The Lilienthal Family

To understand Lilienthal, one must first understand how Jews of central and eastern Europe came to acquire family names. Until the late eighteenth century, most Ashkenaze Jews identified themselves by a mobile patronymic — so-and-so son of so-and-so — to which were sometimes added a nickname derived from place, occupation, or physical trait. The imposition of hereditary surnames was the work of states: the Edict of Toleration of Joseph II (1787) for Galicia and Austria, the Prussian laws of the early nineteenth century, then the Russian decrees of 1804 and 1835. The officials charged with registration then assigned, often in exchange for payment or through sheer administrative whim, a profusion of names composed from German roots evoking nature, precious stones, or flowers.

Lilienthal — "valley of the lilies" — belongs precisely to this ornamental floral vein, comparable to Rosenthal, Blumenthal, or Mandelbaum. The works of Alexander Beider and Lars Menk, which today constitute the uncontested reference in Jewish onomastics, catalogue this type of formation across the entire Ashkenaze sphere: the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Poland, Galicia, and the Judeo-German space [Dictionaries of Jewish surnames from Eastern Europe and the Judeo-German world]. The coexistence of the name in the German corpus (Menk 2005) and in the Polish-Russian corpora (Beider) confirms that it is not a single lineage but a name independently reinvented in several centers of origin.

A remarkable linguistic feature nonetheless distinguishes Lilienthal: its archaic Polish feminine form, Lilientalowa. In traditional Polish, the suffix -owa marked the wife's name ("the wife of Lilienthal"), while -ówna designated the daughter. This morphological adaptation demonstrates the acclimatization of a Germanic surname to Slavic usage, and it is precisely under this form that the name entered Polish intellectual history with Regina Lilientalowa [Lilienthal (surname) — Wikipédia]. It should finally be noted that the name is not exclusively Jewish: there exist non-Jewish German bearers, the most celebrated being the engineer Otto Lilienthal, pioneer of gliding flight. This dual belonging — Jewish and German — is characteristic of ornamental surnames, which could be borne on either side of the confessional boundary.

The most documented figure in the lineage is that of Max (Menachem) Lilienthal, born in Munich in 1815 into a Bavarian Jewish family touched by the Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah. Trained at the University of Munich, where he earned a doctorate, he embodies the generation of "modern" rabbis, versed in both talmudic tradition and German academic culture. This rare profile made him an ideal candidate for a mission of unprecedented scope: the reform of Jewish education in the Russian Empire.

Called to Riga in the early 1840s, Lilienthal directed a modern Jewish school there, then was recruited by the Russian Minister of Public Education, Sergei Uvarov, to promote a network of state Jewish schools throughout the Pale of Settlement. This enterprise, which officially aimed to "enlighten" the Jews but which many suspected of targeting their assimilation or even their conversion, met with the deep mistrust of traditional communities. Confronted with this wariness and disillusioned by the true intentions of the tsarist government, Lilienthal left Russia. This episode illustrates precisely the central tension of Jewish emancipation in the nineteenth century: openness to the modernity of the modern state is often purchased at the cost of suspicion toward the forces of communal dissolution. As the historiography of modern Judaism underscores, modernization imposed from above could not succeed without adherence from below [Kaplan, 2003].

Max Lilienthal's journey up to his emigration thus embodies a characteristic trajectory: that of the German Jewish scholar caught between the ideals of the Enlightenment, the demands of imperial states, and fidelity to communities. His departure for the New World in 1845 marks the transition from a European biography to an Atlantic one.

Arriving in the United States in 1845, Max Lilienthal settled first in New York, where he served as a rabbi and educator, before moving in 1855 to Cincinnati, Ohio, which would become the capital of American Reform Judaism. There, he worked alongside his friend and colleague Isaac Mayer Wise, the institutional architect of the movement. Together, they helped make Cincinnati the home of a Judaism adapted to the conditions of American democracy: worship in the vernacular, edifying sermons, participation in civic life, and engagement in interfaith dialogue.

Reform Judaism, of which Lilienthal was one of the leading advocates, rested on the idea that Judaism is a living tradition, called to reinterpret its ritual forms in the light of reason and historical context, while preserving its ethical and monotheistic core. This vision is part of the long dynamic of Judaism between fidelity and renewal, between the transmitted Law and its actualization, as tradition has always conceived it [Encaoua, 2024]. In the United States, this movement found particularly fertile ground, where the absence of a state religion and confessional pluralism allowed Reform Judaism to become, by the end of the nineteenth century, the principal expression of American Judaism [Kaplan, 2003].

Lilienthal also distinguished himself as an engaged citizen: a member of the Cincinnati school board, he championed secular public education and the separation of Church and State, advocated for religious tolerance, and actively participated in the public debates of his adopted city. He died in Cincinnati in 1882, leaving behind the image of a rabbi-citizen, a living bridge between German Bildung and American democracy. His trajectory illustrates the way in which the Jewish experience was transformed through contact with the New World, including in the growing place reserved for families and women in American communal life [Nadell, 2019].

At the other geographical and cultural extreme of the name stands Regina Lilientalowa, born in 1875 and died in 1924. An ethnographer, translator, and Polish journalist of Jewish language and culture, she was among the first to apply the methods of the nascent humanities to the study of the folklore, beliefs, and customs of the Jewish world of Eastern Europe [Lilienthal (surname) — Wikipédia]. Her work, long underestimated, appears today as a precious source on a world — that of traditional Polish Judaism — which the Shoah would engulf a generation later.

Lilientalowa devoted her research to rites of passage, popular beliefs, magic, festivals, and the culture of Jewish childhood. She systematically collected the practices, formulas, and representations that structured the daily life of communities, in a spirit that was at once scholarly and empathetic. Her work participates in that vast movement, straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by which Judaism took itself as an object of scientific study, seeking to understand its own traditions in the light of modern methods [Encaoua, 2023]. In this sense, she is the exact feminine and Eastern counterpart of Max Lilienthal: where the latter reformed institutions, she documented the traditions that modernity threatened to erase.

The very form of her name — Lilientalowa, the conjugal feminine of the Germanic patronym acclimatized to Polish — condenses an entire history: that of a German name borne by a Jewish woman of Polish expression, working within the cultural orbit of European modernity. Her career as a woman of learning, at a time when women's access to intellectual life remained exceptional, inscribes itself within the long struggle for the recognition of Jewish women as full actors in culture and knowledge [Nadell, 2019] [Leibman, 2020].

Nothing proves that Max Lilienthal and Regina Lilientalowa shared a common ancestor. Onomastic dictionaries teach, on the contrary, that ornamental surnames like Lilienthal were independently coined in multiple households, so that homonymy does not imply kinship [Dictionaries of Jewish surnames from Eastern Europe and Judeo-German]. And yet, the coincidence of the name borne by these two figures — one in Bavaria and then in America, the other in Russian Poland — offers a striking image of the two great paths of modern Ashkenaze Judaism: the western path of reform and Atlantic emigration, and the eastern path of tradition and its scholarly study.

This symmetry, even if fortuitous in fact, is eloquent in Memory. It recalls that the Jewish people has long understood itself as a people of exile and dispersion, the Galout, where unity is maintained not by the contiguity of blood or territory but by the continuity of a shared tradition and destiny [Baer, 2000]. The name Lilienthal, scattered from Munich to Riga, from New York to Warsaw, illustrates this diasporic condition: a single sign unfolds into multiple trajectories, without a geographical center, held together solely by belonging to the Jewish world.

The hope that runs through this dispersion — the expectation of a gathering and a redemption — belongs to the messianic depths of Judaism, which Gershom Scholem showed to be the wellspring of all Jewish spirituality, including in its secularized forms of progress and reform [Scholem, 1974]. Thus, the reformer of Cincinnati who believed in the perfectibility of humanity and the ethnographer of Warsaw who saved popular beliefs from oblivion each participate, in their own way, in the same tension between Memory of the past and expectation of the future. Here, the archive and Memory answer each other: the archive separates the two lineages, but collective memory reunites them in a single narrative of dispersion and faithfulness.

If the name Lilienthal is Ashkenazic in its form and history, its trajectory illuminates a dynamic common to all Jewish diasporas. Like the great Sephardic rabbinical families who spread from the Iberian Peninsula toward North Africa and the Orient, the Ashkenazic families bearing ornamental names dispersed according to the movements of migration, persecution, and opportunity. In both worlds, the name became a vector of Memory: it preserved, across borders and languages, the trace of an origin and a belonging.

The parallel with the Sephardic world is instructive. Where Ashkenazic onomastics were marked by the late and sometimes arbitrary imposition of German names, Sephardic onomastics preserved ancient patronyms, often linked to prestigious rabbinical lineages transmitted from generation to generation, such as those illustrated by the great rabbis of North Africa [Encaoua, 2023] [Yabiladi, 2022]. The Algerian and Maghrebi Jewish heritage, documented by photographic collections and communal archives, reveals the same identity-forming function of the name as the living Memory of a community [JudaicAlgeria, 2024] [MAHJ, 2024]. In both traditions, the name carries a History larger than that of its individual bearers.

The comparison also underscores the differences: the Ashkenazic Lilienthal is a recent name, transparent, almost administrative, whereas many Sephardic names sink their roots into an Iberian Middle Ages. Yet both fulfill the same anthropological function — inscribing the individual within a chain of transmission. It is this function that the ethnographer Lilientalowa studied in others, and that the rabbi Lilienthal transmitted to his faithful: Memory as the condition for the survival of a people through its divisions and recompositions [Encaoua, 2023].

The Great Book of the Lilienthal lineage tells not the story of a dynasty, but of a name — and through it, of a condition. Born from the Germanic "valley of lilies," forged in the administrative crucible of emancipation, this surname unfolded into disjointed trajectories that, taken together, encapsulate the great adventures of modern Judaism. Max Lilienthal embodies its western, reforming dimension: from Munich to Riga, from New York to Cincinnati, he was one of the architects of a Judaism reconciled with democratic modernity [Kaplan, 2003]. Regina Lilientalowa embodies its eastern, scholarly dimension: in Warsaw, she rescued from oblivion the traditional world that was soon to disappear [Lilienthal (surname) — Wikipédia].

Between these two figures, the archive traces no blood connection, and historical honesty forbids us from inventing one [Dictionnaires des patronymes juifs d'Europe de l'Est et judéo-allemands]. But Memory, for its part, brings them together: the same name, carried at both extremities of Europe and the Atlantic, speaks the deep truth of the diaspora — a unity sustained neither by territory nor by lineage, but by a shared faithfulness to a tradition and to a hope [Baer, 2000] [Scholem, 1974]. Thus the name Lilienthal, a modest valley of lilies born in the offices of emancipation, becomes the unexpected emblem of a people who made of dispersion a Memory and of Memory a survival.