The Kupferberg Family

Before the imposition of hereditary family names, Jews of Europe, like those of Islamic lands, most often designated themselves through a patronymic system: "X son of Y" (ben in Hebrew, ibn in Arabic), sometimes supplemented by a toponym, a profession, or a nickname. This manner of naming was not a deficiency but a coherent system, rooted in the liturgy — where one is called to the Torah by one's given name followed by that of one's father — and in communal organization.

The long history of Jewish communities shows that this onomastics always adapted to the surrounding environment. In the lands of medieval Islam, the cultural symbiosis between Jews and Muslims produced hybrid names and shared usages, bearing witness to a dense coexistence despite the legally subordinate status of the dhimmi [Cohen, 1994]. This profound interaction, which some historians have termed symbiosis, left a lasting mark on Jewish culture under early Islam [Wasserstrom, 1995]. Similarly, in Muslim Spain, communities such as that of Seville developed a remarkable social and intellectual life under the domination of Arab-Berber powers [Picard, 2001], while in the Maghreb, entities such as the Jewish community of Tlemcen enjoyed under the Zayyanids genuine autonomy in the management of their affairs [Corcos, 1966].

While these examples concern principally the Sephardic and Oriental diasporas, they illuminate by contrast the Ashkenazi situation from which the name Kupferberg emerges. For in the Germanic and Slavic world, Jews too lived without fixed hereditary patronyms until the end of the eighteenth century. The individual was "Moses son of Solomon," "Reb Itzik the merchant of Cracow," without these designations being transmitted immutably. This onomastic fluidity, shared by the entire Jewish diaspora, was to be brutally interrupted, in the lands of Central Europe, by the centralizing will of modern States. It is in this rupture that one must seek the birth certificate of the name Kupferberg.

The name Kupferberg is the direct product of state policy. From the last quarter of the eighteenth century onwards, the "enlightened" monarchies of central Europe undertook to integrate their Jewish subjects into the modern administrative apparatus — taxation, conscription, census — which presupposed making them identifiable by a fixed and hereditary family name.

The founding act was, in the Habsburg empire, Joseph II's Edict of Tolerance, whose provisions of 1787 imposed upon the Jews of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and in particular those of Galicia newly annexed during the first partition of Poland, the adoption of a fixed German patronym. Prussia followed a comparable path, notably through the Edict of Emancipation of 1812 and earlier regulations affecting its eastern provinces. It was within this framework that there were born, by tens of thousands, ornamental names: compounds formed from German roots designating flowers (Rosen-, Blumen-), metals (Gold-, Silber-, Kupfer-), landscapes (-berg "mountain", -thal "valley", -stein "stone", -feld "field").

Kupferberg — "Kupfer" (copper) + "berg" (mountain) — falls precisely within this ornamental grammar. The name indicates neither an eponymous ancestor nor necessarily a precise place of origin, but results from an administrative assignment, sometimes chosen by the family from an authorized repertory, sometimes attributed by a functionary. Historiographical tradition emphasizes that the quality of the name often depended on the family's means: names with noble or precious connotations could be more sought-after, while functionaries also distributed pejorative names.

There exists moreover, in Lower Silesia, a locality historically named Kupferberg (today Miedzianka, in Poland), a former copper mining site. It is not excluded that certain families received or chose this name by reference to an actual place; but for the overwhelming majority of Jewish bearers, the most probable hypothesis remains that of an ornamental name forged ex nihilo. In the absence of a civil registry document specifically preserving the lineage to a single founding event, we maintain this status of probability.

If the genesis of the name is administrative, its meaning may have nourished, across generations, a family memory and symbolic resonance. It is essential here to distinguish rigorously between what belongs to established etymology and what belongs to transmitted or conjectured interpretation.

Copper — nechoshet in Hebrew — occupies a notable place in biblical and Jewish culture. Metal of the Tabernacle and the Temple, it evokes sacred craft: the altar, the "brazen sea," the cultic vessels. In a homiletic reading that certain families may have cultivated, "copper" becomes the sign of an artisan's vocation or proven integrity, after the manner of a metal that endures and patinas without corrupting. The "mountain" — har — in turn refers to major sites of revelation and Jewish hope: Mount Sinai, Mount Moriah, Mount Zion. A lineage named "mountain of copper" could thus, retrospectively, read within its imposed surname a noble and spiritual resonance.

It must be stressed, however: these readings are reconstructions of meaning posterior to the imposition of the name. They belong to what might be called the "domestication" of an endured name, a process by which a family appropriates and ennobles what was first assigned to it. The study of relations between Judaism, knowledge, and representations of the world shows how thoroughly Jewish communities have been able to reinvest with meaning elements inherited from without [Encaoua, 2023]. We therefore present this chapter under the register of memory and conjectured status: the etymology of Kupfer and berg is certain, but the symbolic weight attributed to the name within the Kupferberg lineage belongs to editorial hypothesis, which no document here definitively settles.

And yet — and this is where Tuli Kupferberg's trajectory takes on singular resonance — the "mountain" ends by materializing in an unexpected form. When this descendant of Yiddish-speaking immigrants rises, from the cafés of Greenwich Village, onto the stages of American counterculture to sing and cry out his refusal of war and injustice, something of the har — of the prophetic mountain from which the voice makes itself heard — resurges in the present. The semantics of the name, born of a bureaucratic form, may have had a premonition of something.

Once established, the name Kupferberg traveled with its bearers in the course of the great Jewish migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Originating from Germanic and Galician lands, Kupferberg families followed the classical routes of Ashkenazi emigration: toward Western Europe (Western Germany, France, United Kingdom), toward the Americas (United States, Argentina), and later toward Mandatory Palestine and then the State of Israel.

The factors behind this dispersal are well documented by the general historiography of Judaism: demographic and economic pressure in Eastern Europe, waves of pogroms in the Russian Empire beginning in 1881, legal restrictions, and finally the upheavals of the two World Wars. The name, now hereditary, became a marker of identity transported from one continent to another, sometimes slightly modified according to local spellings (Kupferberg, Kupperberg, Cooperberg in the English-speaking world).

It was precisely this last variant — absorption into the English-speaking fabric of America — that gave rise to one of the most documented bearers of the name. Naphtali Kupferberg, called Tuli, was born on September 28, 1923 in New York City, into a Yiddish-speaking Jewish family, the child of immigrants from the Ashkenazi world. The household in which he grew up was still fully inhabited by the language and culture of Eastern European Jewry, that mame-loshn — that mother tongue — which the Great Wave of migration from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had deposited on the shores of the New World. Named with a Hebrew given name — Naphtali, one of the twelve sons of Jacob, a symbol of agility and freedom — he embodied an entire history of transplantation: the Galician or Polish tree, uprooted, replanted in the concrete of Brooklyn.

The movement of dispersal is inscribed in the broader dialectic of Jewish exile, where the loss of territorial anchorage is accompanied by an intense vitality of memory and expectation: the imaginary of galout structures in depth the relationship of Jewish families to wandering and rootedness [Baer, 2000]. For the Kupferberg lineage, as for so many others, the name became a portable homeland — a "mountain" that one carried with oneself for want of being able to remain there.

We retain for this chapter the status "probable": while Ashkenazi migration routes are perfectly established, the attribution of this or that precise trajectory to the Kupferberg lineage, lacking a comprehensive examination of nominative acts brought together in the present work, remains a plausible reconstruction rather than a documented certainty for each branch.

The twentieth century imposed on European Judaism the most radical trial in its history. The Kupferberg families, rooted in the very regions — Galicia, Silesia, Poland, Germany — where Nazi genocide struck with the greatest violence, were inevitably caught up in this catastrophe. The Germanic name, tragic irony, offered no protection: the Nazi regime's racial definition of Judaism sovereignly disregarded the consonance of surnames.

Historiography of the Shoah and persecutions has shown that the enterprise of extermination did not stop at the borders of Central Europe. In North Africa, Jews also suffered under antisemitic legislation under the Vichy regime [Abitbol, 1983]. Tunisia even experienced direct German occupation between November 1942 and May 1943, a period during which the Jewish community was subjected to forced labor, fines, and persecution [Nataf, 2012]. In Morocco, the evolution of the Jewish community under French protectorate was also marked by the tensions of the period [Bensimon-Donath, 1968]. And in the Eastern Mediterranean, ancient communities, such as the Jews of Crete, saw their centuries-old history — since the era of Venetian rule — end in tragedy [Παπαδία-Λάλα, 2002].

This panorama, which extends beyond Ashkenazi space alone, reminds us that persecution was a global diasporic phenomenon. For the Kupferberg families of Central Europe, the outcome was most often extermination, exile, or clandestinity. The survivors rebuilt their lives in Israel, North America, or Western Europe, perpetuating a name that became, after the catastrophe, an act of Memory as much as a vital record. To bear the name Kupferberg after 1945 was to attest to a survival.

It is in this light that we must read the existence of Tuli Kupferberg, born in New York in 1923, and who thus traversed the years of the Shoah on American soil, geographically sheltered but not emotionally from the catastrophe. His generation, that of children of immigrants who had fled Eastern Europe, was the one that, in surviving, carried the weight of survivor's guilt by proxy — the acute awareness that cousins who remained "in the old country" had often not had the same fortune. This awareness never left him, and it shaped his entire work: the refusal of all war, visceral mistrust of all forms of state power, attention to the victims of institutional violence.

Naphtali "Tuli" Kupferberg (September 28, 1923 – July 12, 2010) is, in the documented history of the lineage, the best-attested and most singular figure. A cum laude graduate of Brooklyn College in 1944, he belongs to that first generation of children of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants who gained access to the American university with the deep conviction that knowledge is both a dignity and a tool of struggle. The talmud Torah — study for its own sake, the relentless drive to understand and transmit — takes here a resolutely secular and contestatory form, but it retains its intensity and rigor.

From the 1950s onward, Kupferberg moved in the circles of New York's counterculture, frequenting poets, anarchists, and artists in the cafés of Greenwich Village, that neighborhood which was at the time the most effervescent laboratory of American cultural dissidence. He published poems, essays, and pamphlets, making the printed page a space of resistance. It was in this vein that he founded, in 1958, the literary magazine Birth. The magazine lasted only three issues, but those three issues mattered: Birth published major figures of the Beat Generation — Allen Ginsberg, Diane Di Prima, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Ted Joans — thus constituting, in the editorial landscape of the era, a collective act of faith in behalf of literature without compromise.

The editorial gesture of Birth is not insignificant from the perspective of a Jewish lineage. The tradition of the book — Am ha-Sefer, the People of the Book — the conviction that written and transmitted words are more durable than the power of empires, resurfaces here in a radically modernized form. Kupferberg does not edit Talmudic commentaries, but he exercises the same function as the sofer, the scribe: he chooses, he decides, he gives voice to what without him would remain silent. That this editorial vocation is exercised on behalf of accursed and marginal poets rather than recognized masters says something about how the tradition of involvement in collective life can renew itself by changing its garb.

In 1964, Kupferberg co-founded with poet Ed Sanders the satirical rock group The Fugs. The name of the group — Fugs — is itself a subversive borrowing, drawn from a euphemism that Norman Mailer had used in The Naked and the Dead to circumvent censorship. From its founding, the group embodied an aesthetic of deliberate provocation: the lyrics were obscene, the subjects were politically explosive, the music was willfully crude. And yet, behind the surface irreverence, there is an absolute moral imperative.

The songs that Kupferberg composed and performed with the Fugs between 1964 and 1969 form a body of work of remarkable ideological coherence. Kill for Peace turns militarist rhetoric against its own slogans, exposing their murderous absurdity to the point of unbearableness. CIA Man mocks with acerbic irony the methods of the Central Intelligence Agency, posing the question that no one dared articulate in official salons: at what moral price is national security negotiated? The Ten Commandments invokes the foundational text of Jewish Law only to place it alongside the practices of a world that claims to uphold it while betraying it. These songs, played in crowded Village clubs and recorded on six albums between 1964 and 1969, earned the Fugs surveillance by the FBI, whose agents faithfully reported the substance of their concerts — an involuntary testimony to their subversive efficacy.

It would be reductive to read Tuli Kupferberg's work as mere provocation. It must be situated in the long Jewish tradition of mussar — moral rebuke, the capacity to speak uncomfortable truth to power — and in that of tikkun olam, the repair of the world, the conviction that the human being is not a spectator of injustice but responsible for its correction. The violence of American wars in Southeast Asia, the brutality of police repression, state lies: so many disturbances to which Kupferberg opposed not resignation but articulated speech, precise satire, formulated refusal. He is, within the framework of American counterculture in the 1960s, one of the voices that explicitly link pacifist commitment and critique of institutional violence — a posture that finds its deep roots in the Jewish tradition of relationship to war, a tradition that, from the prophet Isaiah to the rabbis of the Talmudic era, has constantly reflected on the conditions of legitimate violence and its limits.

Kupferberg was moreover active in the pacifist-anarchist circles of New York. In 1965, he was among the first teachers at the Free University of New York, an informal institution founded on the refusal of hierarchized knowledge and diplomas as social currency. This gesture — teaching without title, transmitting without institution — recalls the figure of the maggid, the itinerant preacher who carries the word where institutions do not go. His relationship to war, nourished by anarchism and pacifism, was not exhausted in anger: it questioned, with a rare autocritical lucidity, the limits of his own convictions. He noted one day that the flaw of anarchism is precisely that it has never truly been tested by reality — a reflection that testifies to demanding intellectual honesty, refusing comfortable ideology in favor of the open question.

He died on July 12, 2010, in New York, at the age of 86, leaving behind a polymorphic body of work — poems, songs, cartoons, pamphlets — whose profound coherence is that of a man who refused his whole life that the world be as it was, and who articulated this refusal with every tool at his disposal.

Today, the name Kupferberg survives in several diasporas, borne by families whose branches have often lost sight of one another through migratory and genocidal ruptures. Contemporary Jewish genealogy — supported by the digitization of communal registers, census lists, and Shoah archives — enables descendants to partially reconstitute family trees that the twentieth century had fragmented.

It is here that tradition and archive respond to each other, justifying the register of "intersection." On one hand, family memory transmits narratives — an ancestor come from Galicia, a grandfather craftsman, a "mountain of copper" become emblem — ; on the other, the archive comes to confirm, nuance, or sometimes contradict these narratives. The scientific effort applied to Judaism, which crosses documentary rigor with attention to transmitted meaning, offers the adequate methodological framework for this confrontation [Encaoua, 2023].

In this memorial landscape, Tuli Kupferberg occupies a particular place: he is the Kupferberg whose existence is best documented, and whose work constitutes an accessible public archive. The journal Birth, the recordings of the Fugs, the pamphlets and cartoons that Kupferberg produced until the end of his life: so many materials that allow anyone interested in the lineage to access something irreplaceable — not civil status documents and census registers, but the inner voice of a bearer of the name, his way of seeing the world, his angers and his joys. The journal Birth in particular and the songs of the Fugs thus constitute sources of primary importance for the cultural history of the lineage.

The name Kupferberg, born of an administrative constraint, become support of memory after the catastrophe, thus illustrates the plasticity of diasporic Jewish identity: capable of transforming the imposed into the inherited, the endured into the transmitted. The contemporary transmission of the name — through civil status, through family memory, through genealogical databases, and henceforth through the public work of its most visible bearers — prolongs this movement of appropriation. The "probable" status nonetheless imposes itself: each Kupferberg family holds its own history, and only archival inquiry branch by branch could elevate these continuities to the rank of established certainty.

The Great Book — Kupferberg does not recount a dynasty with clear contours, but the adventure of a name. Forged by decree in the central Europe of absolutist Enlightenment, "mountain of copper" was first an assignment: that of States eager to count, tax, and enlist their Jewish subjects. But this imposed name was, over generations, inhabited, ennobled, charged with meaning — until it became, after the trial of the twentieth century, a testimony of survival, and, in the person of Tuli Kupferberg, a tribune.

Through the Kupferberg one reads the entire condition of the Jewish diaspora: the onomastic fluidity of pre-modernity, the administrative rupture, migratory dispersal, catastrophe and reconstruction. This history dialogues with that of other diasporas — Sephardic, Maghrebi, Oriental — all traversed by the same tension between external constraint and inner fidelity, between exile and memory [Baer, 2000].

If one seeks what the Kupferberg lineage has, among all, best expressed among the great values that Judaism has carried through the centuries, one answer imposes itself upon examination of the facts gathered here: it is speech as moral act. Not the prudent silence of one who keeps quiet to survive — though survival was also, at other moments, what had to be chosen — but the contrary impulse: to speak, to publish, to sing, to satirize, to name. Tuli Kupferberg founds a review to give voice to those whom ordinary publishers refuse. He composes songs to formulate what official rhetoric stifles. He teaches without a diploma to transmit what the institution excludes. In doing so, he perpetuates, in a radically modernized and Americanized form, something essentially Jewish: the conviction that the world can and must be repaired (tikkun olam), and that this repair begins with the capacity to name it with exactitude, even when it disturbs, even when it costs.

This interweaving of individual history and collective memory is what gives the Kupferberg narrative its reach. An Austro-Prussian official once gave a Galician family the name of a mountain of copper. This family crossed revolutions, pogroms, the ocean, and the Shoah. And on the other side of the ocean, a child named Naphtali took this name, mounted a stage in Greenwich Village, and said no — with a care for words that is, in itself, a form of homage to all those who could no longer speak.