Kinnui

A kinnui (כנוי) or kinui (translated as "nickname")^[1][2] is the secular name held by Jewish people^[3][4] in relation to the language spoken by the country they reside in, differing from their Biblical Hebrew name.

The religious name is in Hebrew (for example, Moses ben Maimon;^[5] Joseph ben Gershon;^[6] Shlomeh Arieh ben David HaLevi;^[7] Gershom ben Judah; Devorah bat Avraham), and the secular name is in whatever language is in use in the geographic locality (for example, Isaiah Berlin;^[8] Solomon Lyon Barnard;^[9] Sigmund Freud;^[10] Golda Meir;^[11] Etta Cone ^[12]).

History

When Jews arrived in a new country, a secular name was often chosen from the local language. In Central and Eastern Europe, Yiddish^[13] was the secular language, so a Hebrew name was used in religious and Jewish community contexts and a Yiddish name was used (the kinnui) in secular contexts. In France, the secular name was in French; in Spain in Spanish, in North Africa and the middle East in Arabic,^[14] in ancient Babylon, the kinnui was in Babylonian and so on. Some kinnuim (the Hebrew plural of "Kinnui")are based on synonyms (words that have the same or similar meaning but are spelled differently); for example, Mikhail = Yekhiel; Menahem = Mendel; Asher = Anshel. Some Kinnuim represent the ancestral tribes of Israel,^[15] referencing the animal-like attributes of four of the sons of Jacob^[16] and one of his grandsons: Judah, the lion (e.g. the family name Lyon, Loewe); Benjamin, the wolf (e.g. the family name Woolf); Naftali, the deer (e.g. the family names Hirsch,Hersch, Harris); and Issachar,^[17] the ass ^[18](or the bear) (e.g. the family names Bar, Baer, Barell, Barnard, Bernhardt, Berthold, Schulter ^[19]); plus Ephraim, the fish (e.g. the family name Fish).^[20]

The Austrian Emperor, Joseph II Habsburg, who controlled a substantial part of Europe in the late 18th century, was the first head of government in Europe to require Jews to register a permanent family surname. His decree required (on pain of substantial fines for non-compliance) that this surname be (or, at least, sound like) German.^[21] A translation of this 1787 decree is published on the Polish-Jewish genealogy website, Shoreshim.^[22] The frequency of German surnames for Jews in the Russian Empire, may be due to migration from Western Europe. Thus, Jews were compelled to take surnames with a German sound, and usually, they could not choose them. These arbitrary family names generally had no relationship with either the trade or craft, nor the physical attributes, nor the geographic origin of the persons so named. For example, Schwarz, Klug, Weiss, Gross, Klein, Fein and Roth. There are also many names formed with two German roots such as Morgenstern, Morgenstein, Apfelbaum, Birnbaum, Rosenberg, Rosenblum, Rosenbaum, Weinbaum, Weinberg, Bernstein. The spelling of these names varied considerably, especially when they migrated through Poland or Russia.^[23]

Subsequently, in 1808, Napoleon^[24] returned from victories in Germany and proclaimed the religious freedom of the Jews, granting them political rights in France. He also demanded that all Jews within his empire take a family name. Many Jews were still known only by a Hebrew name or "shem hakodesh" (hakodesh meaning "the sacred"; shem meaning "name") (for example, Yaakov ben Yehudah). Under this directive, many Jews took names derived from towns where they traded, such as Hamburger, Berliner, Mainz or Frankfurter, while others used occupations as names such as Miller, Schuster, Schneider, Cantor or Bronfenbrenner. Others used characteristics, such as Friedman, or used a patronymic or tribal name such as Jacobs or Benjamin. When Napoleon conquered Westphalen, a German principality, he imposed these regulations on the Germans as well.^[25]

Among Arabic-speaking Jews, Arabic names were adopted, such as Ḥassan, Abdallah, Sahl; or Hebrew names were translated into Arabic, for example, Eleazar into Manẓur, Ovadia into Abdallah, Maẓliaḥ into Maimun.^[26] "Ibn" (analogous to the Hebrew "ben") was used to form a family name. Examples of this formula are Ibn Aknin, Ibn Danan, Ibn Laṭif. In the Jews of Arab lands a linguistic mixing happened and names appear with both Hebrew and Arabic elements in the same name, for example, Abraham Ibn Ezra.^[27] A peculiarity of the Arabic names is the "kunyah," the by-name given to a father after the birth of his son, by which the father is named after the son (using the prefix "Abu"). For example Abu al-Walid is a "kunyah" or by-name for the father of a son named Jonah. "Abu" also forms family names, as in the case of Abudarham, or Aboab.^[28] The Arabic article "al" appears in quite a number of names, as in Al-Ḥarisi.^[29]

Usage

The secular name is the name that appears in civil documents. The "shem hakodesh" usually appears only in connection with Jewish religious observances, for example, a record of circumcision (brit^[30]), in a marriage contract (ketubah ^[31]), a writ of divorce (get^[32]) or on a memorial stone.

References