The Reich Family

Before being a lineage, Reich was an attribute. The great reference dictionaries classify this surname among descriptive names, those nicknames that fixed in civil status a personal characteristic: fortune, social position, ascendancy. Alexander Beider's Dictionaries of Jewish Surnames of Eastern Europe (Russian Empire, Kingdom of Poland, Galicia) and Lars Menk's Dictionary of German-Jewish Surnames precisely document this type of formation, where the German adjective reich — rich — served to name entire families [Dictionaries of Jewish and Judeo-German Surnames of Eastern Europe, Beider–Menk]. Menk's work, published by Avotaynu in 2005, remains the reference for Judeo-German names, and Beider's for the eastern region.

The history of these names is not neutral. Many German-speaking Jewish surnames were imposed by decree at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, when states sought to identify their Jewish subjects fiscally and militarily. Some names were "pleasant" — flowers, stones, virtues, riches — and others deliberately pejorative. Reich belongs to the first category, that of flattering names, which suggests either a genuinely wealthy family, or the choice, sometimes paid for, of a favorable name from the official in charge of registration. In this way, the name already carries a Jewish value: that of honest economic activity and prosperity assumed without shame, the tradition of Israel having never despised wealth provided it was accompanied by justice and sharing.

The universality of the nickname also explains its dispersal: borne by non-Jews as well as by Jews, the name is found from Alsace to Galicia. The name is widespread among Jews, but it is originally a German name, like most Ashkenazi names that are not of Hebrew origin. This homonymy between Jews and Christians will, in the Europe of nationalisms, be both a protection and a trap.

The geography of the Reich families mirrors that of Ashkenazi Judaism in all its extent. Genealogical sources attest to settlement in several major centers: this patronym is found in France, Alsace and Lorraine, as well as in Poland and Hungary. To these zones is added Austrian Galicia, where Beider abundantly records names of Germanic form in the registers.

Each of these centers imprinted on the name its own coloration. In Alsace-Lorraine, the Reich families inscribe themselves in an ancient rural and village community, governed by the French edicts of 1808 obliging Jews to fix a stable name — a founding moment that Alsatian communal Memory preserves carefully. In Galicia and Hungary, the Reich belonged to the dense world of shtetlech and the great urban communities of Kraków, Lwów, Pressburg and Budapest, where Hasidism, Orthodoxy and, later, the Reform movement and Zionism crossed paths.

This very dispersion illustrates a cardinal experience of Jewish History: the galout, exile, not as simple geographic dispersion but as a spiritual and imaginative condition, as Yitzhak Baer analyzed it [Baer, 2000]. The Reich families, present simultaneously on the Rhine, the Vistula and the Danube, embody this Jewish capacity to make a land of refuge a home without ever forgetting what lies elsewhere. The virtue at stake here is the relationship to the stranger: families of immigrants or newly named, the Reich knew in turn how to be welcomed and to welcome, weaving in each province the bonds of solidarity (tsedaka) that made the strength of the kehillot.

One must pause on the administrative gesture which, more than any marriage or migration, founded the lineage as such: the attribution of a hereditary surname. Until the end of the eighteenth century, most Jews of Central Europe bore no fixed family name and designated themselves by filiation, "X son of Y". For a very long time, aside from the Cohen and the Lévy, Jews bore no family names and designated themselves by their father's given name, in the style "Moses son of Abraham"; when they were forced to choose a family name, as in the French Empire in 1808, they often adopted their father's given name.

The case of Reich follows a different logic: not the paternal given name, but social description. This is where family tradition and archive answer one another — sometimes confirming each other, sometimes contradicting each other. The memory of Reich families enjoys seeing in the name the trace of ancestral wealth, of a fortunate patriarch; the archive, more cautious, recalls that the name could also be chosen or assigned without correlation with real fortune, by the chance of a registration office. Modern genealogical research moreover shows that the sonority of a name sometimes allows one to trace back to a founding figure, but that the descriptive name, unlike the patronymic, does not preserve this dynastic memory — the sonority of a patronymic family name makes it possible to determine which masculine name of a family is included in the set of dynastic names across generations.

In this gap between narrative and document lodges a lesson of individual humility: the name that speaks of wealth reminds us implicitly that nothing was ever owned outright, that everything — the name included — was received, sometimes wrenched, often negotiated in the precariousness of the Jewish condition.

A name as widespread has naturally borne notable figures in almost every domain of Jewish life and general culture. Historical prudence requires not artificially linking all these personalities to a single stock: they testify less to a unique genealogy than to the fertility of a surname. One thinks, in modernity, of public figures evoked even in common debate — one thus finds the Judeo-American politician Otto Reich and the German officer Otto Reich, an example of how the same name encompasses opposite destinies.

In the order of scientific, philosophical and literary knowledge, the name Reich distinguished itself through several generations of physicians, musicians and thinkers. In the world of contemporary musical creation, it evokes one of the major currents of the twentieth century; in that of psychology and sciences, other bearers of the name marked their discipline. Where talmudic tradition was cultivated — in Hungary and Galicia notably —, rabbis named Reich contributed to talmudic knowledge and to the conception of Jewish Law, participating in the great effort of interpretation that, generation after generation, kept the halakha alive.

This panorama — from the poseq who settles a question of religious law to the composer who invents a new form — speaks of a constant virtue: the contribution to Jewish thought and, more broadly, to universal culture. The lineage, in sowing its talents, illustrates this cardinal conviction of Judaism according to which study and creation are forms of divine service, and that knowledge transmitted is worth more than fortune amassed.

The destiny of the Reich family tilts, like that of all European Jewry, into the abyss of the twentieth century. A tragic irony of History willed that the very name of this family — Reich, "empire" — became that of the apparatus which organized the extermination of Jews. Léon Poliakov, in his foundational work, was among the first to document with rigor the machinery of the Third Reich against Jews, establishing the foundations of Holocaust historiography [Poliakov, Harvest of Hate, 1951].

The Reich of the Eastern and Central lands — Galicia, Hungary, Poland — were struck full force. Many perished in ghettos and camps; others survived through flight, exile to America, Mandatory Palestine then Israel, or entry into the Resistance. It is here that the virtue of relation to war finds its highest expression: not war for its own sake, which Jewish tradition never exalts, but resistance to annihilation, the preservation of life and dignity. At the scale of Israel's collective Memory, the vanished Reich join the countless cohort of victims whose remembrance itself — zakhor, "remember" — has become a commandment.

Baer showed that exile constituted a deep structure of the Jewish imaginary [Baer, 2000]; the catastrophe of the twentieth century radicalized its experience. The surviving Reich had to rebuild, elsewhere, an existence whose name now bore a wound. That this surname meaning "wealth" crossed the absolute impoverishment of spoliation and murder confers upon its survival an almost testamentary value.

After 1945, the Reich lineage, like so many others, faced the dual task of mourning and recommencement. In Israel, North America, and France, descendants undertook to reconstitute the broken family trees, to recover the missing branches — work that Jewish genealogy circles document today. The very process of reconstitution is an act of Memory: giving life to the forgotten, recovering the missing branches on a family tree, such is the endeavor of Jewish genealogy circles.

This reconstruction stems from both involvement in collective life and care for the deceased. Jewish tradition names hessed shel emet, "true kindness," the care rendered to the dead who cannot repay it in return; the genealogical and memorial work of the Reich families is a modern transposition of it. Finding a name erased from registers, restoring a date, reuniting a family scattered across three continents: this is a contemporary form of charity and filial piety.

At this stage, transmitted tradition — the accounts of survivors, rescued photographs, given names restored to newborns — and the recovered archive meet. The status of this chapter is that of the transmitted, for it rests largely on testimony and family memory, which the historian receives with respect while noting that they do not all constitute documentary proof. It is in this interweaving that the lineage endures: not by the sole wealth that its name speaks of, but by faithfulness to remembrance.

At the end of this journey, the name Reich emerges as a distillation of European Jewish history: a nickname of prosperity, imposed or chosen at the threshold of modernity, scattered from Alsace to Hungary, illustrated by scholars and creators, tested by catastrophe, and finally restored by memory. The Reich family is not a single dynasty but a bundle of destinies gathered under the same word, and it is precisely this plurality that makes it a mirror of the people of Israel in diaspora.

Among all the virtues that this lineage will have touched upon — knowledge, resistance, solidarity — the one it expresses most fully is perhaps fidelity to memory in the reversal of fortunes. A name that signified wealth traversed spoliation, deportation, and exile, to be reborn in the patient work of reconstituting families. In this, the Reich embody the foundational commandment of the tradition, zakhor — to remember — and join the long chain of those who, from the galout of Baer [Baer, 2000] to the ordeal documented by Poliakov [Poliakov, 1951], have made memory an act of resistance and transmission a form of fidelity. Their true wealth was never that of the name, but that.