Alexander Beider
By Alexander Beider
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Opinion Why Do So Many Sephardic Jews Have Christian Lastnames?
There’s a curious phenomenon which may be unfamiliar to American Jews: Many Germans who have no Jewish ancestors commonly use surnames like Rosenberg, Rosenthal, Meier, Weill, Schuster and Landau. The same is true of Sephardic Jews: Names like Henriques, Lopez, Mendes, Rodriguez and Pereira are commonly used by both Sephardic Jews and by Iberian Christians…
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Opinion How Did Ashkenazi Jews End Up With Famous Non-Jewish Last Names?
It’s a fact: Ashkenazi Jews often bear surnames also used by Christians. What, if anything, does that tell us? Surnames used by a population often contain clues about the historical, linguistic and cultural past of the group. Certain names reveal migration patterns, others provide clues about the occupations of the ancestors and some names provide…
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Opinion How Old Is Yiddish? It’s Not As Old As You Think.
The question of how old Yiddish is has long preoccupied Yiddishists. And as it turns out, it’s a question that’s deeply connected to the nature of Yiddish as a language. On the one hand, you have the Jewish-oriented approach, advocated by Max Weinreich, a 20th century Yiddishist, which sees in modern Yiddish an inheritor of…
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Opinion No, Yiddish Is Not A Corruption Of German
To most people, Yiddish and German are closely related. The languages share many root words and grammatical structures, and most speakers of one language can at least understand an individual speaking the other. To early German Christian scholars, like to many laypersons today, Yiddish was seen as a corrupted and lesser form of German. But…
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Opinion Who Are The Jews Of France? Their Last Names Give A Clue
In my previous article, I wrote about the mysterious Jews of Italy, who seem to be neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardi. So it was natural to turn to a neighboring West European country, France, where the history of the Jewish communities is also quite non-linear. These communities pose a similar difficulty to the simplistic and popular…
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Opinion Neither Ashkenazi Nor Sephardi, Italian Jews Are A Mystery
One often hears about two main cultural groups of Jews: Ashkenazim and Sephardim. Some also speak of a third group, Mizrahim, for the Jews who lived in modern Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Georgia and Uzbekistan. But these groupings can be more complicated than they at first seem. There are three main ways of approaching the…
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Opinion How Important Are The Meanings Of Jewish Names?
In a previous piece in these pages, I discussed the importance of the semantics of traditional Jewish female names. In various countries, Jewish women have often had personal names with pleasant meanings in their local, everyday language. At first glance, that doesn’t seem to be the case for Jewish men. Indeed, since at least the…
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Opinion Why Did Jewish Women Traditionally Have Secular Names, But Not Men?
A few months ago, one of my acquaintances asked me why, in traditional Jewish communities, women tend to have secular names and men tend to have Hebrew names. This person is deeply knowledgeable about the Jewish culture and languages spoken by Jews, and she assumed it had something to do with the way that women…
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