Toledano comes from Toledo. How many surnames are addresses? What surnames keep of places — and places, of names.
Every Jewish place bears several names — Biblical Hebrew, rabbinic Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, Ladino, Judeo-Spanish, the local language in its historical and modern spelling. Every surname tells of an ancestral geography.
This subsection makes these multiple toponyms interoperable and connects surnames to their geographical origin, allowing a Toledano to see Toledo and a Fassi to see Fez.
| Canonical place | Linguistic and historical variants |
|---|---|
| Jérusalem | Yerushalayim (he) · al-Quds (ar) · Gerusalemme (it) · Hierosolyma (la) |
| Fès | Fas (ar) · פאס (he) · Fez (en historique) |
| Thessalonique | Salonique (fr) · Selanik (tr/ladino) · Saloniki (grec) · Salonica (ladino) |
| Livourne | Livorno (it) · Leghorn (en historique) · ליוורנו (he) |
| Le Caire | al-Qāhira (ar) · Fustat (historique médiéval) · מצרים (he talmudique) |
Zakhor's search engine works indifferently across all these variants.
