The Kedmi Family

The foundation of the name Kedmi is the triliteral root ק-ד-ם (q-d-m), one of the oldest and most fertile roots in the Hebrew language. In the Hebrew Bible, the term קֶדֶם (qédem) means in turn the geographical east and the remote past. When Genesis reports that man was placed "to the east" of the Garden of Eden, or that peoples scattered "toward the east," it is this word that is used. But the same word also designates, in biblical poetry, the "days of old," primordial time: thus the expression yémé qédem, "the ancient days." The east and the origin merge in a single image, that of the beginning.

From this root derives a rich lexicon: qadmon (eastern, ancient), qadmout (antiquity, ancientness), qédma (toward the east), and the adjective qadmi (ancient, first, anterior). It is precisely this adjective that provides the form of the patronym Kedmi, where the ending -i functions as a suffix of belonging or relation, frequent in Hebrew for forming gentiles and family names. On the strictly linguistic plane, Kedmi can thus be read as "he of the east," "the easterner," or "he who belongs to the origin, to the ancient."

The morphological structure of the name — pure Hebrew radical, without borrowing from Arabic, German, Spanish, or Slavic — is in itself an index of modernity. Traditional Jewish patronyms often bear the trace of the vernacular languages of the diasporas: names of trades in Yiddish, Iberian place names for Sephardim, Arabicized forms in the Maghreb. The Hebrew component existed in them, but it was often embedded in foreign linguistic matrices; thus, in Algerian Judeo-Arabic, Hebrew provided a religious and lexical substrate without structuring civil family names [Bar-Asher, 1992]. A patronym built entirely on a living Hebrew root, like Kedmi, belongs to another regime: that of language become the language of everyday life.

Works of reference on Hebrew and Israeli onomastics — which catalogue and analyze the origin, meaning, and diffusion of names — provide the scholarly framework for situating such a name in the category of patronyms derived from geographical and temporal roots [Origins of Jewish Names (Stahl, 2005); Family Names in Israel (Eshel, 1967); The Book of Names — 200 Most Popular Surnames in Israel (Ariel, 1997)].

One cannot understand a "modern Hebrew" surname without placing it within the movement that, from the mid-nineteenth century to the first third of the twentieth, transformed Hebrew — the language of prayer, study, and liturgy — into a spoken, everyday, and national language. This linguistic resurrection was inseparable from a broader cultural renaissance that, in Central and Eastern Europe between the late nineteenth century and 1930, articulated language, literature, and national construction [Bechtel, 2002]. The project of reclaiming the language was not a mere philological exercise: it carried the ambition of regenerating the people through their recovered word.

This Jewish modernity had even older roots, in the Haskalah, this movement of Jewish Enlightenment of which Moses Mendelssohn was the inaugural figure and which marked the birth of modern Judaism [Bourel, 2004]. Emancipation, the entry of Jews into European modernity, and the logics through which they negotiated their place in surrounding societies reconfigured even the manner of naming themselves [Kriegel, 1977]. Where the diaspora had imposed, sometimes by administrative decree, names in foreign languages, the Jewish national movement would propose a return to Hebrew as an act of identity reclamation.

It must be emphasized here the coexistence and competition of Jewish languages. Yiddish, the wandering language of Ashkenazi communities, carried an immense popular and literary culture [Baumgarten, 2002]; but it was Hebrew that was invested with national and state function. In this shift, the family name became symbolic terrain: to abandon a Yiddish, German, or Slavic surname in favor of a Hebrew name was to inscribe in one's civil registry adherence to a collective project. The covenant with the recovered language engaged even the most intimate identity, that which one transmits to one's children. A name like Kedmi — "the oriental," "the one of origins" — perfectly condenses this aspiration: to return eastward, toward the land, toward the beginning.

With immigration to the Land of Israel and, even more so, with the founding of the State in 1948, the Hebraization of surnames took on a mass dimension and, in some places, quasi-official character. Many immigrants, civil servants, soldiers and public figures exchanged their diaspora names for Hebrew names, either to erase the mark of exile, or to express their attachment to the new nation, or again through the encouragement of institutions. It is within this vast movement that, in all likelihood, the appearance and spread of the surname Kedmi is situated.

Several procedures governed these choices of names. Some translated their former name literally into Hebrew; others preserved its sound while giving it a Hebrew meaning; still others adopted an entirely new name, chosen for its symbolic weight. Kedmi clearly falls into this latter category or a phonetic translation: a short, sonorous name, rooted in a prestigious root. The choice of qédem — the orient, antiquity — could express the feeling of a return towards the ancestral eastern land, towards biblical qédem, towards recovered origin.

Here, family tradition and the archive answer one another without always coinciding. Many families bearing Hebraized names preserve the oral memory of the earlier name — the abandoned diaspora name — while civil registry records often record only the new form. For a given Kedmi family, it is therefore probable, but not systematically documented, that an earlier surname existed: an Ashkenazi, Sephardic or Mizrahi name replaced at the time of immigration or naturalization. Research on names in Israel shows that this hidden stratum — the name before — is the rule rather than the exception for modern Hebrew surnames [Family Names in Israel (Eshel, 1967) ; The Book of Names — 200 Most Popular Surnames in Israel (Ariel, 1997)].

It should also be noted that qédem, the orient, could take on a particular resonance for Jews coming from Islamic lands — from the Maghreb, Iraq, Yemen — for whom the "return" was made from the east. The modern Jewish societies of the Maghreb, worlds in movement long before the twentieth century, nourished a decisive part of immigration to Israel [Taïeb, 2000] ; and the long history of the Jews of North Africa forms the backdrop to these eastern trajectories [Chouraqui, 1965]. For these families, a name evoking the Levant was not the erasure of an origin but its assertion.

To give the name Kedmi its full historical depth, one must broaden the perspective to include the diasporas for which the relationship to the Orient and origins became central to their identity. The history of Sephardic Jews, Marranos, and new Christians of Hispano-Portuguese origin is traversed by this tension between a lost origin and a loyalty maintained in secrecy or exile [Yerushalmi, 1998]. For these communities, qédem — the time before, the land before — was not an abstraction but a wound and a hope.

The name Kedmi is not, strictly speaking, a traditional Sephardic name: it does not appear among the Hispano-Portuguese surnames inherited from the expulsion of 1492. But the spirit it carries — the return toward the Orient, the memory of the ancient — resonates deeply with the Sephardic experience. One may see in it, on a symbolic level, the modern outcome of a long aspiration: what Marrano generations lived as clandestine nostalgia, Hebrew modernity formulates openly, in a name borne in broad daylight.

Similarly, in the Maghrebi world, the Hebrew component remained alive at the very heart of the spoken language, Judeo-Arabic, where religious and learned terms derived from Hebrew structured the communal imagination [Bar-Asher, 1992]. The passage from such a substrate to a fully Hebrew surname like Kedmi illustrates the movement by which Hebrew, long a nested and sacred language, becomes again a civil and nominal language. In this sense, Kedmi can be read as a bridge-name: it makes the memory of Eastern diasporas communicate with Israeli modernity. This reading remains interpretive nonetheless — hence its status of probable — because no single genealogy allows us to attribute the name to only one of these trajectories.

It is in the trajectory of Yakov Kedmi, born Yakov Iosifovich Kazakov on March 5, 1947 in Moscow, that the patronym finds its most striking and best documented embodiment. For the passage from Kazakov to Kedmi is not merely a change of civil status: it is a political act, an existential one, and in a sense theological — the visible sign of a conversion not of faith, but of destiny.

Kazakov is one of the most widespread Russian patronyms, derived from kazak, the Cossack, which bears no mark of Jewish belonging. That young Yasha Kazakov, son of Iosif Yakovlevich and Sofia Yakovlevna Kazakova, grew up in a name that said nothing of what he was, speaks to something of the Jewish condition in the Soviet Union: an identity assigned to administrative invisibility, reduced to the mention of nationality in the fifth line of the Soviet internal passport — the famous "fifth column" of the document, which labeled the Jew without allowing him to name himself. To choose to become Kedmi — "he of the Orient," "he of origins" — is to respond to this assignment with voluntary naming.

The biography of Yakov Kedmi is in this sense a narrative of implication in collective life and of justice toward his own conducted under conditions of adversity rarely reached. In 1967, at nineteen, he crossed the threshold of the Israeli embassy in Moscow and openly asked to make his aliyah. The gesture was perilous: Israeli diplomats themselves first suspected him of being a KGB agent, so improbable did the initiative seem in Brezhnev's Moscow. Refused, surveilled, he did not lose heart. In May 1968, he publicly renounced his Soviet citizenship — an act of rupture without return in a system that did not recognize the right to emigration. Then, at the end of that same year, he drafted a letter that reached Nehemiah Levanon, responsible for Israeli clandestine operations for Soviet Jews; in this text, he expressed his pride in his Jewish heritage and declared his will to reinscribe himself in it body and soul. This letter, a testimony of piety in the etymological sense — fidelity to that from which one comes — was one of the founding acts of his public life.

When he finally immigrated to Israel and chose the name Kedmi, he did not merely adopt a patronym: he performed the gesture that this book has attempted to theorize. The abandonment of Kazakov for Kedmi recapitulates in a single stroke what entire generations had experienced in diffuse fashion: to break with the name of the country of exile in order to return to the Hebrew root, to qédem, to the Orient-origin. The hidden layer — the name of before — is here perfectly documented, a rare case that illustrates the general rule sketched in chapter three.

His career within Nativ — in Hebrew "the path" or "the way," a clandestine organization answerable directly to Israel's Prime Minister — allowed him to give institutional form to this commitment. Nativ's mission, long kept secret — its very name was revealed inadvertently, through a slip of an Israeli Finance Minister in the early 1990s — was to facilitate the emigration of Jews from the Soviet bloc to Israel. For twenty-two years, Yakov Kedmi served there, including seven as its head, from 1992 to 1999. These years coincided with the collapse of the USSR and one of the greatest waves of aliyah in contemporary history: more than a million Soviet Jews reached Israel in the early 1990s, transforming the country profoundly — demographically, culturally, scientifically. That this human torrent could be organized and poured into Israel owes in part to the clandestine and diplomatic structures that men like Kedmi had patiently built during the years of Soviet darkness.

One finds here, in the biography of a single man, the dimension that Jewish tradition calls pidyon shevuyim — the deliverance of captives — one of the highest mitzvot of halakha, the one that takes precedence over almost all other individual obligations. The Jews of the USSR were not captives in the literal sense of Talmudic law, but their situation — forbidden religious practice, teaching of Hebrew, emigration, public expression of their Jewishness — amounted to a form of imprisonment both identitary and spiritual. The action of Nativ, under Kedmi's direction, can be read in this light: a modern and institutional form of pidyon shevuyim, exercised in the language of intelligence and diplomacy rather than in that of ransom and redemption.

In 2011, Yakov Kedmi published his memoirs in Moscow: Безнадёжные войны — Директор самой секретной спецслужбы Израиля рассказывает — Hopeless Wars — The Director of Israel's Most Secret Secret Service Tells All (Eksmo ed.). The title deserves close attention. Hopeless Wars: the expression, in this man's mouth, is not an admission of defeat but a wager on the improbable. What he accomplished — bringing Jews out of a self-enclosed empire, reversing institutional policy, organizing the exodus of a million people — was, viewed from the outside, precisely a hopeless war. The thesis of the book, which shines through in its very title, is that no such thing exists: that a resolute man, who does not lie to himself and bows before no authority other than his own conscience, is capable of accomplishing the impossible. This conviction is not bombast: it is the product of lived experience, of a choice made at nineteen in a Moscow embassy office, and of an entire life devoted to a cause that no one believed could be won. It is also, at bottom, the meaning of qédem: not a motionless nostalgia, but the energy of origins as a propulsive force forward.

The meaning of a name like Kedmi, turned toward the origin and the East, finds an echo in modern Jewish thought, which has continually interrogated the relationship between ancient source and the present. Modern Judaism constituted itself precisely in the tension between fidelity to tradition and entry into modernity, between the heritage of qédem and the demands of the present time [Hayoun, 1992]. To give a child the name of the orient and of origin is, in a certain way, to inscribe within the flesh of the lineage this philosophical question.

Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy made the "Hebrew source" a focus of thought, showing how anteriority — what precedes, what grounds — engages an ethic of responsibility toward the other [Chalier, 2002]. Now qédem is precisely that: the anterior, what comes before and obligates us. Similarly, reflection on the Law as the origin of the political in the Torah situates the beginning not as a simple chronological starting point, but as a normative principle always active [Trigano, 1991]. The name Kedmi, bearing the root of origin, participates symbolically in this meditation on the beginning as foundation.

This philosophical dimension receives a striking biographical illustration in the case of Yakov Kedmi. His memoirs reveal a man who, from an early age, formulated for himself a rule of life articulated around the refusal of self-deception. To have served for two decades in the most opaque recesses of Israeli intelligence, and to have drawn from it not the cynicism of the man in the shadows but the conviction that truth is the first condition of efficacy, testifies to a singular form of individual humility: not the humility of submission, but that of lucid diagnosis, which begins by regarding one's own situation without complacency. It was this disposition — inherited from a Soviet Jewish childhood where reality was daily falsified by state ideology — that allowed Kedmi to perceive, before others, the fissures in the Soviet system and to exploit its openings for the benefit of Jews who wished to leave.

Finally, it should be recalled that Jewish modernity was not only a history of ideas and renaissances, but also of catastrophe. The destruction of European communities during the Shoah broke entire lineages and conferred a particular gravity on the gesture of naming and transmitting a name after the abyss [Delbo, 1970]. To take up a Hebrew name, to bear it, to give it, is also, for many families, to affirm a continuity against annihilation. The return to qédem, to the origin, becomes then an act of fidelity and survival. In the USSR, this threat had taken a form other than physical destruction: forced assimilation, the administrative erasure of Jewish identity, the silencing. To resist it through the public assertion of one's name — as Kazakov did in becoming Kedmi — was, in its own way, an act of memory against programmed forgetting.

The history of Nativ is, in its own way, a parable of the Jewish virtue of care for the other exercised at the geopolitical scale. The organization was created in the early years of the State of Israel to maintain a clandestine link with Jews of the Soviet bloc — cut off from their coreligionists, forbidden from practice and emigration, yet no less real in their aspiration to exist as Jews. Nativ worked in the shadows: its agents operated under diplomatic or commercial cover, its actions were denied, its very name unknown to the general public for decades. It thus represents a unique case in the history of intelligence services: a secret organization whose mission was not to destroy or spy on an enemy, but to liberate a community.

Yakov Kedmi took its direction in 1992, at the precise moment when the iron curtain was collapsing and the aspiration of Soviet Jews to emigration, long compressed, was suddenly released. The period of his leadership, from 1992 to 1999, corresponds to the most massive influx in the history of Soviet and post-Soviet aliyah: more than a million people who transformed demographically the State of Israel, strengthened its scientific and cultural fabric, and durably modified its political landscape. The role of Nativ in this transformation is not of an anecdotal order: the organization had, during the preceding decades, maintained the invisible net that prevented Soviet Jewish identities from dissolving entirely, and that allowed emigration candidates to find an interlocutor.

This history is inscribed in the long time of Israel's collective memory. One of the great constants of the Jewish people across centuries and continents is this active solidarity toward communities in danger — what ancient texts call kol Israël arevin zeh bazeh: "all Israel is guarantor for one another". This Talmudic formula, which founds a mutual responsibility among Jews beyond borders and regimes, has never been merely an abstract principle. It was embodied in the collections of Sephardi communities for the victims of Ashkenazi pogroms, in networks of aid to refugees across twentieth-century Europe, in the operations of Mossad and Nativ for the Jews of the USSR. Kedmi, in directing Nativ, is its direct and conscious heir.

The memoirs he published in 2011 constitute in this regard a precious document not only for the history of Israeli intelligence, but for the history of contemporary Jewish solidarity. Written in Russian — the language of the empire from which he wanted to liberate his people — published in Moscow — in the very city where, at nineteen, he had crossed the threshold of the embassy — these memoirs are themselves a symbolic act: Kedmi returns in the language of exile to tell of its crossing, as if the qédem, the reconquered origin, had meaning only on condition of being narrated in and against the language of separation.

The title — Wars Without Hope — bears within itself a vision of the relation to struggle that Jewish tradition has long cultivated in other forms: that of refusal of resignation in the face of adversity, of insistence on maintaining a claim that the balance of forces seems to render vain. From the Babylonian exile to the forced conversions of Spain, from resistance in the ghettos to Soviet refuzniks, Jewish history is a long series of wars that one should not have won and that one has nonetheless, often, won — or at least survived. Kedmi, in giving this title to his memoirs, places himself consciously in this lineage.

By the end of this journey, the patronym Kedmi reveals itself less as the name of a documented dynasty than as the distillation of a collective history — and, henceforth, the name of at least one exemplary life whose archival records allow us to trace the path with precision.

A modern Hebrew patronym, attested as such by reference sources [Q98078368 — Wikidata], it draws from the root qédem a double meaning — the orient and the origin — which makes it one of those names through which Jewish modernity expressed its aspiration for return: return to the land, to the language, to the beginning. Its emergence is part of the great movement of Hebraization of names that accompanied the renaissance of the language and the building of the State of Israel [Family Names in Israel (Eshel, 1967); The Book of Names (Ariel, 1997)].

The trajectory of Yakov Kedmi — Kazakov become Kedmi, Muscovite become Israeli, transport engineer become director of an intelligence service in the service of aliyah — illustrates this history with an intensity that few individual destinies attain. It shows that the passage from one name to another is never a simple administrative act: it is the inscription in the flesh of a claimed belonging, of an irreversible choice, of a responsibility assumed toward a community. Kazakov was the name of empire; Kedmi is the name of return.

If one were to name what this lineage, by means of the best-documented figure who bears it, will have expressed above all else, it would be the virtue of involvement in collective life coupled with the value of care given to the other — this areivout, this active solidarity, which the Jewish tradition formulates in the mutual responsibility of all Israel for all Israel. Yakov Kedmi did not serve an abstract cause: he served real women and men, confined in an empire, who wanted to recover their name, their language, their land. He did it in the shadows, with persistence, with lucidity, without deceiving himself — which is perhaps the most sober definition of greatness.

Behind him, behind his memoirs, behind the name he chose, there emerges the image of what qédem means in all its depth: not the nostalgia for a fixed past, but the energy of the origin as an impulse toward the future. The Great Book of the Kedmi is thus, faithfully, a book of the path — the one that the root indicates and that the bearers of the name have, each in their own way, traveled.