Zakhor

Letter no. 3 · Monday, August 17, 2026

Hello,

When Israel Changed Its Name

Last week, we looked at where Jewish names come from. This week, let us look at what becomes of them. For Jewish history is not only the story of names transmitted: it is also, and perhaps above all, the story of names lost, imposed, concealed, translated, erased, and sometimes reclaimed.

A celebrated midrash asserts that the children of Israel were delivered from Egypt because they had not changed their name, their language, or their clothing (Vayiqra Rabba 32, 5). It is a magnificent sentence. It is also, historically, almost entirely false. Jews have changed their names ceaselessly. They have changed their language even more often. And they endured.

This contradiction is not an embarrassment: it is precisely the place where Zakhor does its work. The midrash speaks a truth of memory — the name is the last stronghold of identity. The archives speak a truth of history — the name is the first thing power seizes. Both registers hold, without one annulling the other.

Genesis

The name as covenant

The first name change in our story is not suffered: it is given. Abram becomes Abraham, Sarai becomes Sarah, Jacob becomes Israel after a night of struggle. The new name does not conceal the old one; it fulfills it. This is the founding model: to change one's name is to enter into a covenant.

All the rest of Jewish history will be the often painful variation on this initial theme.

Egypt · Babylon · Susa

The name under constraint

Already in Genesis, the second model appears. Joseph receives from Pharaoh the name of Tsafenat-Panéah: a court name, an administrative name, a career name. In Babylon, Daniel becomes Belshazzar, Hanania, Mishael and Azaria become Shadrakh, Meshakh and Abed-Nego. In Susa, Hadassa presents herself under the name of Esther, and the book bearing this Persian name is precisely the one in which the name of God does not appear.

Here is born the most durable structure of Jewish life in diaspora: the double name. One name for the synagogue and the community register, one name for the outside. This duality will traverse twenty-five centuries. Our databases encounter it every day, and this is why a Zakhor entry can bear several forms of the same name without any being held to be the "true" one.

Jerusalem · 2nd century before the common era

Hellenization: the name as program

In the era of the Second Temple, the translation of names ceases to be a convenience and becomes a policy. The high priest Yeshua has himself called Jason; his rival takes the name of Menelaus (II Maccabees 4). The Greek name signals a project: to integrate Jerusalem into the Hellenistic oikoumene. The Maccabean revolt is also, in its own way, a nomenclatural dispute.

A durable lesson: to change one's name is never neutral, but it is not always a betrayal. Generations of Jews bore a Greek, Latin, Arabic or Italian name while remaining fully within their Judaism.

Iberian Peninsula · 1391-1497

1391, 1492: the baptismal name

The Iberian Peninsula produces the most violent rupture. The forced conversions of 1391, then the expulsion of 1492 and the mass conversion in Portugal in 1497, engender tens of thousands of baptismal names: godparent names, city names, saint names, names of trees and birds.

For Zakhor, this moment is a major methodological warning. An Iberian surname proves nothing — neither the presence of Jewish ancestry nor its absence. Onomastic catalogues guide research; they never establish a lineage. This is one of our constitutive principles, and it is born precisely here.

Tuscany · 1591-1593

Livorno: the name one reclaims

Then comes the opposite movement — and it follows a path we document closely.

The Livornine, charters promulgated by Ferdinand I de Medici in 1591 and 1593, guarantee to those who come to settle in Livorno that they will not be troubled for their former religious life. Concretely: a baptized Portuguese merchant can become a Jew there again — and reclaim a Jewish name. Amsterdam, Hamburg, Bayonne and Bordeaux will know similar processes.

In the registers of these communities, one sometimes reads both names on the same line. The merchant from Lisbon and the member of the nazione ebrea are the same person, separated by a border and a generation.

From Livorno, these families spread toward Tunis, Algiers, Oran, Sousse. The Grana long preserved there their Tuscan and Iberian names — Lumbroso, Boccara, Moreno, Cardoso, Attal — which became, in the Maghreb, the visible marker of a Western Sephardic history distinct from that of the Tochavim. The name here does not merely tell of a family: it tells of an itinerary.

Vienna · Paris · Algiers · 1787-1870

Civil registration: when the name becomes a box

The 18th and 19th centuries bring the Jewish name into bureaucracy. Joseph II's edict (1787) in the Habsburg lands, then Napoleon's decree of 20 July 1808 in France, impose fixed, hereditary surnames. In Algeria, the registration of Jews in French civil registers, completed around the Cremieux decree of 1870, produces a new wave of fixations, phonetic transcriptions, competing spellings — and sometimes arbitrary attributions.

This is where a good part of our difficulties today are born: a single lineage can appear under five spellings in three registers. The work of variants that Zakhor conducts on the lineage pillar is the direct heir to these decades of administrative pens.

Pale of Settlement · 1804-1997

The Russian Empire: the name as instrument of census

No territory has produced so many Jewish names, nor so quickly, as the Russian Empire. The partitions of Poland, where more than 90 percent of Ashkenazim lived, bring into the Empire, after 1795, more than two million Jews who did not use family names. In the shtetlekh, one knew one's neighbors: a first name, a patronymic, a nickname sufficed.

The edict of Alexander I of 1804 imposes upon all Jews of the Pale of Settlement — present-day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldavia — the adoption of a permanent patronym; a second edict, promulgated by Nicholas I in 1835, thereafter forbids any modification of these names. The text of 1804 is explicit: at the census, each Jew must bear or adopt a known and hereditary family name, employed without any variation in all documents and all lists. The motive is administrative and not cultural: to rationalize tax collection and military recruitment.

The genealogical consequences are considerable, and they run in both directions at once. The edict of 1804 created as many distinct family units, each endowed with its own patronym, independently of prior kinship ties — presumably several thousand new names. The result: many individuals with no kinship relation bear the same name, while close relatives bear different ones.

Added to this is conscription. Service in the tsar's army being particularly dreaded in the Pale, families sought to escape it by manipulating patronyms: having a boy registered as belonging to a family without sons, concealing sons from census agents, covering one's tracks. This is the regime of the cantonists, those Jewish children enlisted from 1827 onwards, often forcibly baptized and renamed with Russian names — the most radical onomastic disappearance of the 19th century.

Let us retain from this the rule, for it is stronger still than that drawn from the Iberian case: in the Pale of Settlement, an identical name does not imply kinship, and a different name does not exclude it. Two brothers can legitimately appear in the registers under two different patronyms. No onomastic catalogue, however learned, can supplement the act of record.

The forms themselves are of remarkable richness: patronyms in -ovitch (Abramovitch, Rabinovitch), toponyms in -ski drawn from towns (Berditchevski, Sloutski, Vichnevski), and especially a series of matronymics rare elsewhere in Europe — Rivkine, Beiline, Guitline, Sorkine, Malkine, Estrine — formed from the mother's or wife's name. Where European civil registers erase women, Ashkenazi onomastics inscribes them.

Then reappears the structure of Babylon: to the Hebrew name of the synagogue corresponds a civil Russian first name. Gershon becomes Grigori, Barukh becomes Boris, Leyb becomes Lev, Moshe becomes Mikhail, Haim becomes Efim. The same person, two registers, one life.

The Soviet era adds two contradictory gestures. On one side the revolutionary pseudonym, which erases the Jewish name in favor of a political identity — Bronstein become Trotsky, Rosenfeld become Kamenev, Radomyslski become Zinoviev. On the other, and here is the decisive inversion of our entire subject: a 1932 law institutes the famous "fifth entry" of internal passports, which inscribes the nationality of each citizen, determined by the parents' membership; at sixteen, the child of a mixed couple could choose that of his father or mother, with no possibility of changing it thereafter. For Jews, the line read evreï, with the attendant prejudices, and this practice was not abandoned until 1997.

This is the moment when the name ceases to be the marker. Elsewhere, concealing one's name could protect; in the USSR, it no longer served at all, since the State had consigned Jewishness to a separate line. One could be called Grigori Ivanovich and remain assigned. A century and a half after having imposed names upon Jews to count them, the same administration no longer had need of them.

Finally emigration — from the 1970s to the great departures of 1989-1991 — retransliterates all these names one final time, from Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet or Hebrew, multiplying the spellings of a single lineage: Rabinovitch, Rabinovich, Rabinowitz. Not to mention the otchestvo, these intermediate patronyms that Western civil registers sometimes place as a second first name, sometimes as a family name. A not inconsiderable part of the work of variants we conduct on the lineage pillar consists of undoing, one by one, these layers of transcription.

New York · 1881-1924

Ellis Island: the name America did not change

Between 1881 and 1924, more than two million Jews from Eastern Europe disembark in the United States. From this crossing was born the most powerful onomastic narrative of modern Jewish history: the harried inspector, the unpronounceable name, the pen that decides. The most well-known Yiddish joke fixes its form — the immigrant who answers shoyn fergessen, "I've already forgotten," and whom the official registers under the name of Sean Ferguson.

History here contradicts memory — and it must be said, for it is instructive. The inspectors at Ellis Island did not write the names of arrivals: the only list of names came from the ship manifests, filled in Europe by employees of the shipping companies. The inspectors did not create the immigration registers; they verified the names of persons passing before them against those appearing on the ship's passenger list. These manifests were drawn up from passports and official documents, and the companies, financially responsible for repatriating rejected passengers, had every interest in rigor. When inspectors modified a spelling, it was generally to correct an error in the manifest.

In other words: administrative fixation did indeed take place, but upstream and in Europe. It was an employee of the Hamburg-Amerika Linie, the Norddeutscher Lloyd, or an agency in Le Havre who, selling a ticket, transcribed in Latin characters a name borne until then in Hebrew or Yiddish. The exact same gesture as the civil registrar of Oran or Constantine. Once entered in the manifest, this spelling became the passenger's legal identity in America.

What truly transformed the names came afterwards, and from within. The work of historian Kirsten Fermaglich on petitions for name changes filed before New York courts in the 20th century shows that thousands of immigrant Jews and their children changed their own names. The motives given range from simplification of a name no one knows how to spell to explicit obstacles to employment — reflecting ordinary social antisemitism. Horowitz becomes Harris, Lefkowitz becomes Landis, not from shame, but from calculation of professional survival, at a time of university quotas and discriminatory job postings.

Why, then, did the Ellis Island myth triumph? Because it is more transmissible. To say "they took our name from us" is told to grandchildren; to say "my father gave up his own to find work" is told much less often. The myth shifts responsibility from family to State, and transforms a capitulation into a theft.

For Zakhor, this case is exemplary: the family narrative is false in its facts and true in its object. It speaks a truth about the constraint suffered, by mistaking the window. We therefore record it for what it is — a testimony falling within the memory register, to be preserved in its full documentary dignity — and we accompany it with the passage manifest, which falls within the history register. Neither one should be suppressed in favor of the other.

Occupied Europe · then Israel

1940-1945: the false name that saves

Then comes the century in which the name kills. The censuses of 1940 and 1941, in occupied as well as unoccupied zones, transform the patronym into an instrument of tracking. Against this, thousands of families adopt false names, and hidden children learn to answer to a first name that is not theirs. Some will never recover the other.

After 1945, the French law of 1945 on name changes will be massively employed: families Gallicize their patronym, not from joyful assimilation, but from learned caution. It must be said without judgment.

In contrast, the Hebraization of names in nascent Israel — Grün becoming Ben Gurion, Meyerson becoming Meir, Shertok becoming Sharett — falls under quite a different gesture: avowed rebirth, and sometimes administrative pressure on civil servants and diplomats. Two opposite responses to the same century.

Madrid · Lisbon · Paris · 2015-2022

Today: the name one goes back to seek

For a few years, a new movement has been observed. The Spanish and Portuguese laws of 2015 opening nationality to descendants of Sephardim have triggered a wave of onomastic research. In France, the law of 2 March 2022 now allows one to change one's name once in one's life by simple declaration. Grandchildren reclaim the name Gallicized in 1947; others reclaim the one that appeared in an Oran or Tunis register.

We receive these requests every week. They are not born of nostalgia. They are born of transmission — our purpose.

The midrash was therefore right, but not as it believed. Israel did not keep its names. It kept the memory of its names — which is a task far more difficult, and far more ours.

It is precisely the work we conduct: for each lineage, not to choose among forms, but to preserve them all, dated, sourced, situated. A name erased and recovered is not a name restored. It is a name that now also bears the trace of its erasure.

That is zakhor.

To go further: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, "Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory" (1982) — Aaron Demsky (ed.), "These Are the Names" — Francesca Bregoli, "Mediterranean Enlightenment: Livornese Jews" (2014) — Lionel Lévy, "La Nation juive portugaise: Livourne, Amsterdam, Tunis" (1999) — Kirsten Fermaglich, "A Rosenberg by Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America" (2018) — Vincent J. Cannato, "American Passage: The History of Ellis Island" (2009) — Alexander Beider, "A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire" (revised ed., 2008).

In this letter. 91 Great Books appeared this week — leading with Great Book of the Rubins, then 12 lineages, 7 great figures, 12 communities, 48 thematic entries, 4 places, 7 institutions; 4 openings in the collection — David, Ḥanan Porat, Khazars, Menorat ha-Maor; a narrative — Putting into Writing; 223 finds from yesterday, of which 3 reported here; what has changed on the site in 7 days of work; 6 items deposited by members; 14 arrivals, and we are now 130 keeping this register.

The Grand Livre of the Week — Grand Livre des Rubin

From Dolina to Philadelphia, from Budapest to New York, from Bucharest to the Korean peninsula, and from Butzbach in Hesse to that French counter where a man named Weinberg left with the name Rubin — this book was born from material as heterogeneous as the dispersion itself.

28 pages.

→ Read Grand Livre des Rubin

What Appeared This Week

91 Grand Books were born in seven days. Here they are, by pillar.

Lineages — 12

Bransten — 24 p.
Hirtz — 23 p.
Rosenberg — 21 p.
Grand Book of the Weinberg — 19 p.
Amsallag — 13 p.
Bronstein — 13 p.
and 6 others — see all

Great Figures — 7

Aquila — 10 p.
Shabbethai Ẓebi B. Mordecai — 9 p.
Mohammed — 9 p.
Lewis Gerstle — 9 p.
JACOB, also called Israel — 9 p.
IBN GABIROL, SOLOMON BEN JUDAH, also known as Avicebron — 9 p.
and 1 other — see all

Communities — 12

Ḥasidim, Ḥasidism — 12 p.
Hebraists, Christians — 10 p.
Marrano — 9 p.
Zealots — 9 p.
Pseudo-messiahs — 9 p.
Philosophy of Alexandria — 9 p.
and 6 others — see all

Thematic Areas — 48

Aramaic Language Among the Jews — 14 p.
Biblical Archaeology — 13 p.
The Way of Hasidic Thought — 13 p.
Covenant — 11 p.
Semitic Languages — 10 p.
Kol Nidre — 10 p.
and 42 others — see all

Places — 4

Agricultural Colonies in Palestine — 10 p.
Agricultural Colonies in the United States — 9 p.
Byzantine Exile — 8 p.
Agricultural Colonies in Russia — 8 p.

Institutions — 7

Yeshivah — 14 p.
Exilarch — 9 p.
Agricultural Colonies in the United States — 9 p.
Asylum — 9 p.
Gaon — 8 p.
Ḥaluḳḳah — 7 p.
and 1 other — see all

Four Doors in the Collection

A lineage, a figure, a community, a work. Each week, four others.

The life of a lineage — David

There are names that carry within them an entire people. The name David is one of them. Before it became a surname inscribed in the colonial registers of Algeria and Tunisia, or in community records of the New World, it was the name of the shepherd of Israel who became king, the name of the psalmist, the name whose tradition in Judaism awaits that a descendant will one day restore justice upon the earth.

→ Read — 16 pages

A great figure — Ḥanan Porat

Few figures embody with such intensity the tensions and passions of contemporary religious Zionism as Ḥanan Porat (1943–2011). Rabbi, educator, settlement pioneer and politician, he was simultaneously a survivor of one of the foundational tragedies of Israel's War of Independence and one of the principal architects of the movement that, after 1967, would go on to transform…

→ Read — 14 pages

A community — Khazars

At the borders of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, between the lower Volga, the Caucasus and the Pontic steppes, there rose from the 7th to the 10th century an empire whose name remains singular in the history of Israel: that of the Khazars.

→ Read — 9 pages

A work — Menorat ha-Maor — The Candelabrum of Light

The Menorat ha-Maor, "the Candelabrum of Light," stands among the great ethical works of medieval Spanish Judaism. Composed in Toledo in the course of the 14th century by Rabbi Israel ben Joseph Aln'kaoua (Encaoua), it belongs to that genre of Hebrew literature which modern scholarship designates as sifrut ha-musar, the literature of moral and religious conduct.

→ Read — 8 pages

The Story of the Week — Putting It in Writing

Beit She'arim and Sepphoris · around 200

A law transmitted by word of mouth for centuries, and which was forbidden to write down. Around 200, it is written — because there is fear of forgetting it.

Judah ha-Nassi — Rabbi, simply, in the literature — lived approximately from 135 to 217. He is nassi, patriarch, leader of the Jewish community of Roman Palestine, and he has a status with Rome that gives him means.

→ Read the story · All stories

What the Nights Found

Our watch turns each night, in thirteen languages. 223 findings this week. Here are three.

Halberstadt: a symposium on provenance research of 176 Jewish objects suspected of being looted in Saxony-Anhalt

The Berend Lehmann Museum for Jewish History and Culture in Halberstadt (Saxony-Anhalt, Germany) is organizing on August 31 and September 1, 2026 a scholarly symposium entitled "Provenienz jüdischer Objekte erforschen und vermitteln" ("Research and Convey the Provenance of Jewish Objects"). The event is part of a research project launched in January 2026 by the museum, devoted to examining over one year the biographies of one hundred seventy-six objects suspected of having been sold, extorted, or abandoned under duress by the Nazi regime in the Saxony-Anhalt region. Source

Milan opens the 2026 European Day of Jewish Culture with an unprecedented exhibition by Barbara Nahmad

The 27th edition of the European Day of Jewish Culture (Giornata Europea della Cultura Ebraica) will take place throughout Italy on Sunday, September 6, 2026, on the theme of love in Jewish tradition. In Milan, the opening is scheduled for 10 a.m. at the central synagogue on Via Guastalla, with institutional greetings, followed at 10:30 a.m. by a discussion entitled "Il Dio dell'amore e il Dio di giustizia" and then, at 11:30 a.m., by an encounter around the Book of Ruth. Source

At the Jewish Museum of São Paulo, the exhibition "Burle Marx: plantas em movimento" reads the landscape architect through his Jewish heritage

The Jewish Museum of São Paulo (MUJ) presented from April 30 to August 2, 2026 the exhibition "Burle Marx: plantas em movimento," devoted to Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, curated by Daniel Jablonski. The exhibition highlights the artist's German-Jewish paternal ancestry — his father was a Jewish immigrant from Germany — as a lens for reading his work, articulated around the themes of migration, crossing, and identity continuity. Source

→ All this week's findings

What Changed on the Site

Two new sections for readers, an assistant that responds in real time, and the site reclaiming its name

This week, readers will see the arrival of two new sections: brief historical narratives reaching their target of five hundred sixty-six episodes, and an initial corpus of Jewish cemeteries, opened with eighty-nine Moroccan cemeteries. The assistant that answers visitors' questions has undergone profound reworking: its responses now display as they are being written, with sources visible even before the first word. Behind the scenes, the site adopts the name that its readers actually type, "Zakhor.ai". Substantial foundational work enriches the documented families and figures through several archival funds and specialized encyclopedias, while two research and review tasks move from a pay-by-the-hour system to the team's flat-rate subscription.

Monday, August 10 — Search relocates lost families, the site stops crashing on certain pages
Tuesday, August 11 — Records load quickly again
Wednesday, August 12 — Book translation now follows readers, and the weekly meeting simplifies its invitation
Thursday, August 13 — A day of organizing: international Jewish organizations enter the registry
Friday, August 14 — The site reclaims its name, the Livorno–Maghreb axis ceases to be a claim, and sourcing accelerates
Saturday, August 15 — A new section of brief narratives is launched, and the site's menus are reorganized
Sunday, August 16 — A corpus of cemeteries enters the site, and the "Ask" assistant finally responds in real time

→ The project, day by day

The Week Ahead

No calendar landmarks this week.

What You Have Deposited

6 items this week: Rubin ex Weinberg (Patrick Rubin), Famille Rubin. (Patrick Rubin), Hirtz (Marc Bransten), Fiancailles de Titine Bellity fille de Fradji Bellity à Béjà (Tunisie) (Gad Bellity). The 26,051 documents we preserve all began with someone who opened a drawer.

0 Published Ledgers · 7,391 lineages · 15,439 figures

Those Who Joined Us

14 people opened an account this week. Members reconnected with their family: Amsallag, Bensaid, Bransten, Goeta, Hirtz, Rubin. We are now 130 holding this register together.

We do not name them: one enters here to search for one's own, not to be announced.

Join in turn →

What You Can Do

Write, enrich, or simply read a Grand Livre. Every family, every community, every work can have one. If one already exists, you can add what it lacks; if it does not exist, you can bring it into being.

→ Write or enrich a Grand Livre · Browse the Grand Livres

Bear witness to one of your loved ones. A grandfather, an aunt, a neighbor from down the street. What you know of a person — where they lived, what they did, what they told — is written nowhere else. The account is signed with your name and attached to the family tree.

→ Bear witness to a loved one

Import your family tree. If you maintain a tree in software — Heredis, Geneanet, MyHeritage, Gramps — it exports to a GEDCOM file that you can upload here. You remain in control: nothing is published without your action.

→ Import a tree (GEDCOM)

This week, a gesture

Look at what you keep without knowing why. A photo with no caption. A letter in a language you cannot read. A piece of paper at the bottom of a box, that you have never thrown away and yet can never say why.

Deposit a piece →

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