Aaron Demsky, professor emeritus of Bar-Ilan University’s Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry, has dedicated his professional life to the study of Jewish names.
By CARL HOFFMANA JEW in Iraqi Kurdistan, 1930s. Demsky notes that Jews from such places as Kurdistan, Yemen and India did not have hereditary family names at all until they immigrated to Israel.(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Without any preamble, lead-in or introduction, the book bluntly begins by naming names: “Now these are the names of the children of Israel who came to Egypt; each man and his household came with Jacob: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah; Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin; Dan, Naphtali, Gad, and Asher.” Accordingly, the second book of the Bible, called “Exodus” in English, is known in Hebrew as “Shemot,” or “Names.”Aaron Demsky, professor emeritus of Bar-Ilan University’s Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry, has dedicated his professional life to the study of Jewish names – given names, surnames, Biblical names, Second Temple period names, Diaspora names, and place names mentioned in the Bible. Unbeknown to most of us, the study of names itself has a name, “onomastics,” and Prof. Demsky has made Jewish onomastics a recognized and widely respected field of Jewish history and social studies.Demsky made aliyah with his family from New York in 1965. Having studied at both Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary, he received his doctorate from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and taught at Bar-Ilan University for 40 years in the department of Jewish history. In 1991, he founded and now directs the Project for the Study of Jewish Names at Bar-Ilan University, and has organized 14 biennial conferences, which have brought together scholars from all over the world, in all aspects of research focusing on Jewish names.“That includes linguistics, Jewish literature, social studies, migration patterns, in all languages spoken by Jewish people,” he says. This year’s conference featured 19 speakers and attracted Jewish name specialists from Romania, Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, Serbia, Canada and the United States, in addition to scholars from Israel.So how did he acquire this fascination with Jewish names?“It emanated from my studies of the biblical Book of Chronicles, which begins with nine chapters of genealogies which are usually skipped over,” he says. “But I began to study those genealogies and realized that the study of names was a useful focus of study – even going beyond a purely Biblical vein into all areas of Jewish history. It’s become for me an overall area of interest in the social history of the Jewish people. One of the advantages that we have over other cultures is that we have a documented history for 3,500 years. So we can see how Biblical names have evolved over the generations in different communities.”DEMSKY’S ENTHUSIASM for the subject becomes contagious as he explains how onomastic scholars identify the locations of places mentioned in the Bible. Many can be found almost “frozen in amber” in contemporary Arabic place names. He explains, “When we study onomastics, there are two major areas. One is the names of people, called anthroponymy.The other is the names of places, toponymy. As for the names of places in the Bible, around the year 1300 there was a rabbi named Estori Haparhi who came from Provence to Eretz Israel and lived in Beit She’an. He was the father of the study of Biblical toponymy. This was pre-scientific, but he realized that Biblical names are preserved in Arabic, among the Arabs who were living in Eretz Israel. Estori went around the whole country, seven years in total – two years in the Galilee alone – and identified around 100 Biblical places with contemporary, early 14th century, Arab names. For example, he passed by a town called Silon and was able to identify it as the Biblical Shiloh. There are many other examples.”Demsky says that place-name identification today is much more scientific, with each identification corroborated by linguistics, available documents and, of course, archaeology.Demsky is particularly interesting on the subject of Jewish family names. He notes that there are no fewer than 16,000 hereditary family names in the Meni de Shalit Archive in the Diaspora Museum, and that with most of these were acquired relatively recently. Most Sephardi surnames, for example, were chosen after the 1492 Expulsion from Spain as a way of maintaining community identity. Most Ashkenazi surnames, those of Jews from Central and Eastern Europe, were taken – and sometimes imposed – between in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the result of governmental policies to register their Jewish subjects, and particularly in Russia to draft them into the czar’s army. In his published introduction to the Diaspora Museum archive, Demsky lists hundreds of Jewish surnames, with exhaustive descriptions of their origins and meanings.
He also notes that Jews from such places as Kurdistan, Yemen and India did not have hereditary family names at all until they immigrated to Israel. And the early years of the State of Israel was a time in which many Ashkenazi immigrants from Europe were Hebraicizing their family names as potent expressions of Zionism. Some prime examples of this were David Grun to Ben-Gurion, Moshe Shertok to Sharett, Levi Shkolnik to Eshkol, Yitzhak Shimshelevich to Ben Zvi and Meir Berlin to Bar-Ilan.Asked if there is any truth to the old story that antisemitic officials in Central and Eastern Europe sometimes imposed insulting surnames on Jews and then charged them money to change the names to something less offensive, Demsky replies, “This is a story that reoccurs. It’s obvious that if you have the authority to write down names, there might be have been people who exploited that position. But it’s maybe more of an urban legend. Let’s put it that way. But there are jokes about this, too. There’s one where a fellow comes home and says, ‘Well we now have a family name. It’s “Knocker.”’ Everyone says, ‘So what’s so good about that?’ And the fellow answers, ‘Listen, I had to pay a lot of money for that “n.”’ This is Jewish humor, and an aspect of Jewish onomastics.”HE ALSO discusses the relative fluidity of Ashkenazi names, how names changed in 19th-century Russia, for example, to avoid the drafting of young Jewish boys into the army, as well as names changing to accommodate the life and languages of countries to which Jews were moving and making new homes.Sephardi family names are a different story, Demsky says, based on an entirely different impulse.“It was a very different situation with Sephardim, and by ‘Sephardim’ I mean specifically Jews from Spain and Portugal. While family names, or the idea of family names, were imposed on the Ashkenazi community, for the Sephardim we’re talking about self-definition, a desire to preserve that aspect of their identity. So here we have names like Toledano, Sevilla, these names preserving where they’re coming from.”As he discusses the various aspects of onomastics, Demsky repeatedly emphasizes his view that names are more than just names.“We’re touching here on larger topics,” he says. “Names are an aspect of identity. This is common to all people, and particularly important to us. When you hear our names, you’re hearing family histories. You’re hearing identity, and sometimes a desire to change that identity, as with the Hebraicizing of names in the new State of Israel.”“Look how much the High Holidays emphasize inscribing one’s name for perpetuity, for eternity, for good deeds,” Demsky says. “It is said that there is a heavenly ledger book, ‘The Book of Life,’ and we pray to be inscribed in it. These elements are repeated motifs in the High Holiday liturgy.”“A traditional custom in many families is naming a child after a grandparent, whether they be Sephardic and the grandparent is alive, or Ashkenazi and the grandparent is dead,” he says. “In either case it’s a meaningful way of honoring one’s father and mother. It also expresses and the idea of the continuity of Jewish tradition and that name that our child bears makes him or her a living link in the life of our people.”“I’ve dedicated my academic life toward developing this field,” Demsky says. “It really has great implications for not only our personal and family identity, but for our religious and national identity as well.”
