, Freetown, Sierra Leone. ciated with emancipation and Verbesserung were There were, of course, good practical rea- 24 engendered by a desire on the part of rulers to sons why authorities throughout this part of transform the state into a unified and central- Europe compelled Jews to adopt names. ized entity. This goal was to be achieved through Fixed made it easier to integrate per- the elimination of local particularisms and the sons into a centralized state — easier to levy taxes barriers created by estates, corporations, and on them, to conscript them into the army, and denominations. Jews, as well as other minori- to identify and categorize them. At the same ties, were to be pulled into the dominant realm time, these surnames were another emblem of through a process of assimilation. Thus the so- the assimilationist process that accompanied

called Edict of Tolerance, promulgated under emancipation. From the perspective of persons of the enlightened rule of the Hapsburg emperor among the dominant who wished to change and

Comparative Joseph II in the early 1780s, relieved Jews of the “uplift” Jews — to convert them culturally and Asia,

Studies obligation to wear special emblems and distinc- “make them more like us” — a surname in the the and tive garb and of the requirement that men wear dominant language symbolized transformation. South Africa beards. It prescribed secular and civic education And for Jews, the adoption of a new name in the East in German for Jewish children and compelled language of their emancipators seemed like rec- Middle Christian schools and institutions of higher ognition of their entrance into a gentile world learning to admit Jewish pupils. Jews were also from which they had been largely excluded. It permitted to become artisans and to enter the seemed to symbolize their increasing accep- free professions, to choose certain vocations tance and belonging within it. that had previously been closed to them, and However, while the adoption of new sur- they were encouraged to open factories. Even- names — and, in some places, new first names — tually, Jews were also granted the freedom to became a compulsory precondition for Jewish settle where they liked, to own land, and to be- emancipation and admission into the process come naturalized subjects — a precursor to their of assimilation, the Jews’ new names had to be receipt of greater equality and full citizenship officially registered, and thus they were subject privileges some eighty years later, in the 1860s. to the approval of the authorities. Generally But naming — the compulsory adoption of speaking, Jews were not permitted to take the German fore- and surnames — was an important surnames of existing gentile , especially component of Jewish emancipation. Up to the famous or illustrious families. Instead their new end of the eighteenth century, the majority of names were adopted from a variety of sources. Ashkenazi Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, Some were merely translated patronyms (e.g., unlike their Sephardic coreligionists in Spain, Abramson, Isaacson, Jacobson, and Mendelsohn), Portugal, and Italy, did not have family names. or (like Kohn, Kahane, Kantor, and Levi) they In practice, Jews followed the custom of using reflected long-recognized connections to priestly their personal forename plus their father’s or lineages and religious functionaries. Others mother’s forename — for example, Gershon ben (e.g., Berliner, Wiener, Deutscher, Bresslauer, Yehuda (Gershon, the son of Yehuda) or Mir- and Jordan) derived from place-names or from iam bat Leah (Miriam, the daughter of Leah). vocational designations (e.g., Schneider [tai- In 1787 Joseph II promulgated an edict - lor], Bäcker [baker], Drucker [printer], Holtzer ing Jews within his Austrian domains to adopt [woodworker], and Wechsler [money changer]). permanent family names in German — the first Still others were drawn from physical character- such law in Europe. Laws ordering Jews to as- istics and colors (e.g., Klein, Gross, Alt, Schwarz, sume fixed family names then followed suit Weiss, and Blau) or from the names of animals in various German-speaking areas: Frankfurt (e.g., Hirsch, Katz, Adler, and Vogel). In those in 1807, Westphalia in 1808, Prussia in 1812, places where a fee was charged or a bribe ex- Bavaria in 1813, and Saxony in 1834. In 1808 pected for the official approval or registration of Napoleon also decreed that Jews adopt family a name, persons able to pay larger fees received names throughout the French empire. some of the finer-sounding names — names from flowers and gems, like Rosenthal, Lilien- IMPORTANT NOTICE thal, Edelstein, Diamant, Saphir, Goldstein, and The Public are [sic] hereby informed that from 25 Silverstein. Those able to pay less or nothing and after this date were sometimes saddled with derisory names MR. W. J. DAVIS, Senior Resident Master of the Wesleyan High like Schmalz (grease), Ochsenschwantz (oxtail), School, Freetown, and 1st B.A. of the University or Hitzig (hot). of London, will henceforth be called and known However, the very fact that the names by the name of given to Jews in Central Europe were largely in- ORISHATUKEH FADUMA. vented, while the names given to blacks eman- All communications should be addressed ac- 10 cipated from slavery in West Africa generally re- cordingly. Taken Spitzer produced those of white missionaries, colonial On 16 September 1892, in Bromberg, Ger- Leo officials, or even long-ago slave owners, points Name many, the merchant Emil Schmul, a Jew, made a to an obvious difference — but also to a similar- an application to the Bromberg district presi- ity between the two groups and their experi- dent to change his family name from Schmul to Given, ences. The difference, of course, derives from “Goetze.” In the early decades of the nineteenth

a commonplace association of physical charac- Name

century, Schmul claimed, his grandfather, an ac- A teristics with racial definition: from the reality credited French translator, had sometimes been that no matter how similar their name to that called “Goetze,” and now he and others in the of Europeans with whom they interacted in the Schmul family wished their surname to be Go- West African colonial setting, the skin color and etze as well. After some initial delay, this change external physical traits of Europeanized Afri- of name was officially approved. But when it was cans like the Sierra Leone Creoles remained as announced in the press, as legally required, it a badge of difference. was immediately appealed by Rudolf Goetze, se- Thus it becomes clear that while the nam- nior physician at the University of Würzburg’s ing (or renaming) of Jews was a requisite change psychiatric clinic. In a letter signed by twenty- easing their administrative integration into the six additional bearers of the name “Goetz(e),” sphere of the dominant — and a compulsory Goetze wrote: “The name Götze is a truly Ger- step to enable their further emancipation — the man . By every honest Christian names they were given, or permitted to take, German his respected name is regarded as his continued to differentiate them from non-Jews family’s badge of honour; he considers it to be into whose midst they were otherwise assimilat- his inherited property and it is incomprehen- ing. In Central Europe, their names were now in sible to him that . . . his very name could be be- German, to be sure. But these names remained stowed on [someone] with the express purpose peculiarly “Jewish names” — banner names that of concealing [that person’s] Jewish descent and would continue to identify their bearers with thereby helping to improve [his] business.”11 a past from which many were hoping to move Schmul’s change of family name and the away. response it elicited in Germany, as well as W. J. Davis’s change to Orishatukeh Faduma in Sierra (Re)Naming Oneself Leone — although seemingly unrelated — reflect On 13 August 1887, in the Sierra Leone Weekly a trend. Among both the “educated Africans” in News, a Freetown newspaper owned and edited British colonial Africa and the Jews in Central by Cornelius May, the Creole (Krio) son of Jo- Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth cen- seph May, the following announcement was tury, changing a family name previously “given” published: or “taken” during the process of emancipation

10. Sierra Leone Weekly News (Freetown) (hereafter SLWN), 13 August 1887. Name changing is also ad- dressed in the 20 August 1887 issue.

11. Dietz Bering, The Stigma of Names: Antisemitism in German Daily Life, 1812 – 1933 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 94. became a widespread phenomenon. For exam- accelerated incidence of name changing among 26 ple, in Prussia there was a dramatic increase in Jews in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and the legal petitions to change from Jewish-­identified emergence of this phenomenon at this very banner names like Kohn, Levy, Hirsch, Moses, same time among Sierra Leone Creoles and or Solomon to what the petitioners referred other Europeanized Africans in British colo- to as “truly German” or “Christian” surnames. nial West Africa, corresponded with the growth From 1872 to 1881, the percentage of these peti- and spread of the “new,” pseudoscientific rac- tions more than doubled over the previous de- ism and of modern anti-Semitism. It was, after cade (from 27 of 1,221 requests to 154 of 2,898), all, in the decades beginning in the 1870s that 12 and they remained high well into the 1920s. the conversionist/assimilationist ideology that of Intermarriages, in which Jewish women mar- had provided a framework and justification

Comparative ried “out of the faith” and took the surnames of for the emancipation of Jews and blacks came Asia,

Studies their non-Jewish spouses, also rose during these under increasing attack. The explanations for the and years, as did name changing upon conversion to the growing popular appeal and diffusion of South Africa Christianity and — a practice routinely new discriminatory and exclusionary practices East permitted to Jews in Germany and Austria until based on racist ideology are numerous, but the 13 Middle its restriction in 1903. In Sierra Leone many of very success of emancipation and conversion- the colony-born children of Liberated Africans ism is certainly one of them. When previously and early black settlers from Britain, the West confining legal constraints inhibiting economic Indies, and changed their names and social mobility were eased in the early as well, either by shedding what they termed as 1900s, many Central European Jews and “elite” their “foreign” surname to adopt one with an blacks in British colonial Sierra Leone had in- African “sound” or by adding an African name deed taken advantage of the new opportuni- to their “Christian-European” one. Thus A. E. ties offered by the emancipatory process. They Metzger became A. E. Toboku-Metzger when he conformed to the transformative goals associ- added a Yoruba name to the name that the fam- ated with “uplift” and “civilizing” conversionism ily had taken from his father’s Anglo-German and were frequently highly successful in pro- missionary pastor earlier in the century. O. T. fessional, business, and artistic fields that had George became O. T. Nana; Claude George, previously been restricted or closed to them. already well known as the author of The Rise of For those among the dominant who perceived a British West Africa, became Esu Biyi; Isaac Augus- danger in this blurring of boundaries between tus Johnson changed to Algerine Kefallah San- themselves and those who had been “other,” on koh; and Africanus Matthew Goodman became the “outside” or on the “margins,” biological Eyahjemi Morondia.14 racism and racist anti-Semitism, with their im- In Central and Western Europe, how- permeable barriers, became useful ideologies ever, as well as in the Americas, name changing to turn back the clock on emancipation and es- among Jews — from banner or “brand” names, tablish a renewed exclusion. which immediately designated a person as a It is important to take notice, however, member of the Jewish minority — was not a new that while the emergence of name changing occurrence and had been rather commonplace among Sierra Leone Creoles and its accelera- throughout the entire nineteenth century. tion among Central European Jews were con- Numerous cases exist: for example, Kalmano- nected with the rise of these racist ideologies, vitch changed to Kalman, Davidsohn to David, the motivations driving name changing in each Aron to Nora, Haim to Vidal, Kohn to Kuhn place were considerably different. (or Krohn or Kaune), Weiss (in the United Among Jews, name changing primarily States) to White, Schwartz to Black, Bronstein reflected a desire to integrate themselves more to Brownstone, and Kaplan to Chaplin. But the fully and inconspicuously into the world of the

12. I b i d . , 8 3 – 9 0 . 13. Marsha Rozenblitt, The Jews of Vienna, 1867 – 1914: 14. See Leo Spitzer, Creoles of Sierra Leone: Responses Assimilation and Identity (Albany: State University of to Colonialism, 1870 – 1945 (Madison: University of New York Press, 1983), 128 – 46. Wisconsin Press, 1974), 117. dominant — to blend in, avoid attention, and to life . . . [and] to integrate and become articu- “become an ordinary citizen.” For what emanci- lated with the people with whom they lived.”15 27 pation and the removal of restrictions on Jew- For others, it was more like an act of “camou- ish geographical and social mobility had en- flage” producing a verbal screen to hide their abled — indeed, what the ideology of Verbesserung religious background and Jewish origins.16 It had encouraged — was the removal or modifica- was a masking intended to avoid attention, to tion of virtually all cultural markers by which veil the name-badge of difference. For a l l eman- Jews had previously been distinguished from cipated Jews, however, changing a name was a the Christian majority. By the mid-nineteenth defensive act — a reflection of their recognition

century it was certainly true, as anti-Semites re- that, despite emancipation and assimilation, Taken Spitzer peatedly indicated, that within the bourgeoisie they were still living within a potentially hostile Leo and the urban working classes, dress, language, world, one that indeed was becoming ever more Name a or writing could no longer be relied on to indi- dangerous as the “new” anti-Semitism surfaced cate differences between German Jews and Ger- and intensified. Given, man gentiles. Over the years in which the vari- In this respect, the motivation for name

ous reform measures associated with the process changing among Jews in the late nineteenth Name of Jewish emancipation were implemented, Ger- and early twentieth centuries differed from that A man Jews had expanded their outlook and mod- among Sierra Leone Creoles and other Euro- ified aspects of their social behavior through peanized blacks in colonial Africa. Here, name secular education and greater everyday contact changing was a means of resistance, part and with the culture of the non-Jewish world. They parcel of a broader manifestation of cultural had willingly adopted the majority language, nationalism that was emerging as a reaction to German, for business, accounting, documenta- the spreading wave of racism and its prejudicial tion, and conversational as well as literary ex- effects. In the 1880s it was not at all unusual pression. And outwardly, in the clothing they for colonial officers, travelers, and resident Eu- wore, they conformed to the fashions of their ropeans in British West Africa to speak of Cre- gentile economic peers. To be sure, anti-Semites oles and other European-educated Africans as often attributed distinctive physical character- “apes” and “niggers” and to insult and parody istics to Jews: big noses, “dark” complexions, them in articles and books. Richard Burton’s and weak, “stooped” bodies. But in effect, ste- popular Wanderings in West Africa and To the Gold reotypes notwithstanding, was it really possible Coast for Gold, G. A. L. Banbury’s Sierra Leone ; or, to distinguish between a German Jew and a The White Man’s Grave, and A. B. Ellis’s West Af- “true German” merely on the basis of external rican Sketches all shared a derogation of African appearances? The only identificatory marker capabilities as well as scorn for conversionism that continued to reveal Jews as Jews was the Jew- and its consequences. Racial discrimination, ish banner name they still bore. Levis, Cohens, moreover, now permeated the colonial profes- Hirschs, or Zweigs might be dressed in latest sional fields, commerce, and the civil-service German fashions and pronounce eruditely on bureaucracy, where African advance was being German art and music in elegant German prose impeded and blocked. “It is a matter beyond and speech, but their name made them instantly controversy,” wrote the Reverend Claudius May recognizable as Jews. ( Joseph [Ifacayeh] May’s eldest son) in 1887, For some Jews, changing from a banner everything today points to the fact that we are name to a less conspicuous one was a “flight” approaching a crisis in our existence as a com- indicating an effort to remove themselves from munity. . . . The successors of those who fifty a past identity, a desire, as Stefan Zweig had ob- years ago believed in giving us every opportu- served, “to dissolve themselves in the common nity to rise in the world, now believe that every

15. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobi- ography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 4 2 7 – 2 8 .

16. Memmi, Liberation of the Jew, 32. effort on our part should be nipped in the bud among Africans — Western- clothing — but 28 or regarded with indifference bordering on con- only as a first step toward gradual independence tempt. . . . They treat us as puppets not as men, from all European customs. As Claudius May, they look upon us as instruments which they one of the founding members, explained: “Dress may use when necessity requires and throw off Reform . . . would set itself as time advances to when necessity ceases to exist.17 grapple with other social and local questions. With the assimilationist/conversionist ideal Its intention is to become the line of advance of that they had embraced under attack, many Eu- all social improvements. . . . It is a society that ropeanized blacks began to turn an introspec- could become more and more the rallying point

tive eye on themselves and their society. If the for all who long for and are zealous for the in- of European world seemed to reject them, and dependent national existence of Africa and the

Comparative their advancement within it was made difficult Negro.”20 Asia,

Studies or impossible, was this perhaps because they did “Name Reformers,” for their part, encour- the and not belong there in the first place? Had they, as aged their fellow Creoles to “Africanize” the South Africa maintained by one of their primary intellectual “foreign” surname their parents or grandparents East spokesmen at the time, Edward Wilmot Bly­ had received, either in slavery or upon their lib- Middle den, “perverted” their “true racial personality” eration in Sierra Leone. Thus Kufileh Tubokhu through indiscriminate Europeanization, thus justified his own and the aims of perhaps deserving ridicule and prejudicial treat- the Name Reform Society in an open letter that ment?18 In Sierra Leone, Creoles like the Mays declared: scrutinized everything that defined “educated Every one of our Liberated Negro Parents had Africans,” not only their mode of education and a name given him in the land of his nativity by subjects learned, but also their social life and oc- which he was called and known from his birth cupations, preference for European-style dress, up to the time he arrived in the land of his exile. dwellings, diet, manner of parting and wear- He had a name full of meaning . . . preserving a ing their hair — even their very names — a n d c o n - tribal or racial individuality. When transported cluded that their community had lost “the flavor through the baneful traffic of the Slave Trade of their race.”19 Children and grandchildren of to this land, that name was exchanged for a for- liberated slaves, they had become people of cap- eign one, void of meaning, and insignificant to him . . . tive intellect, blindly imitating manners and cus- It is nought but a profound and crass ig- toms alien to the African environment. norance that thinks a man who would be civi- But having acknowledged the errors of the lized must forsake all that belongs and is natural past, members of the Creole society in Freetown to him, in exchange for what is foreign and un- now resolved to assert a new identity that was Af- natural.21 rican, not European. In 1887 they established However, despite a wave of initial enthu- a Dress Reform Society and a Name Reform siasm for these early manifestations of cultural Society to help them achieve this new transfor- nationalist assertiveness and resistance against mative goal. Attracting many of the same indi- racism, neither the Dress Reform nor Name Re- viduals into membership — mostly men but also form Societies were able to sustain themselves a small number of women — these organizations as organizations for very long. In large part this attempted to bring about practical, immediate, was prefigured by the ambivalence of their elite and long-range changes within the European- Creole founders. At this time in their history, ized African elite. Thus members of the Dress despite the growth of racial discrimination, Reform Society declared the avowed purpose of most still felt that their own life and career op- their organization to be the elimination of the portunities within Sierra Leone remained favor- most obvious external badge of Europeanization

17. SLWN, 26 February 1887. 19. I b i d . , 3 9 8 – 9 9 .

18. E. W. Blyden, Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race, 20. Methodist Herald (Freetown), 21 December 1887. 2nd ed. (London: W. B. Whittingham, 1889), 317 – 18, 21. Kufileh Tubokhu, letter to the editor, SLWN, 1 Octo- 3 9 8 – 9 9 , 4 3 3 – 4 4 . ber 1887. able. As such, they did not wish either to divest seen as a major threat by anti-Semites. Emanci- themselves completely of the European world pation and assimilation, the most hostile among 29 into which assimilation had taken them or to them maintained, were insidious blunders that embrace a larger, multiethnic African identity had permitted Jews — those alien, fundamen- that would blend them indistinguishably with tally immutable, less-than-human creatures other African people in the Sierra Leone hin- bent on world domination — access into the terland whom they had long come to consider German realm. Once inside, Jews transformed “less enlightened” than themselves. themselves in external appearance and observ-

This ambivalence was certainly reflected able characteristics in order to “blend in” indis-

in the names the “reformers” adopted — which tinguishably; they infiltrated themselves fur- Taken Spitzer were African only in a broad, generic sense. ther and further into the unsuspecting German Leo

While many of them were in the language of body politic until, like a cancerous growth, they Name a the Creoles’ forefathers and mothers, most would eventually take it over to destroy. Banner usually in Yoruba, others (like the name Afri- n a m e s — Jewish names — had remained as warn - Given, canus or Algerine) were merely manufactured ing signals to help identify and bring into vis-

to sound African. They were certainly not names ibility Jews who might otherwise pass unnoticed. Name generally found in Sierra Leone’s up-country. If these names continued to be permitted to be A Similarly, the new wardrobe adopted by the changed to “truly German Christian names,” members of the Dress Reform Society was a full- how could the enemy within be recognized and scale invention — somewhat like the short trou- revealed? sers and sleeveless country-cloth gowns worn by There is, of course, a certain irony to the non-Creole “bush” Africans of the neighboring fears and anger that name changing engendered interior, but still different enough so as not to in anti-Semites. If one examines name changes be confused with them. The new costume, al- among Jews, it is easy to note that in many of though a departure from the clothing that the them the rupture with the past that they im- members of the Creole elite and Europeans in plied is often quite incomplete. In the practice the colony normally wore, was sufficiently radi- where banner names were changed through cal to invite derision. Thus while the society’s mere shortening — for example, Rabinowitch members were initially willing to be innovative to Rabin, Davidovitch to David, or Steinberg to in the closed gatherings of their group’s meet- Stein — the transformation is hardly a radical ings, the strength of their convictions faded one. It is no more than a “half-hearted conceal- quickly when they tried to wear their “reformed ment,” to use a phrase Albert Memmi employed dress” in public. for it in his Liberation of the Jew — a “veil through Nonetheless, while the dress and name which it is easy to see if one cares.”22 Similarly, reform societies disappeared from the scene the frequently employed practice of “name rather rapidly as formal organizations, the “Af- translation” (often accompanying emigration ricanization” of names (and, eventually also, of from one country to another), like Weiss to clothing) continued over the years. Although White, Grünfeld to Greenfield, Wasserman to these symbolic practices elicited occasional Waterman, Aaron to Arendt or Ahrens, or Stein criticism as well as jokes, both from within Afri- to Stone or Steiner; or of “modified disguises,” can society and from European colonialists, the like Moses to Moos or Moser or Mosse or Mor- negative reactions generally remained within ris; or of “equivalent letter reversals,” like Aron the realm of the verbal. They were certainly to Nora; or “simplified anagrams” like SchLO- mild when compared with the much more viru- moVItch to SOLVI, ISrAeL to ALSI — all merely lent reactions to name changing among Jews in screen rather than break off connection to a the German-speaking lands of Central Europe. past identity. As Memmi observed: “Those who Here, the very fact that name changes po- translate or reverse their names . . . feel their tentially erased the banner name that had re- inner security has been preserved. Henceforth mained to identify assimilated Jews as Jews was shielded from non-Jewish eyes, they neverthe-

22. Memmi, Liberation of the Jew, 35. less remain intact, since they have abandoned more difficult by placing increasingly constrain- 30 nothing of themselves. Better still, they save self- ing restrictions and regulations on it. Thus the esteem, since they have conceded almost noth- right to a change of name on the occasion of con- ing to their oppressors.”23 version and baptism was abolished early in the However, these “incomplete” (or merely twentieth century in Prussia (1903), as was the “screened”) transformations of surnames are right to change a name upon the legal adoption also clearly indicative of continued adherence of a Jew by a German non-Jew (1907).25 When to a family group — of a desire to maintain famil- the decorated World War I veteran Leo Abra- ial continuity despite the felt need to conceal. hamson, a Jew from Berlin, applied to change

To abandon the family name is to leave the fam- his name to “Schmidt” in 1919, he received the of ily, to break away, to sever connection with kin- following response from the district president

Comparative folk, ancestors, familial legacy, and heritage — a in Potsdam: “If the applicant should . . . be ex- Asia,

Studies radical departure. And it is in this respect that posed to mocking remarks because of his name the and the Jewish efforts to “blend in” and “pass un- Abrahamson, the District President would, in South Africa noticed” without making that break can also be accordance with existing provisions, be in a po- East viewed as a form of resistance. They resemble sition to give full consideration to an applica- Middle the decisions made by so many ex-slaves in U.S. tion for a change of name. In this case he would history after the Civil War: to maintain as their be prepared to grant permission for a different surname, even after emancipation, the name of name such as, for example, Rosenfeld, Morgen- their initial owners or the owners of their fami- thau, Hirsch, Fuchs, etc. Purely Christian names lies of origin.24 Only in this way could connec- like Schmidt would, on the other hand, be out of tion to a family — often dispersed, broken up, the question.”26 sold off — be symbolically retained. Anti-Semitic publications relished in their But the very analogy between Jewish and increasingly aggressive efforts to publicly “re- African American practices also highlights veal” or “unmask” persons as Jews — or of Jewish a double bind, an inescapable trap. A link to descent — who, years or decades earlier perhaps, past identity, and familial continuity, could be had changed their name. Indeed, the efforts to achieved only by holding on to the “slave mas- expose and denounce “the Jewish camouflage”27 ter’s name” (in the African American instance) (as some termed name changing) of persons or through the partial retention of the banner who might otherwise be mistaken for “true name “given” to Jews during emancipation and Aryans” gained tremendous momentum in the marking them as other. In both cases, the con- early 1930s with the accession of the National nection to the legacy of “being named” — of Socialists to power in Germany (and the Ger- having a name imposed — remains. The alter- man Anschluss of Austria in 1938). In January native is no better: the invention of a new name 1938 a law “on the changing of surnames and (as exemplified in the Name Reform Society of first names” was published that made it compul- the Sierra Leone Creoles) may be a form of self- sory to “change back to the original” every Jew- affirmation, but it comes at the cost of familial ish change of name in the Reich — no matter when identity and continuity. it was granted, no matter whether the person involved was still alive or had already died!28 Realizing the difficulty of recognizing “less obvious” or “trans- formed” Jewish names, expert “consultants on In the German-speaking lands influenced by Jewish names” of the Reich Ministry of the Inte- growing anti-Semitic pressures, an initial re- rior drew up lists of hundreds of Jewish banner action to the perceived acceleration of Jewish names and their numerous modifications and name changing was to make the practice legally published them in book form as a “warning and

23. Ibid., 38. 25. Bering, Stigma of Names, 1 1 0 – 1 8 .

24. Herbert G. Gutman, “Somebody Knew My Name,” 26. Quoted in ibid., 133 – 34. in The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750 – 1925 27. Memmi, Liberation of the Jew, 41. (New York: Pantheon, 1976), 230 – 56, especially 253. 28. I b i d . , 1 4 4 – 4 5 . a guide.”29 But even while name-revocation pro- ceedings based on the 1938 law were being dealt 31 with, another decree was published compelling all persons defined as Jews (no matter what their fore- or surnames) to add the middle names “Is- rael” (for males) and “Sara” (for females). This measure, of course, now guaranteed the recog- nizability of Jews in all transactions requiring documentation or a . However, since it

could not help identify assimilated Jews as Jews Taken Spitzer in their everyday public street lives, Nazi ruling Leo officials in 1941 (in the course of the war) is- Name a sued an order compelling all Jews within terri- tories under German control to wear a visible Given, yellow star on their clothing. By means of the

yellow star, Jews were now made identifiable Name even from a distance. As in pre-emancipation A days, they were stigmatized visually — forced to wear a sign that symbolically branded and cat- egorized them as “other.” But now the purpose was not mere stigmatization — it was deporta- tion and eventually extermination.

Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film Shoah, a monu- mental exploration of the Final Solution, car- ries a moving epigram from Isaiah 56:5: “I will give them an everlasting name.” With these pow- erful words, Lanzmann exemplifies a common strategy in the remembrance of the Holocaust: to bring the victims into memory by preserving their names. In view of what I have discussed in this essay, however, this move carries a certain irony. Even though it is often treated as such, a name, as we have seen, is not an extension of the person it designates. This emerges most point- edly if one looks at social situations of domina- tion and subordination. Names are given, and often imposed, arbitrarily. They are contingent markers, changed according to circumstances and necessities, signs not of permanent identifi- cation but of continual negotiation with social, political, and ideological circumstances. They are shaped by forces of prejudice and persecu- tion. They can be read to tell stories of assimila- tion as well as of creative negotiation and resis- tance. Names are certainly not everlasting. On being called, we may respond. But we are not our names.

29. Bering, Stigma of Names, 146.