What Tbel Mean and How Tbel Det,eloped JUST AS JEWS IN DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE WORLD HAD THEIR OWN LANGUAGES, which were distinguished from t}re speech of t-he non-Jews but incomprehensi- ble to each other, they also had names that the local non-Jews thought of as Jew ish, even though Jews elsewhere might not have recognized them. Many of the same patterns of name formation can be found in widely separated and unrelated cultures, though there are a few that are distinctively Jewish. To further compli- cate matters, sometimes a name that was seen as typically Jewish in one area might be considered a non-Jewish name elsewhere. Originalty, in almost every society, a name had a specific meaning known to those giving the name. Sq in the Bible there are many passages of the type "And 70 ,@. 75, 1r*,rn Cultural Tapcstrl Names W 7r his hand was grasping the heel of his ['akev] brothe4, so they calred his name Jacob 1204J was not a family eitheq, "son [Ya'akovl."This pattern is familiar to name merely Greek for of Maimon." Among us from Native American names we customariry that in the as translate into English, such Jews Muslim countries well as in Italy, family names began to appear in as Sitting Bull and crazy Horse, but was originally virtually it the later Middle Ages, as shown by the names of such great rabbis as Joseph Caro universal. This contrasts with the in way names are derived many westem societies today, where [1488 1575J, Itzhak Abravanel (1437-1508), and Ovadia Sforno [c.1470- they are frequentiy borrowed from eign languages. for_ c.1550) AmongAshkenazic Jews, family names were In our society the name is yust still largely absent in the a series of soun&, and it is for George unusual eighteenth century. the or John, Mary or Alice to know the Take examples of three famous religious and intellectual originar meaning of their names. ieaders of eighteenth century Ashkenazic Jewry: the Ba'al Shem Tov [d. 1760), else and where gov_ founder of the Hasidic movement; the Vilna Ga'on [d. 1797), a great talmudic et by with only a sin_ scholar and the chief opponent of the Hasidim; and Moses Mendelssohn olten have to add a (1729 1786), the first important Jewish Enlightenment philosopher in Ger- other people many. None of them had a family name. Even the seeming exception, Mendels- family or hereditary names, but could instead be sohn, was the son of Mendel Sofer [Mendel the scribe). Whenever he signed his generation. Throughout name in Hebrew, it was as Moshe Dessau of Dessau), never as Mendels- much of th istory of the r"wish p.ople,gn:THJ; [Moses names simply did not exist. sohn. In the Bibre' Most modern individuars are generally identified societieq howeve4, sooner or later, have had to require their in- by a single name that has a clear meaning in the Hebrew1"r,g,r"g", habitants to take permanent hereditary family names for bureaucratic purposes. v;trrr"i i"rr" win laugh,,), Racher David yonatan [,,ewe,,], In some ["beloved,,J, (,.God has given,J, countries the taking of family names was relatively recent. In a few; such Naomi (,.pleasantness,J, and on. If more identification so as present-day Iceland, family are is needed, tt i, i. ,rr,r"tty names still not used. Instead all Icelanders have provided by giving a father,s name: Moses surnames ending in -son or -donir, which are preceded by their father's given son ofNun ben Nun], or fYehoshua name. Among Europeans, the Ashkenazic Jews were one of the last groups to sionally tlre Bible gives a whole gene take fixed family names, in most cases between l78l and 1835. benyair ben Shime'i In their selection of given or first names, Jews could choose ben Kish. Sometimes the tribal names of either is added. But ffi51l' Hebrew or vernacular origin. Even chose nowhere is there a family name. "",,"T"llii'" when they names of Hebrew origin, The lack of family names these often difFered from region to region. Such Hebrew male given names as continued throughout tre tarmudic into " period and well the Middle Ages. Great leaderg , Hai, Rahamim, Saadia, Ovadia, and Nissim and female names like Mazaltov and scribed by their occupationq fathers, Simha fthe latter a male name amongAshkenazim) are typical of Jews of Muslim name. Such countries are leading lights of the earlv r but virtually unknown amongAshkenazic Jews. The names Shraga, Shim'on ben yochai, and yoch".r* H"i", Yerachmiel, Shifra, and Basya seem more typically Ashkenazic and are rare in family names' Rashi, tre great medieval Muslim countries. Even when Jews took vernacular names like those of non- commentator in northern France I 105J, was really named [d. Jews, they traditionally avoided names tfrat had non-Jewish religious connota- Rabbi Shl he son of yitzhak, abbreviation and Rashi was just the of those names. The nonides,,in tions (e.g., Christopher, Mary and John in Christian countries or Ali, Aysha, and Moses Maimonides (1135_ Muhammed in Muslirn ones). Names W /) guage(s) spoken in the area. Returning to the example ofAbraham son ofJacob mentioned above, in Hebrew this would be Abraham ben ya'akov. But most Jewish surnames were vernacular rather than Hebrew Among Ashkenazic Jews who spoke Yiddish, the surname wouid become Jacobs or Jacobson. In Eastern Europe, where most Ashkenazic Jews lived, governments often used Slavic translations yiddish of the surnames, so Jacobson wourd be written in Polish records as Jakubowicz and pronounced "yakubo'vitch.,,The -owicz end- ing would have varied spellings in other Eastern European languages, including -ouii (Czech), -ouics _ozicz [HungarianJ, and (Romanian], but would still be pronounced "ovitch." German scribes might transcribe the name in the form - oruitz. Russian officials used the cyrillic alphabet; when Jews came from Russia to the United States, they sometimes spelled their patterns of Family last names phonetically in Name Formation English with -ouitch. Some Jews in the Caucasus, Bukhara, and the Crimea were given surnames with 6 the Russian endings -o,itch and -oz when the Rus- sians conquered their homelands in the nineteenth century. The development The name ,,son,,was of surnames, which tumed Jacobson could take many other forms as well In into fbmily names, tends to forlow Iran similar patterns expressed in names in many countries The four types with the endings -za.deh or -ian.rn Georgia itwas -eshuili; of derivation that are most in_ ternational in distribution in Arabig as in are based o" th. parent,s Hebrew, it was ben (ot ibn) and preceded rather than folowed if ; name fpatronymics and matronymicsJ' [2J occupation, the name. Itaiian Jews often used the ending [3J nicknames [personal characteristicsJ -i, as in Abrami or Israeli. Some place , and (4) names' In the English language, Moroccan Jews have names based on the Berber for nsta.ig we can find the patronymic prefix O_ffor in_ amples following ex- from each category: Williams, stance, Ohana, son of HannaJ, almost like tl-re Irish preffx in [lJ Johrrrorr, (2) Carpenteq, Farmer, Smith, O,Donnell and [3) Shortea Blaclg.vVhite, O'Malley. and (4) Lincoln, Scott, Fjanders These four complicating basic categories are also to be the situation still further was the fact that many Jewish found among Jews, though the dis- ver- tributions and naculars specific exampres differ wideiy. (especially Yiddishl loved to give vemacular translations or nicknames In the earry stages, sumames were not yet hereditary' for Hebrew names So if Jacob had a son named from the Bibre and Tarmud. Among Ashkenazic Jews the Abraham, that son wouid be called Abraham Jacobson, but nicknames for Jacob were yanker and Koppel, if Abraham had a son named Moseg fiom which arose such family called he would be Moses Abramson. Later on tJre family names as Yanl<elovich and Koppelson. Sometimes biblicar n"-", name became hereditary with the *".. strange result that women can have ".ro.i- family names like Jacobson or Ben (son of Chaiml. chaim The patronymic, or father's name, is a very common form of Jewish name famiry ln many parts of the worrd, but its specific form depends on the locar ran_ the wolf fwolf in Yiddish, Volk in Sravic ranguages, Farkas in Hungarian) from Namts @ /t 74 @ Tbe Jewish CulturalTopest"l Hebrew, like Chait Melamed Hazan [cantor), and Kat- which come the names Wolfson, Volkovich, Wou( and so on. Naphtali was associ- from [tailor], [teacher), but most are derived from the vernacular. For that reason, Jewish ated with the gazelle [Zvi in Hebrew, Hirsh or Hersh in Yiddish), creating such zoff [butcherJ, in various parts of the world do not sound related even when they have patronymics as Hershenson and Herszkowicz ["son of little Hersh"). The Ashke- names same meaning. Among Ashkenazic Jews, the most common trade immortal- nazic family name Moscowitz has nothing to do with the city of Moscow; rathel, it the in family names is that of the taiior. Besides Chait, mentioned above, there is comes from the Pollsh Moszek/Moszko flittle Moses) Other animals frequently ized (from German or Yiddish, sometimes Americanized to Snyder), referred to in Ashkenazic personal names, and later in family names, are the bear Schneider and Portnoy and, in Russian, Medved Kravrtz Polish Krawiec), Kravchrk (from Llkrainian], ffrom [Ber, used in such family names as Berenson, Berkowitz [from Russianl. There are also many roundabout ways of including the tailoring profes- and Medvedev), the falcon [Falk, Sokol, Sokolovsky), and the eagle (AdlerJ name. Examples of this are Nadelman or Nudelman (needle- Sometirnes nonbiblicai Hebrew names would be translated into the vernacu- sion in a family Yiddish Sher, "scissors"], and Fingerhut fthimbleJ' Other lar and then develop further.