Focus on Issues: Scholar on Russian Jewry Digs Deep to Find Origins of Jewish Surnames

Most weekends, Alexander Beider, a 31-year-old Soviet Jewish emigre living in Paris, follows a rigid routine.

Each Saturday, he bypasses the tourists outside the medieval Notre Dame Cathedral on his way to a nearby Polish-language library along the Seine, where he spends the morning in research.

Next, Beider, who is known among his friends as “Sasha,” visits the National Library and the finishes the day at a Yiddish library.

The object of all this effort, which he continues at home on Sunday and at his computer-programming job during spare moments, is the compilation of a dictionary of Polish-Jewish surnames that he hopes to have ready for publication later this year.

Beider’s previous work, the 760-page “Dictionary of Jewish Surnames From the Russian Empire,” was published in 1993 by the New Jersey-based genealogical publishing house Avotaynu Inc.

It provides details on the etymology and geographical distribution of some 50,000 surnames from the former Pale of Settlement, the area in western Russia where most Jews were concentrated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Although the book has won recognition as a monumental study within genealogical circles, it has received little attention from the scholarly or mainstream press to date.

It’s the most significant work on Jewish surnames to have been published since World War II,” said Zachary Baker, head librarian of New York’s YIVO Institute.

Some reviewers, writing in Jewish genealogical journals, have been even more lavish in their praise, calling it the most important work on Jewish surnames to appear in a century.

What distinguishes Beider’s dictionary from other studies of Jewish surnames is his reliance on original archival material. He is dogmatic in his insistence that the derivation of a surname can be correctly understood only in reference to the geographical location and linguistic culture in which it first appeared.

Beider based the work on an exhaustive study of Russian voters’ lists from 1906, 1910 and 1912 that he found in the former Lenin Library in Moscow. The lists, he says, provide not only the names but also their geographic distribution — information he regards as essential.

“The first and most important principle I developed for may etymological research is that names must be studied near the places where they originated,” Beider said. “In other words, one should document in what region a name appears for the first time. Geographic distribution is crucial for etymology — it’s the basis fir all other investigations.”

Few scholars have examined historical texts and linguistic sources as carefully as Beider in relation to this topic. Some have speculated on the influence of Jewish sacred texts, suggesting that a high proportion of Jewish surnames came from the Torah.

“The necessity for surnames was imposed on Jews by Christian authorities, so not all Jewish names can be found in Jewish sources — that approach is wrong,” Beider said.

Onomatics, the study of the origins of names, is “a branch of linguistics, so an analysis of suffices and dialects of languages used in an area must be taken into account,” he said.

A polyglot with the ability to speak Russian, English and French, and to read German, Yiddish, Polish and Ukrainian, eider boasts a lifelong interest in science.

Before arriving in France in 1990, he earned a doctorate in mathematics at a prestigious Moscow scientific academy, where he trained as a statistician. That fact quickly becomes apparent to readers of the dictionary’s 90-page introduction, which features charts that rank the prevalence of the most common Jewish surnames in various regions of the former Soviet Union.

Hailed as a breakthrough in the study of Jewish surnames, the scholarly, if somewhat dense, introduction “is the definitive explanation of the origin and evolution of Jewish surnames in the Russian Empire,” said Gary Mokotoff, publisher of the genealogical journal Avotaynu as well as a growing number of books under the Avotaynu imprint.

“What Sasha has demonstrated is that Jewish surnames were not randomly given. People had visions of some anti-Semitic registrar handing out surnames to Jews, but invariably it was the Jewish community that assigned the names in Russia,” said Mokotoff.

Until the Napoleonic era, roughly two centuries ago, most Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia were not legally required to use surnames. Most were known by patronymics (names derived from the name of a father) such as Mordecai ben Tsvi, according to ancient Hebrew custom.

Attempting to integrate the ghettoized Jews of Europe into Christian society, Hapsburg ruler Joseph the Tolerant issued a decree in 1787 that required Jews to adopt surnames in the Christian style. Many similar laws were enacted across Eastern Europe in the early 19th century.

Although the adoption of surnames by Jews was widespread, little is known about the actual process.

“The Jews as bearers of these names were not very interested in their names – – and likewise the scholars,” said Beider. “Except in Germany, there have been almost no major scientific works produced on Ashkenazi Jewish surnames. For Eastern Europe, the field of Jewish onamastics has been completely neglected.”

It has long been observed that many Jewish surnames derive from place names, occupations, patronymics or matronymics, Hebrew acronyms, biblical sayings, even physical characteristics. Some names like “Goldman” (which derives from “gold”) or “Rosenberg” (based on “rose”) were taken because of positive associations they connote.

However, traditionally, Jewish onomastics has been the combination of science and speculation.

Until Beider, for example, no one had recognized the inordinately high proportion of matronymic-based surnames arising in a few localities, suggesting that the local kahal, or Jewish community officials, had assigned the names. And few others have discovered so many surnames that are unique to particular localities.

During their long pre-publication correspondence, Beider informed Mokotoff that his surname was unique to a district south of Warsaw, something Mokotoff had already established through his own research.

But Mokotoff had a more difficult problem regarding another family surname, Taratotsky. An American self-styled expert in Jewish surnames had suggested a possible derivation — “but it was wrong, it had been just a wild guess,” said Mokotoff.

As one of a multitude of clandestine tests that he conducted on Beider’s research, Mokotoff asked him about the name. Beider replied that he had never heard of it.

“As far as I was concerned he gave the correct answer — it’s a name of unknown origin,” said Mokotoff. “I was very impressed: Here was a scientist who was willing to say he didn’t know the answer. When Sasha doesn’t know, he says so. But the fact is, he knows 99 percent of the time.”

Beider is utilizing 19th-century Jewish civil records, post-Holocaust yizkor or remembrance books, and other original sources in compiling the forthcoming “Dictionary of Jewish Surnames From the Kingdom of Poland,” which should contain some 25,000 names when completed.

If Jewish onomastics seems far removed from the sort of task for which he was trained, Beider counters that it is perhaps the only topic that now interests him scientifically.

“In Jewish onomastics,” he said, “I have found a domain where I can apply my scientific methods.”