What’s in a name?

How the Jewish surname came to be.

By ANTON FELTON
Emperor of Austria- Hungary 521 (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Emperor of Austria- Hungary 521
(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Are the names that our parents give us, or those we give ourselves, important? The significance of a name, many would say, is that a person or a thing hardly exists without one; indeed, some philosophers argue that nothing at all exists without a name.
Jewish names are significant because of the information and insights they yield about both our personal forebears and Jewish history generally.
From time immemorial, Jews have given biblical names to their children in the belief that the name will determine the child’s destiny. Examples of such names include four of my own children: Hephzibah (my only delight is in thee), Abigail (joy), Gideon (a judge) and Nathaniel (God-given).
The cultural continuity of biblical names was assured by two customs: the naming of a newborn baby after a deceased close relative, and – to facilitate identification when there were so many identical names around – the addition of “ben” or “bat” (son or daughter) after the first name and before the father’s or mother’s name.
Names change. Right from the beginning, Abraham’s, Sarah’s and Jacob’s names changed to indicate their new status. Later, in the talmudic period, a change of name became suspect, being a sign of assimilation into the host culture. In the Middle Ages, the name of a very sick person would be formally changed in the hope that it would confuse and redirect the Angel of Death.
As society became more complex – and, in the 18th century, as the walls of the ghettos started to crumble – the patterns of nomenclature changed, and the adoption of surnames or family names became more common.
These often denoted the families’ places of origin. Many of the Jews of Turkey who retained surnames like Toledano or De Leon, for example, recalled their families’ old homes in Spain before the expulsion in 1492.
Then, at the end of the 18th century, the general tendency to acquire family names was abruptly accelerated and enforced.
Up until that point, the existence of an individual Jew had been of no interest to his host culture, for it was the community as a whole, via its leaders, that had been governed and taxed. But following two revolutions – the Industrial and the French – the rulers of Europe became desperate both for more money to pay for their wars and for more young men to fight them. These new needs, the requirements of the modern state, could only be met by changing the relationship of control, from control through the community to direct control of the individual. As such, identification of the individual became essential.
In 1787, the Emperor of Austria-Hungary decreed that Jews must have surnames. Civil servants armed with lists of possible names were sent to the shtetls to enforce the law. Soon France, Prussia and, in effect, Russia followed suit.
But with corruption endemic in their bureaucracies, everything had a price. Nice names – the names of precious stones, metals or flowers, like Gold, Silber, Diamante, Rosenthal and Lilienthal – were costly but still cheap compared to stylish nomenclature such as Kluger (wise) and Froehlich (happy). If you were poor or facing a bored or hostile civil servant, you could get stuck with a name like Galgenstrick (gallows rope), Eselkopf (donkey head), Taschengregger (pickpocket) or Schmaltz (grease). (In 1938, the Nazis introduced similar legislation; there was a choice of 185 names, mainly derogatory, for men, and eight for women.) Many Jews settled for patronyms like Jacobson, Aaronson and Israelson. Others would Germanize their tribal names, as with Levitan and Cohenstein.
Some Jewish names had always been constructed from acronyms. Ben-Rabbi Nachman, for instance, was abbreviated to Baron or Baran, and Ben-Rabbi Kalam to Brock. Likewise, Zak, Sack and Sachs come from zera kedoshim (the seed of holy ones). Other acronym names include Shwab (shohet ve-bodek, or ritual slaughterer and inspector), Katz (Cohen tzedek), Yavitz (Jacob Ben-Zvi) and Segal (segan Levi’im).
Other Jewish names described places of origin – such as Brody, Breslau, Epstein, Ginsberg, Landau, Posner, Dreyfus (Trier) and Shapiro (Speyer) – or occupations – such as Gartner (gardener) and Schneider (cutter). Still others stem from physical characteristics, such as Weiss (white), Schwartz (black), Gross (big) and Klein (small). Some family names often followed the family’s natural surroundings, like Bach (stream), Baum (tree) and Berg (mountain).
(Similarly, by far the most common name in mountainous Japan is Yuma, or mountain, whereas in gentler England, the telephone directory records many Hills but few Mountains.) In the 1790s, England’s George III, reviewing the Jews who had flocked to join the British Army in the wars against Napoleon, heard the roll-call in Hyde Park and remarked on the large number of recruits with the names of powerful animals like Wolf, Lion or Bear.
Some names followed from the father’s occupation, as in Rabinowitz, which means the son of the rabbi. Take my father’s name – I did. His original name, Felbrodt, was probably functionally a derivation of “fel” (Yiddish for an animal skin, or pelt) and “Brodt,” referring to Brody, a substantial town in Galicia in the Ukraine that had a significant Jewish population dating back to the 15th century.
One of my father’s forebears would probably have been the skinner or the furrier from Brody.
In dumping Felbrodt for Felton, I wonder whether he realized he was merging himself and his heirs with the Feltons of Worcester, minor English gentry with roots going back to the 12th century.
That family’s greatest luminaries were one 16th-century Felton executed for nailing the Papal Bull of excommunication of Elizabeth I to the gates of Lincoln’s Inn, and another Felton hanged, drawn and quartered in the 17th century for assassinating the Duke of Buckingham.
But then, what’s really in a name? Winsomely, Shakespeare advises, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Yet over the millennia so very many of us (including Lev Bronstein and David Gruen) have understood that it is not only ourselves, but the worlds in which we live that decide what we shall be called.