The Kaufman Family

The oldest and most firmly attested stratum of the surname is its occupational dimension. In the medieval and modern German-speaking world, the Kaufmann designated the merchant par excellence — a central figure in the Hanseatic cities, the Rhine fairs, and the markets of the Holy Roman Empire. The name is an occupational patronym whose usage is both German and Jewish, signifying "merchant, trader" in German, formed from the root "koufôn" and the element "man".

This semantic transparency explains the double belonging of the name. Borne by Christian German families as well as Ashkenazi Jewish families, it inscribed itself in the long tradition of names designating an economic activity. For Jewish communities, whose access to trades was often restricted to commerce, moneylending, and brokerage, the term held particular relevance: it described a dominant social reality. Onomastic works confirm this polyvalence — Kaufmann is, as both a German and Ashkenazi Jewish name, an occupational name designating a merchant or a wholesaler, a surname that is also encountered in France, principally in Alsace and Lorraine, but also in Hungary, Denmark, Bohemia, and several other European countries.

The spelling Kauffmann, with a double f, constitutes a recognized orthographic variant of the standard name. Kauffmann and Kaufman are among the attested variants of the patronym. These spelling variations do not signal distinct origins but rather reflect the absence of orthographic normalization before the nineteenth century, as well as the successive transcriptions carried out by the administrations of the different States where the name became established. The European diffusion of the name — beyond Germany, in France, in Central and Northern Europe — testifies to the mobility of Ashkenazi Jewish families and the circulation of Germanic onomastic models throughout the Western diaspora.

There is a virtue that the name carries within it from its origins, almost despite itself: involvement in collective economic life. The Jewish merchant, the Kaufmann, was not merely an individual seeking his profit. In the towns of the Rhine or Galicia, he was often the link between rural communities, the articulator of exchanges that exceeded his own household. The name crystallized this social function before transforming into an identity transmitted from father to son.

Alongside professional etymology, established and incontestable, circulates a second explanation of quite different nature, which belongs more to transmitted tradition than to archival demonstration. According to this reading, the name Kaufman would derive not from a trade but from a Hebrew given name, through a process of gradual phonetic deformation. As a Jewish name, Kaufman would be derived from Jacob (Yaakov), which becomes Yakovman, then Yakofman, then contracts to Kofman to emerge in the form Kaufman; Coifman would come from Yiddish dialect and mean "buyer."

This double tradition deserves to be approached with caution. The derivation from Yaakov belongs to a well-known genre of Jewish popular onomastics: the search for a sacred root behind a name of apparently profane appearance. It illustrates the tendency of communities to link their surnames to the memory of the patriarchs rather than to economic contingencies. This filiation must therefore be treated as a transmitted narrative, plausible for certain families but not generalizable, and decidedly less assured than direct occupational origin.

A third path, more discreet, attaches the name to the sphere of Hebrew masculine given names serving as profane names — the kinnuim. The given name Yekuthiel (יקותיאל), notably, was associated in Ashkenazi usage with various vernacular names. Rabbinic tradition moreover preserves the memory of ancient bearers of the name: Moses Jekuthiel Kaufmann was a Polish Talmudist, born in Krotoschin around the middle of the seventeenth century, son-in-law of Abraham Abele Gombiner and rabbi in Kutno, in Poland. This ancient occurrence in Poland shows that the name Kaufmann was already fixed and borne by religious authorities before the great campaigns of administrative surname attribution.

In this search for a sacred root something distinctly Jewish can be read: the refusal to let the name be reduced to the register of profit alone. The collective memory of Israel has always tended to sanctify, to link the everyday to the eternal — from the name of the ancestor to the given name of the patriarch, from the shop to the ark of the covenant. Whether the derivation is phonetically exact or not, the gesture itself — seeking Yaakov behind the merchant — says something about the way these communities conceived of themselves.

If the name is of Germanic origin, its French history is written primarily in Alsace and Lorraine, regions where Jewish presence is ancient and where the Judeo-Alsatian linguistic substrate, close to German, favored the establishment of Germanic surnames. Onomastic repertoires confirm this concentration: the surname Kaufmann is encountered in France principally in Alsace and Lorraine.

Alsatian rootedness must be replaced in the context of the legal establishment of surnames. Before the nineteenth century, many Jewish families did not have a hereditary family name in the modern sense, instead using floating patronymes — the father's given name, place of origin, or occupational designation. It was in this framework that professional names like Kaufmann became stabilized and transmitted. The economic relevance of the term in rural Alsatian communities, where livestock commerce, peddling, and textile trading constituted central activities, explains the lasting diffusion of the name in this area. This commerce was not merely an individual survival strategy: it was also, often, a form of mutual aid, of loyalty toward one's own. The Alsatian merchant who bought wool from a village to resell it in the city, or who advanced credit to a coreligionist in need, practiced in his own way what Jewish tradition calls gemilut hassadim — concrete benevolence, care taken for the other.

The French spelling Kauffmann, with a double f, is particularly widespread in Alsatian and Lorraine registers, where it neighbors the form Kaufmann. This coexistence of spellings within the same region illustrates the orthographic flexibility of ancient documents and the gradual Francization of a name that remained recognizably Germanic. Alsace thus constitutes a major center of the lineage, a meeting point between the Rhenish heritage of the name and its insertion into the French State.

Among the illustrious bearers of the name, the figure of David Kaufmann occupies a prominent place in the history of modern Jewish intellectual life. David Kaufmann (June 7, 1852 – July 6, 1899), whose Hebrew name was דוד קויפמן, was an Austrian Jewish scholar born in Kojetín, in Moravia. His career embodies the flowering of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, the "science of Judaism," a scholarly movement that applied modern critical methods to the study of Jewish texts and history.

His appointment to the rabbinic seminary of Budapest marks a foundational moment. In 1877, Kaufmann was appointed professor of history, philosophy, and homiletics at the newly founded rabbinic seminary of Budapest, where he taught until his premature death. He refused, out of loyalty to this nascent institution, a prestigious offer from across the Atlantic: he declined the offer of a chair at the Jewish Theological Seminary of Cincinnati, preferring instead to accept the chairs of history, philosophy of religion, and homiletics at the newly founded rabbinical school of Budapest, which he held until his death.

In this decision — declining Cincinnati for Budapest — is revealed a quiet but real virtue: loyalty to a nascent institution, to a community in formation. Kaufmann could have chosen established prestige; he chose foundation, a building to be constructed stone by stone. This form of institutional humility, this service rendered not to his own glory but to a collective work, resonates with the Jewish conception of kiddoush Hashem in its secular version — to sanctify, through one's deeds, not one's own name but that of the community.

Beyond teaching, Kaufmann was a bibliophile and collector of the first order, whose cultural legacy remains considerable. Principal of the Jewish theological seminary of Budapest and eminent representative of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, he assembled a collection of well over five hundred precious manuscripts, transferred after his death to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Posterity retains the breadth of his erudition: a scholar of unusually wide and deep learning, he produced an astonishingly high number of works during his short life. The trajectory of David Kaufmann illustrates how a bearer of the name became one of the pillars of the scholarly renaissance of Central European Judaism.

Zakhor Online, in its article devoted to the thought of Yehezkel Kaufmann, reports that it was precisely Professor Yehezkel Kaufmann whom David Ben Gurion asked to interrogate the specificity of the Jewish nation, messianic redemption, and the particularism of Israel — proof that the name Kaufmann traversed the twentieth century as a guiding thread between the science of Judaism and political reflection on the future of the Jewish people.

The name Kaufmann, in its various spellings, has distinguished itself in diverse domains of learning and creation, to the point of constituting a veritable intellectual constellation of the diaspora. Though these bearers do not necessarily belong to the same biological family, they testify to the cultural radiance attached to the name.

In the field of biblical scholarship, the figure of Yehezkel Kaufmann marks the twentieth century. Yehezkel Kaufmann (1889–1963) was an Israeli scholar born in Ukraine, whose contributions to biblical studies have often been underestimated; he obtained his doctorate from the University of Berne in 1918 and taught at the Reali School in Haifa. His monumental work on the history of Israelite religion made him one of the great interpreters of ancient monotheism within modern Jewish scholarship. Yehezkel Kaufmann's contribution to Jewish thought touches on one of the most fundamental problems that tradition has posed: in what way is Hebrew monotheism irreducible to surrounding syncretisms? In answering this question with the tools of philology and comparative history, he continued, on another register, the approach inaugurated by David Kaufmann in Budapest. Knowledge, in this lineage, did not serve to seduce but to understand — and to transmit.

Rabbinic tradition, as we have seen, already counted bearers of the name from the early modern period in Poland, with the Talmudist Moses Jekuthiel Kaufmann of Krotoschin. This continuity — from the seventeenth-century Polish Talmudist to the twentieth-century biblical scholar, passing through the bibliophile of Budapest — traces a coherent thread: that of a name associated, across generations and borders, with the study and transmission of Jewish learning. It would be rash to postulate direct kinship between these men; it is reasonable, however, to observe that the surname Kauffmann/Kaufmann was, in the Ashkenazi sphere, a name of scholars as much as of merchants, reflecting the social mobility that led, in one or two generations, from commerce to study.

This passage from commerce to learning is not a rupture in Jewish identity: it is one of its most constant expressions. The tradition of talmud Torah — study as obligation and as joy — has always coexisted with economic necessity. In the Kaufmann families, this movement seems to have repeated itself with each generation, as if the name bore within itself a productive tension between the world of business and that of ideas.

The honest history of a patronym cannot dispense with its most embarrassing episodes. In 1941, a man bearing the name Kaufman published one of the most controversial texts of the twentieth century — a text that, turned against him by his adversaries, served to justify persecutions against the very people whose cause its author claimed to represent.

Theodore Newman Kaufman (February 22, 1910 – April 1, 1986), sometimes incorrectly listed under the first name Theodore Nathan, was an American businessman and writer of Jewish origin. In 1939, he published pamphlets as "president of the American Federation of Peace," arguing that Americans should be sterilized so that their children would no longer have to fight in foreign wars. Born in Manhattan on February 22, 1910, to Anton Kaufman and Fannie Newman — his father had been a journalist for the Berliner Morgen-Zeitung before emigrating to the United States — Theodore Kaufman was neither rabbi nor scholar: he was a businessman, driven by a singular obsession with perpetual peace, which he intended to achieve by radical means.

Germany Must Perish! is a one-hundred-page book that Kaufman self-published in 1941 in the United States. The work advocated genocide through the sterilization of all Germans and the territorial dismemberment of Germany, on the grounds that this would guarantee world peace. Kaufman founded the Argyle Press publishing house in Newark, New Jersey, to publish this book, of which he was the sole owner.

The text, read today, leaves one speechless — not by its rhetorical power, but by the moral abyss it reveals. A man who himself had roots in a persecuted people advocated against another people the same logic of biological elimination that his tormentors applied to his own. The Jewish tradition teaches that every human being is created in the image of God — tzelem Elohim — and that "whoever saves a single soul, it is as if he had saved an entire world." Kaufman's pamphlet represents, in the light of these fundamental values, a radical betrayal, all the more striking because it comes from within a tradition that has made justice — tzedek — its first principle.

The Nazi Party used this book, written by a Jewish author, to support the argument that Jews were plotting against their country. The effect was catastrophic and perfectly predictable. Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda, noted in his diary: "This Jew [Kaufman] has rendered a true service to the enemy camp [German]. If he had written this book for us, he could not have done better." In September 1941, the NSDAP publishing house published five million copies of a German pamphlet commenting on Kaufman's work. The text was also cited by name as a pretext for the arrest of Jews in Hanover — the vicious circle was complete: the words of an obscure American Jew were being used to persecute innocent Jews in Germany.

It would be tempting to downplay this episode by invoking the marginality of its author. Theodore N. Kaufman was neither representative of American Judaism, nor even an influential figure in the political or intellectual circles of his time. His claim to have the ear of President Roosevelt's advisers was, according to historians, grossly exaggerated, if not purely fanciful. The magazine Time devoted an ironic review to him, treating it as ultimately an isolated proposition. But the marginality of the author does not diminish the gravity of the text or the reality of its effects: Nazi propaganda had no need for a representative text — it needed a usable text.

What this episode reveals is also the fragility of reason when it cuts itself off from the Law — not from the law of the State, but from halakha and the ethics it underlies. The Jewish tradition has never ignored anger — the prophets are full of it — but it has always channeled it into justice (tzedek) and not into collective vengeance. Kaufman, in his intellectual solitude and despair in the face of the rise of Nazism, made the error of confusing legitimate rage with a moral program. It is a real shadow in the constellation of the name. The Great Book must name it.

The geographic dispersal of the name constitutes one of the most revealing aspects of the Kauffmann family's history. The surname is encountered in France — primarily in Alsace and Lorraine — but also in Hungary, Denmark, Bohemia and several other European countries. This distribution follows the major routes of Ashkenazi migration: from the German-speaking heartland westward to the French-speaking regions and eastward to Polish and Hungarian territories.

It is in this diffusion that transmitted Memory and established archive answer each other. The tradition linking the name to the given name Yaakov, or to Hebrew kinnuim such as Yekuthiel, coexists with the documentary reality of a Germanic occupational surname. The two readings do not necessarily exclude each other: for some families, the name was probably adopted for its professional transparency; for others, it could have covered a Hebrew given name through phonetic adaptation. The linguistic attestation remains that the name means "merchant" in German, but family Memory, in its diversity, has sometimes preserved a sacred reading of it.

Transatlantic migration ultimately transformed the name. Kaufman constitutes an Americanized form of the German Kaufmann, illustrating the adaptation of the patronym to Anglo-Saxon orthographic norms upon immigration to the United States. Thus, from the Alsatian Kauffmann to the New York Kaufman, the name bears the imprint of each society it has traversed, while remaining identifiable as a marker of Ashkenazi identity. This plasticity — which does not alter the core of the name — makes the Kauffmann family an exemplary witness to diasporic Memory: a name that travels, is transcribed and reinterpreted without ever being lost.

It is in this geographic wandering that the relationship to the foreign is constructed, generation after generation. The Alsatian Kaufmann speaks Alsatian, Yiddish and French. The Hungarian Kaufmann navigates between Magyar and Hebrew. The American Kaufmann becomes Kaufman in a generation, and his children sometimes no longer read the Yiddish of their grandparents. At each border crossed, something is lost and something is enriched. Jewish tradition has always known that exile — galouth — is not merely a punishment but also a mission: to be a bearer of Memory, to transmit it to the world that welcomes you, even imperfectly.

The history of the Kauffmann surname reads like a condensed account of the Ashkenazi Jewish experience in Europe and its American and Israeli extensions. Its primary origin, firmly established, is that of a Germanic occupational name designating the merchant, fixed as a hereditary surname in the German-speaking region and then diffused to Alsace, Lorraine, Hungary and beyond. To this documentary stratum is added a transmitted onomastic memory, sometimes linking the name to Hebrew given names such as Yaakov or Yekuthiel — a plausible reading for certain families, but one that the archive cannot generalize.

The lineage, understood in the broad sense of a community of bearers of the name, produced notable figures: the talmudist Moses Jekuthiel Kaufmann in Poland, the scholar and bibliophile David Kaufmann in Budapest, the historian of Israelite religion Yehezkel Kaufmann in the land of Israel. It also produced a troubled figure: Theodore N. Kaufman, whose 1941 pamphlet illustrates not a virtue but its absence — anger without Law, revolt without justice. The honesty of the Great Book demands that this shadow be named alongside the lights, for the collective memory of Israel is not hagiography: it is an ongoing dialogue between what was accomplished and what should have been.

From rural Alsace to the seminaries of Budapest, from medieval commerce to contemporary scholarship, the name Kauffmann testifies to a trajectory of social mobility, fidelity to study, and capacity for adaptation to the multiple homelands of the diaspora.

Among all the values that this lineage expressed, the most constant and profound is that of talmud Torah in its broadest sense — knowledge as obligation, as communal practice, and as response to adversity. From the talmudist of Krotoschin to the bibliophile of Budapest, from the interpreter of biblical monotheism in Tel-Aviv to the professor whom Ben-Gurion consulted on the future of the Jewish people, it is always the same conviction that shines through: that study is not a refuge but a form of engagement, that the transmission of knowledge is, for Israel, a way of being in the world. The merchant sometimes faded behind the scholar; and the scholar always carried, in his manuscripts and his chairs, the weight and dignity of the name.

The "Great Book" devoted to it does not close this history: it offers an honest cross-section of it, distinguishing what the archive assures from what tradition transmits, what the lineage accomplished of greatness from what it sometimes failed, and inviting each family bearing this name to rediscover there the thread of their own memory.