Category Archive

David Jacobs and Patrick Hanks

The “Family Names in the UK” Research Project (FaNUK) at the University of the West of England, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, is investigating the origins, history, migration patterns, and geographical distribution of all family names with more than 100 bearers in Britain (plus a number of rare but “interesting” names), regardless of where they come from or how long they have been here.  One particularly important thread is the history of Jews in Britain.  It is generally accepted that Jews have made a disproportionately large and valuable contribution to the cultural, intellectual, and economic life of Britain, often in the face of prejudice and ignorance. Modern British Jewry provides a model of balance between social integration and preservation of religious and cultural heritage. Any investigation of modern family names must do justice to Jewish family names and their history in Britain.

There are a few well-known milestones:

• Jewish settlement in England from northern France under William I in 1070
• The blood libel and ritual murder charges and persecution beginning in 1144 prior to the expulsion of the Jews in 1290.
• The petition of Rabbi ben Israel of Amsterdam to Oliver Cromwell in 1655
• Resettlement of Jews  in England starting in 1656
• Sephardic immigration from the 17th century onwards
• The establishment of an Ashkenazic community in London in 1690
• The Jewish Naturalization Bill of 1753
• The admission of Jews to Parliament and to the Bar in the 19th century
• Mass immigration from Eastern and Central Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries.

It would be good to put some flesh on these bare bones in the context of researching family names, addressing questions such as the following:

• Who are the earliest known bearers of each Jewish family name in Britain?
• Can such a UK Jewish family name be traced back to an original immigrant?
• If the original immigrant is known, when did the family first arrive in Britain and where did they come from?  Where in Britain did they establish themselves? What was their prior history?
• In what language and under what national administration was the name of each Jewish family now found in the UK coined, adopted, or imposed?
• To what extent have names of Yiddish and other European origin been anglicized?
• What are the processes of anglicization. In the anglicization of Yiddish and other European surnames, which names were calqued (e.g. Zuckermann > Sugarman), shortened (e.g. Sugar), or otherwise changed?
• How can we identify apparently English names that are also Jewish (e.g. Morton)?
• In the case of polygenetic names like Morton and Goldsmith, what are the relative proportions of Jewish and gentile bearers?
• What does each name mean, and what, if any, are the religious, cultural, or other implications of the name?
• Some families can trace their genealogy to a single ‘key ancestor’—someone who had many marrying male children who themselves had male marrying children.  How many Jewish key ancestors can be identified, and what can be said about them?
• Some families (e.g., among the gentiles, Cecil, Cavendish, Campbell) have made a particular contribution over several generations to the political or cultural life of Britain.  What should be said about similar Jewish families, for example Montefiore, Rothschild, Mocatta, Goldsmid, and Sassoon?
• Was the pattern of Jewish migration into Scotland and Ireland different from that into England and Wales?
• What are the main centres of Jewish settlement today, and were they always there?
• What are the comparative frequencies of Jewish surnames in the UK? (FaNUK already has some data on this)

The coordinator for Jewish family names in the project is David Jacobs, Chairman of the Jewish Historical Society:
email david.jacobs40@ntlworld.com

Linguistic and etymological information for the project will be based on the contribution of David Gold to the Dictionary of Surnames (ed. Hanks and Hodges, Oxford University Press, 1988) and of Alexander Beider to the Dictionary of American Family Names (ed. Hanks, Oxford University Press, 2003). In addition, we shall be very glad to receive information about family history and early bearers of particular names that will help us to provide answers to at least some of the above questions. Please send such information to david.jacobs40@ntlworld.com.

Jewish-non-Jewish relations: Between exclusion and embrace – An online teaching resource: www.jnjr.div.ed.ac.uk

The complex relationship between Jews and non-Jews lies at the heart of teaching Jewish Studies at university level. A new online teaching resource provides access to a broad range of primary sources and high-quality commentaries by experts in the field, addressing the perceived lack of an easily accessible body of sources, which specifically deal with relations between Jews and non-Jews from a historical and contemporary perspective.

The website offers a range of commented primary sources from all periods of history, offering original and stimulating discussions of a broad range of topics and issues from an interdisciplinary perspective. Accessibility is a major concern of the project: as an online-based project, it can be freely accessed by anybody with an internet connection. All entries were written in jargon-free language.

The main target group for the website are students and academics in higher education. Each peer-reviewed entry provides the historical and social context and background of a chosen primary source, includes the source in its original language and, where necessary, a translation into English, followed by a discussion of the source and a number of relevant questions that can be used as a starting point for discussion in the classroom.

In the now completed pilot stage of the project, we have mainly secured contributions from colleagues at other British universities. We are now commissioning additional contributions from all periods of history and geographical areas and invite scholars working on Jewish-Christian or Jewish-Muslim relations to suggest further contributions from their specific field of expertise.

Please contact us at jnjr@ed.ac.uk for suggestions and comments and for authors’ guidelines if you wish to contribute to the site.

Project coordinators:
Dr Maria Diemling (Canterbury Christ Church University)
Dr Hannah Holtschneider (University of Edinburgh)

Contact:
jnjr@ed.ac.uk

URL:
www.jnjr.div.ed.ac.uk

Sacha Stern (UCL, Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies) has been awarded a grant from the Leverhulme Trust for a research project entitled ‘Medieval Christian and Jewish calendar texts from England and Franco-Germany’. He will be joined by two postdoctoral research associates, Justine Isserles (Geneva/Paris) and Philipp Nothaft (Munich), for a two-year project starting from 1 October 2011. The project will investigate, through the study of largely neglected medieval manuscripts from England and Franco-Germany on the subjects of calendars, astronomy, and computus, the interest that Christian and Jewish medieval scholars developed in each other’s calendars, how information about their calendars was exchanged between them, and what motivated this unique manifestation of scholarly Christian-Jewish relations.

This project adds itself to Sacha Stern’s other research projects on medieval calendars, ‘Medieval monographs on the Jewish calendar’ (funded by the AHRC, with Ilana Wartenberg and Israel Sandman as postdoctoral research associates), and ‘The Jewish calendar in early Islamic sources’ (funded by the Leverhulme Trust, with François de Blois as research assistant). See further http://www.ucl.ac.uk/hebrew-jewish/research/projs.php

The foremost task of the British Association for Jewish Studies is the promotion and defence of the scholarly study of Jewish culture in all its aspects within higher education. The massive cuts in, and radical restructuring of, higher education and research funding are a matter of grave concern. Our colleagues work in and across a broad range of disciplines, mostly in the arts and humanities, and are therefore particularly prone to be affected by the cuts and the institutional concentration processes likely to follow.

The BAJS Committee will oppose these developments and support colleagues affected by them as best it can. We intend to make the case for Jewish Studies and its impact in an effective and forceful manner and provide colleagues in individual institutions with arguments and statistics that will help them fight their corner.

To do so, the Committee is dependent on one resource above all: information. It is imperative that our colleagues keep us informed of relevant developments. We need to know about looming cuts or closures, the pending loss of Jewish Studies positions through retirement, success rates in securing research council grants, the number of students taking Jewish Studies courses etc. The Committee appeals to all colleagues involved in Jewish Studies to provide us with relevant information as and when it becomes available.

If you have relevant information, please contact the BAJS Secretary, Lars Fischer (lf309@cam.ac.uk), or another member of the committee (http://britishjewishstudies.org/about/committee/). If requested, information will be treated confidentially.

The British Association for Jewish Studies (BAJS), representing scholars of many backgrounds and a variety of perspectives on the State of Israel, deplores any attempt to weaken educational links with Israeli institutions or individuals by the University and College Union (UCU). We believe that such actions contradict the aims of scholarship and the mission of an academic body, and do not ultimately contribute to the resolution of the conflict. BAJS will continue to promote and strengthen educational links with Israeli institutions and individuals.