The Sapolsky Family

The only member of the lineage whose trajectory is today fully documented opens this book, not by convention but by necessity: it is he who gives the name Sapolsky its contemporary depth. Robert Sapolsky is born in Brooklyn, in the State of New York, to parents who immigrated from the Soviet Union; he is raised as an Orthodox Jew and spends his childhood reading about gorillas and imagining living among them [JewAge] [Baidu Baike]. In 1957, Robert Morris Sapolsky comes into the world in Brooklyn, in a family of Russian immigrants, and grows up in an Orthodox Jewish household [Baidu Baike].

This biographical detail — a family that came from the Soviet Union and remained faithful to Orthodoxy — is not trivial. It places the Sapolskys within the immense migratory wave that, from the last decades of the Tsarist Empire through the Soviet era, tore millions of Jews from Eastern Europe away from their lands of origin. The family belongs to that Eastern European Judaism which, transplanted to Brooklyn, reconstituted there its synagogues, its schools and its rituals, making the neighborhood a living fragment of the disappeared world.

Robert Sapolsky's childhood bears witness to a precocity that one finds, like a thread, in Jewish scholarly culture: raised as an Orthodox Jew, he spends his time reading and imagining himself living among silver-backed gorillas; by the age of twelve, he writes fan letters to primatologists, and in high school he devours specialized manuals and teaches himself Swahili [JewAge]. This self-taught discipline, this way of making a knowledge into a devouring passion, extends in a secular register the Litvak virtue par excellence: lernen, study held to be both a duty and a joy. He attends John Dewey High School; as an adult, he will hold the John A. chair at Stanford, pursuing a career as a neuroendocrinologist, primatologist, and science writer [Geni] [Baidu Baike].

In the trajectory of this man, the Jewish tradition of study changes its object without changing its nature. Where his ancestors would have scrutinized a page of Talmud, he scrutinizes the mechanisms of stress in the brains of primates. But the attitude is the same: an obstinate fidelity to the question, a demand for rigor, the conviction that understanding is a form of responsibility. It is in this that the path of a researcher born in Brooklyn illuminates, in reverse, the culture of the world from which his family came.

The surname itself is a document. Sapolsky, with its attested variant Zapolski, reads readily in the Slavic languages of its area of origin: the root evokes za pole, "beyond the field," a topographic designation for one who dwelt at the edge of cultivated land, at the threshold of a village, where plowed earth gave way to wasteland and woods. It is a toponymic name, as confirmed by the notice of the lineage — a Jewish toponymic name from Eastern Europe, issuing from the Russian Empire.

The accessible genealogical sources recall that the surname Sapolsky is of Jewish origin, particularly associated with Eastern European ancestry, and that it often denotes a geographic relation, sometimes connected to a place-name [Crests & Arms]. This toponymic reading accords with the whole of Ashkenazi Jewish onomastics: when, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, imperial administrations imposed upon Jews the adoption of fixed family names, many received or chose denominations drawn from their place of habitation or origin. A Zapolski was, literally, "he from beyond the field."

Other hypotheses circulate, which it behooves us to mention with due caution. Certain surname databases connect the name to a Yiddish root evoking a trade; these propositions, uncorroborated by authoritative scholarly sources, partake more of commercial conjecture than philological demonstration, and one cannot hold them for established. The best-attested form remains the Slavic toponymic reading, consistent with the Belarusian and Polish geography assigned to the lineage.

What matters, beyond the exact etymology, is what the double spelling reveals of the family's destiny. Sapolsky and Zapolski are not two names: it is a single name passed through two administrative filters and two transcription systems. The shift from the initial Z to S, the appearance or loss of the final y, are the scars left by the borders crossed — from Russian chancelleries to American immigration offices, from Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. Each variant records a functionary, a desk, a moment when a family had to declare its identity in a language that was not their own. In this, the name bears the very experience of diaspora.

Situating the Sapolsky family in Belarus and Poland means inscribing them at the heart of the Litvak world — that Jewish cultural area which far exceeded the borders of modern Lithuania to encompass Belarus, part of eastern Poland and northern Ukraine. Yves Plasseraud demonstrated how profound this heritage, today nearly disappeared, was in its universal reach, shaping a Jewish way of being in the world marked by rationalism, religious sobriety and the primacy of study [Plasseraud, 2008].

Litvak Judaism distinguished itself through austere intellectualism and mistrust of mystical exaltation. It gave rise to the great Lithuanian yeshivot, centers of Talmudic erudition of unequaled rigor, where generations of young men spent their lives disputing the subtleties of the Law. This universe of lernen, where social prestige was measured by knowledge rather than wealth, profoundly permeated the Jewish families of the region, including the most modest. It is hardly insignificant that the lineage which this book addresses produced, in the contemporary generation, a man whose entire life was devoted to knowledge: the calling of learning is not here an accident, but the legacy of a culture.

The daily life of these communities unfolded within the framework of the shtetl, the Jewish townlet so finely analyzed by Rachel Ertel [Ertel, 1982]. Neither city nor village, the shtetl was a world unto itself, woven from synagogues, houses of study, markets and charitable institutions. Solidarity there was a religious obligation as much as a social necessity: tsedaka, justice-charity, structured collective life through mutual aid societies that cared for the sick, provided dowries for orphan girls and buried the dead. A family from the Belarusian-Polish borderlands like the Sapolsky necessarily lived within this web of mutual obligations, where care for the other was not a private virtue but the very condition of communal survival.

Israel Bartal retraced the transformation of this world between 1772 and 1881, from the partitions of Poland to the dawn of the great migrations [Bartal, 2005], while Antony Polonsky provided its vast history, from the late Middle Ages to the contemporary era [Polonsky, 2010]. It is within this documentary framework — in the absence of nominative archives specific to the family — that the existence of the Sapolsky ancestors must be understood: an existence whose faces we do not know, but whose world we do know.

The Jews of Belarus and eastern Poland lived, from the last third of the eighteenth century to 1917, under the particular regime that the Russian Empire reserved for its Jewish subjects. Confined to the Pale of Settlement, subject to exceptional laws, they experienced a State that oscillated between the will to assimilate them by force and that of keeping them apart. John Doyle Klier analyzed the way the "Jewish question" haunted imperial policy [Klier, 1995], and ChaeRan Freeze showed how tsarist power attempted to regulate even the intimacy of Jewish families, their marriages and divorces [Freeze, 2002].

One of the heaviest ordeals was military service. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern described the conscription of Jews into the Russian army between 1827 and 1917, this draft which, under Nicholas I, tore children from their homes for long decades of service, while constituting, paradoxically, one of the first forced gateways into modernity [Petrovsky-Shtern, 2009]. Every Jewish family in the Pale knew the dread of recruitment, the stratagems to escape it, the anguish of departures. That the Sapolsky family ultimately left the imperial and Soviet space attests, without our knowing the details, to the same logic that drove millions of Jews westward: to flee an order in which one was never quite at home.

Facing this suspicious State, Jewish communities developed their own institutions of solidarity and emancipation. Brian Horowitz studied Jewish philanthropy and the Enlightenment movement in late tsarist Russia [Horowitz, 2009]: learned societies, educational works, networks of mutual aid that embodied, in a hostile environment, the old Jewish requirement of collective responsibility. It is from this soil — mutual aid as a response to adversity — that emerged the values that a family transmits even when it no longer transmits archives.

The most solid datum of family biography — parents immigrated from the Soviet Union — inscribes the Sapolsky family in the history of Jewish departures from Eastern Europe, but in one of its latest and most perilous variants. Leaving the Soviet Union was not leaving the Empire of the tsars: it meant crossing the Iron Curtain, escaping a regime that, after promising equality, had made state antisemitism a persistent practice and rendered emigration difficult, even dangerous.

Antony Polonsky traced the history of the Jews of Poland and Russia from 1914 to 2008, a period during which the Jewish world of Eastern Europe was successively upended by revolutions, devastated by the Shoah, then stifled under Soviet rule [Polonsky, 2012]. The family from which Robert Sapolsky descended belonged to those who managed to extract themselves from that space to begin life anew elsewhere — a movement whose exact date and circumstances remain unknown, but whose reality is attested by the family's settlement in Brooklyn and by the Orthodox fidelity they maintained there.

One must here measure what this transplantation represented. A family come from the Soviet Union and remained Orthodox in Brooklyn is a family that refused erasure. The Soviet regime had undertaken to dissolve Jewish religious life, to close synagogues, to sever new generations from tradition. That the Sapolskys preserved, across exile, a living Jewish practice testifies to a tenacious fidelity — this emuna, this fidelity to received heritage, which the tradition of Israel holds as a cardinal virtue. It is against this background of preserved continuity that one must read the Orthodox childhood of a future man of science.

The world they left behind had also been, before its destruction, an extraordinary wellspring of creativity. Debra Caplan recounted the adventure of the Vilna Troupe, that itinerant Yiddish theatre which carried the art of Eastern European Jewry across the world [Caplan, 2018], and Henri Minczeles wrote the history of the Bund, that Jewish labour movement which dreamed of emancipation in Yiddish language and culture [Minczeles, 1995]. Theatre, politics, study: the vitality of this world gives the measure of what was lost — and of what families like the Sapolskys carried with them, not in their luggage, but in their way of being.

There is, in the passage of a Litvak lineage to a neuroendocrinologist at Stanford, a continuity that exceeds anecdote. Eastern European Jewish culture had made study an absolute; when the doors of modernity opened, this intellectual energy poured into the sciences, letters, and medicine with remarkable intensity. The trajectory of Robert Sapolsky is an almost exemplary illustration of this: the child who, in an Orthodox household in Brooklyn, taught himself Swahili and wrote to the scholars he admired, prolonged, in a secularized form, the immemorial gesture of the young Jew bent over a difficult text.

Become a researcher, Robert Sapolsky devoted his life to the study of stress and its effects on the brain, conducting long campaigns of observation on baboons in the East African savanna before becoming, through his works of popularization, one of the most-read science communicators of his generation. This vocation for transmission — making complex knowledge accessible to the widest audience — joins a deeply Jewish value: knowledge belongs to no one, it must be taught. The master who explains, who comments, who renders intelligible, occupies an eminent place in the tradition of Israel. By making the general public the audience for science, the heir of the Sapolskys perpetuated, in his own way, the figure of the melamed, of one who instructs.

This dimension also illuminates the collective scope of a singular family history. The Litvak world had produced scholars, physicians, thinkers; its destruction nearly swept all away. That its values — the primacy of intelligence, the demand for rigor, the conviction that understanding is a duty — survived exile and flourished anew in the universities of the New World, here is one of the finest rebukes inflicted on those who sought to erase that world. The Sapolsky lineage, by giving a man of science born of exile, participates in this discreet resurrection of Eastern European Jewish genius under other skies [Plasseraud, 2008].

Robert Morris Sapolsky (born 1957) — The only figure in the lineage today fully documented. Born in 1957 in Brooklyn to a family of Russian immigrants and raised in an Orthodox Jewish household [Baidu Baike], he became a neuroendocrinologist, primatologist, and science writer. As a child, he dreamed of living among gorillas and, from age twelve, wrote to primatologists, teaching himself Swahili in high school [JewAge]. A researcher at Stanford, he studied stress and the brain and became, through his books, a major science communicator, embodying the Litvak vocation for knowledge transplanted into the contemporary world.

No other named figure in the lineage is today documented by verified sources. Robert Sapolsky's ancestors, immigrants from the Soviet Union bearing the name in its Sapolsky or Zapolski forms, remain anonymous in the current state of the archives: this silence, common to countless Jewish families of Eastern Europe whose records have been scattered or destroyed, is an integral part of their history and cannot be filled by conjecture.

The Sapolsky lineage presents itself to the historian as a paradoxical figure: an eloquent name, a richly known world of origin, a single life fully documented. From this configuration arises the honesty of this book, which invented nothing where the archives fell silent, and which sought in the collective history of Litvaks, Jews of the Russian Empire and Soviet exile the true context in which a family history, otherwise discreet, is inscribed.

Of all the virtues that the Jewish tradition has carried through the centuries, it is the vocation for knowledge that this lineage will have, above all others, best expressed. The Litvak world from which the name issued made study a way of existing; exile did not extinguish it; and it flourished anew, in the contemporary generation, in the life of a scholar who devoted his existence to understanding the living and to transmitting this understanding. From the talmudic lernen disputed in the Belarusian towns to the study of the brain conducted in a California laboratory, runs one same fidelity: that which holds intelligence as a duty and knowledge as a good one possesses only on the condition of sharing it.

Thus, the singular history of the Sapolskys joins the collective Memory of Israel. In carrying, from one continent to another, this demand for knowledge, they participate in a virtue that the Jewish tradition has cultivated everywhere it has passed. The field that their name evokes — that Belarusian borderland from which the family came — has transformed into another field, that of science, ploughed with the same stubborn patience. And perhaps this is the most fitting of inheritances: not a coat of arms or a fortune, but a way of standing upright through study.