Main contributor: Maor Malul
Sephardic Jewish surnames
Sephardic Jewish surnames

Sephardic Jewish surnames are those surnames used by Jews who descend from those expelled from Spain and Portugal in 1492 and 1496, respectively, who spread to the Low Countries, the Ottoman Empire, parts of North Africa, France, Italy, the colonial possessions of the Netherlands and England in the Caribbean as well as Brazil and the Venezuelan city of Coro in Venezuela, where they set up the oldest Jewish cemetery in continuous use in the Americas.[1]

A very small, yet affluent, number of Portuguese Jews emigrated to British India from The Netherlands and settled in Madras (today's Chennai) and an even smaller number in Cochin, where they traded with the longer-established Cochin Jews; where they were known as the Paradesi ("foreign") Jews.

History of Sephardic Jewish surnames

Unlike most other Jewish communities, hereditary family names have been used by Sephardic Jews for centuries. In the Iberian peninsula, surnames began being used around the 10th century CE, with almost everyone having a hereditary surname by the 15th century, regardless if they were Catholic, Muslim or Jewish.[2]

Sephardic Jewish naming conventions

Tombstone of Abraham Da Fonseca Meza. Jodensavanne, Suriname, 1748.
Tombstone of Abraham Da Fonseca Meza. Jodensavanne, Suriname, 1748.

Among Sephardic Jews, the firstborn son is named after the paternal grandfather and the second male child is named after the maternal grandfather; the first daughter is named after the paternal grandmother and the daughter is named after the maternal grandmother; after those, the next children's names are alternated between the paternal uncle or aunt or the maternal uncle/aunt. Unlike Ashkenazi Jews, Sephardic Jews do name their children after a living relative.[3] However, in the case a grandparent (paternal or maternal) or sibling was deceased, their name would often take precedence over a living relative. Some Spanish expelees, perhaps influenced by Catholic customs, named children after their own parents.

Some Sephardic Jews, especially the most affluent conversos, who were extensively exposed to Catholic influence, followed the Spanish custom of joining together the paternal and maternal names, thus creating new surnames like Aboab da Fonseca, Teixeira de Mattos, Lopes de Oliveira, Bueno de Mesquita, Lopes Cardozo, Cohen-Henríquez, Mendes Henriques, Solis-Cohen and Mendes Nasi.[4][5] Upon reverting to normative Judaism after leaving Portugal for cities in northwestern Europe, they carried the custom with them, thus creating new family hereditary names.

Sephardic Jewish surnames of patronymic origin

There are Sephardic Jews share the same patronymic surnames with other Portuguese and Spanish non-Jews, like the Spanish patronymics Henríquez, Fernández, Rodríguez, Álvarez and Méndez and their Portuguese versions Henriques, Fernandes, Rodrigues, Alvares and Mendes; however, as these became mainstream Spanish and Portuguese surnames after the colonization of the Americas and also through adoption of these surnames by New Christians, it can be very difficult to research them and distinguish from one another.

Sephardic Jewish surnames of occupational origin

A small number of Sephardic Jewish surnames had an occupational origin, like Camhi ("flour merchant"), Bardugo (from "Verdugo", executioner), Roffe (from the Hebrew word for "physician") and Abenatar ("son of the spice merchant"), which is of Arabic origin. Many other Jews took surnames with the Hebrew prefix ben- ("son of") after their arrival to the Ottoman Empire, just as their peers in Morocco. Some of these surnames are Bendjoya, Benaroya, Benveniste, Benezra and Benyakar.

Sephardic Jewish surnames of toponymic origin

Tombstone of Rabbi Raphael Carigal. Jewish Cemetery of Bridgetown, Barbados. 1777
Tombstone of Rabbi Raphael Carigal. Jewish Cemetery of Bridgetown, Barbados. 1777

The best-known[6] Sephardic Jewish surnames reflect the region, city or town of origin of the original bearer of the surname, and sometimes with a different spelling to the one used in Modern Spanish or even using the spelling form in other Iberian languages like Portuguese, Galician, Aragonese or Catalan. Among the most common toponymic Sephardic Jewish surnames are:

Sephardic Jewish surnames of descriptive origin

A significant part of the Sephardic Jewish surnames are associated with a personality or physical trait, and sometimes even with an animal whose behavior resembled the one of the original bearer of the surname, like Cattan (from the Hebrew קטן, "small"), Albo ("white"),[6] Petit ("small"), Amarillo ("yellow"), Bueno ("good"), Senior (from Señor, "sir") Moreno ("dark-skinned"), Pardo, ("brown") Maduro ("mature, middle-aged"), Fresko ("cool"), Negrin (diminutive of "black") and Aviyente ("affluent" in Judeo-Spanish).

Sephardic Jewish surnames of Hebrew origin

Most of the Sephardic Jewish surnames of Hebrew origin are associated with religious activities, roles and Hebrew given names, apart from the widely used Cohen and Levi; one of the most famous Sephardic Jewish surnames is Abravanel, one of the oldest and most prominent Jewish surnames. It became known in the Iberian peninsula during the Middle Ages, meaning Ab ("father") rabban ("priest") el ("of God"). The first prominent jew carrying this surname was Don Judah Abravanel, who was the treasurer and tax collector of the Castillian kings Sancho IV (1284–95) and Ferdinand IV (1295–1312).[8]. Other well-known Sephardic Jewish hereditary surnames with Hebrew origin are:

  • Hassan (חסן, s a spelling variant of Hazzan, "cantor")
  • Sedaka (from צדקה, "righteousness", usually used as "charity" in Modern Hebrew)
  • Nahum (a prophet whose prophecy is recorded in the Hebrew Bible and The Old Testament)
  • Uziel (עוזיאל "God is my strength")
  • Baruh (ברוך, "blessed")
  • Nahmias (Spanish form of Nehemiah, "the Lord consoles")
  • Gaon ("genius", usually associated with a great religious scholar)
  • Crescas (Spanish form of Tzemach, "scion")
  • Caro (Spanish form of Habib, "darling")[6]

Sephardic Jewish surnames of Arabic origin

Pages containing the "Ma Nishtana" section of the Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated manuscript from ca. 1350.
Pages containing the "Ma Nishtana" section of the Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated manuscript from ca. 1350.

A few Sephardic Jewish are of Arabic origin, either acquired during the period of Arab domination of Spain, commonly called Al-Andalus, or after the expulsion of the Iberian Peninsula by the Jews who arrived to Arab-dominated lands, like Alhadeff (from the verb hadā, "to guide"), Abulafia ("Owner [of] the Health/Wellbeing", usually given to a pharmacist or physician), Alfandari ("from Alfambra", in Andalusia), Abudraham, (“the one in charge of the mint house")[6] Aboab (a variation of Abdelwahab, "the benefactor’s servant"), Abenatar ("son of the spice merchant") and Altaras (from al-Tarās, "embroider").

Sephardic Jewish surnames of Portuguese origin

See also: Crypto-Jewish surnames

Many of the Jews who fled from Spain to Portugal forcibly converted to Christianity in 1496, to avoid being expelled again. Upon being baptized, they took the surname of their "Old Christian" (Non-Jewish) godparents, in order to make the New Christians (the term used to refer to the Jewish converts to Catholicism) indistinguishable from the Old Christians. Some of these surnames include:

Many of these New Christians left Portugal after a few years for places where the Inquisition was not present, like Antwerp, Rotterdam, Bordeaux, Bayonne and Leghorn as well as the Dutch and Portuguese colonies in the Americas like Barbados, Jamaica, Suriname and Curaçao, where they returned to their Jewish faith; however, they continued carrying their new surnames. Others took the Spanish or Portuguese version of their surname, like Vidal for Hayyim, Lobos for Zev, De Paz for Shalom, and De La Cruz or Espírito Santo for Ruah.

Turkification of Sephardic Jewish surnames

Jewish marriage certificate of Jacob Franco and Fari Goria. Izmir, Türkiye, 1830
Jewish marriage certificate of Jacob Franco and Fari Goria. Izmir, Türkiye, 1830

In 1934, the Surname Law was passed by the government of Türkiye, which made surnames mandatory; until then, Muslims in the Ottoman Empire didn't have surnames and carried titles such as "Pasha", "Hodja", "Bey", "Hanım", "Agha", and "Efendi", which either defined their profession or their informal status within the society. The new surnames could not relate to military rank, civil officialdom or ethnicities. The law specifically forbade certain surnames that contained connotations of foreign cultures, nations, tribes and religions, and mandated that new surnames had to be taken from the Turkish language.[9] As a result, many Greeks, Armenians, Kurds, Assyrians and Jews had to take on new surnames, with non-Turkish Muslims and Jews not being as heavily targeted as Greeks, Armenians and Bulgarians. Nevetherless, a few surname changes did took place in the Jewish community: one of the first Turkish Jews to adopt a turkish-sounding surname was the writer and kemalist Moiz Cohen, who changed his name to Munis Tekinalp,[10] and other changes their names according to a similar sound or a similar meaning, which produced new surnames, like:

Other surnames like Kohen, Levi, Barokas, Bonomo, Farhi, Sedaka and Mugrabi continued to be used without being turkified.

Celebrities of Sephardic Jewish origin


Explore more about Sephardic Jewish surnames

References

  1. Venezuela: El primer cementerio judío de Sudamérica es reacondicionado. eSefarad (in Spanish)
  2. On Sephardic Surnames. Hollander-Waas Jewish Heritage Services
  3. Jewish Names and Genealogies
  4. ABOAB. Jewish Encyclopedia
  5. Muthiah, S. The Portuguese Jews of Madras. The Hindu. Retrieved 6 October 2018
  6. 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Kaganoff, Bentzion. Jewish Surnames Through the Ages:An Etymological History. Commentary Magazine
  7. The surname Sasportas:An Onomastical analysis
  8. Skolnik, Fred; Berenbaum, Michael. Encyclopaedia Judaica, Volume 1. Granite Hill Publishers, 2007. ISBN 978-0-02-865929-9
  9. İnce, Başak. Citizenship and identity in Turkey: from Atatürk's republic to the present day. I.B. Tauris. London, 2012. ISBN 9781780760261
  10. Landau, Jacob M. . Tekinalp, Turkish Patriot, 1883-1961. 1984
  11. Szurek, Emmanuel. Arabic and its Alternatives: Religious Minorities and their Languages in the Emerging Nation States of the Middle East (1920-1950). Brill, 2020. ISBN: 9789004423220
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