The Szejnfeld Family

To understand the Szejnfeld family, one must first understand Poland, for no land has harbored Western Jewish life for longer or more densely. From the Middle Ages onward, Jews found there a refuge that the kingdoms of Western Europe denied them. The historian Yitskhok Schiper devoted foundational works to this medieval settlement, its culture and economy, showing how deeply the Jewish community had early inserted itself into the commercial and artisanal networks of the kingdom [Y. Schiper, Kultur-geshikhte fun di yidn in Poyln beysn mitlalter, 1926 ; ref:3] [Y. Schiper, Di virtshafts-geshikhte fun di yidn in Poyln beysn mitlalter, 1926 ; ref:4].

This presence never ceased to grow, making Poland the demographic heart of world Jewry. Poland long harbored one of Europe's most significant Jewish communities; until the twentieth century, several million Jews lived on Polish territory, which explains the great diversity of Jewish family names of Polish origin, often called Ashkenazi names. [Tak Poland] The demographer Refoel Mahler undertook to precisely quantify this presence, mapping through registers and censuses the Jewish population of former Poland [R. Mahler, Yidn in amolikn Poyln in likht fun tsifern, 1958 ; ref:1], while Meyer Balaban restored its communal texture, its institutions and figures [M. Balaban, Yidn in Poyln, 1930 ; ref:2].

It is within this framework that Antony Polonsky's masterful synthesis situates the anchoring of lineages such as that of the Szejnfeld: an organized community, autonomous in its religious and judicial institutions, structured around the kehila — the community — and the great Council of the Four Lands, that assembly which governed Polish Jewish life for nearly two centuries [A. Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia, Volume I: 1350 to 1881, 2010 ; ref:10]. There was expressed one of the cardinal virtues that Jewish tradition has carried through the ages: involvement in collective life, the idea that no Jew lives alone, but always bekhol Israel — within the assembly of Israel. The name Szejnfeld, when it appears, does not emerge from a void: it is born of this communal matrix where the individual thinks of himself first as a link.

The surname Szejnfeld is not immemorial. It belongs to a historically dateable stratum: that of the mandatory fixing of Jewish family names. Until then, Eastern European Jews identified themselves through filiation — ben, bat, son or daughter of — according to a usage that tradition had maintained since antiquity. The best way for Jews to take an official definitive name was to adapt the name they already bore, to make it permanent, which explains the use of patronymy and matronymy. [FJN Internationale]

But when the Austrian, Prussian, and then Russian administrations imposed, in the regions resulting from the partitions of Poland, the adoption of fixed hereditary names, a portion of families adopted neither a profession nor a place, but forged — or were assigned — names of pure evocation. These are ornamental names, of which Szejnfeld is a limpid specimen. It is this stratum that the dictionaries of Alexander Beider and Lars Menk have methodically mapped, decomposing each surname according to its region of appearance and its mode of formation [A. Beider; L. Menk, Dictionaries of Jewish Surnames of Eastern Europe and Judeo-German, Avotaynu].

Genealogical lexicography confirms the dual nature of the name. Shonfeld derives from numerous places in Germany and Austria named Schönfeld or Schönefeld; as a Jewish name, it can sometimes be ornamental. [Geneanet] In other words, the same name could, for some, refer to a very real village in the Germanic world, and for others — Jews — designate an ideal, a dreamed beauty of the landscape. The meaning of the name is "beautiful field": from the German schön, "beautiful," and Feld, "field" or "open countryside." [ask-oracle] There is in this choice a discreet delicacy: a people long forbidden to own land gave themselves as a name a magnificent field. Named beauty compensated for refused land — humble ruse of hope, which the memory of Israel knows well, having always known how to transform lack into promise.

Where did the Szejnfeld family live? In those Jewish towns of Poland, the shtetlekh, whose inner world Rachel Ertel restored with rare finesse — from the most deeply rooted tradition to the first fissures of modernity [R. Ertel, Le Shtetl. La bourgade juive de Pologne, de la tradition à la modernité, 1982 ; ref:7]. We may imagine, without being able to prove it with archival evidence, a family of this type: small merchants, craftsmen, peddlers, perhaps a schoolmaster or grain dealer, gravitating around the synagogue, the ritual bath, and the weekly market.

It was there that Jewish life concentrated its daily virtues. Tsedaka — charity, which in Hebrew bears the same word as justice — was not an embellishment of the soul but an institution: each community maintained its relief funds for the poor, its mutual aid societies, its confraternities for the care of the sick and the dead. The study of Torah and Talmud, for its part, structured social prestige more surely than wealth: the scholar, the talmid ḥakham, enjoyed a consideration that no merchant could equal. This hierarchy of learning, peculiar to Polish Jewry, lies at the heart of Israël Bartal's work on the Jews of Eastern Europe [I. Bartal, The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772-1881, 2005 ; ref:12].

In such a world, a name like Szejnfeld carried, whether one wished it or not, a burden of humility. Without noble lustre, without displayed priestly genealogy, it spoke of belonging to the great anonymous and fervent body of the people. This very humility is a virtue of tradition: anavah, modesty, which the masters held to be the first of qualities, that without which no other has worth.

The century that saw the Szejnfeld name become established was also one of considerable spiritual upheaval: the conquest of a large part of Polish Jewish society by Hasidism. Glenn Dynner has shown how this movement of enthusiastic piety, born in Podolia and Volhynia in the eighteenth century, methodically gained the central regions of Poland, relying on networks of rabbinic courts, patrons and disciples [G. Dynner, Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society, 2006 ; ref:6].

A Szejnfeld family from the Kingdom of Poland or Galicia was likely traversed by this division — for it was a division — between Hasidim, devotees of fervor, and mitnagdim, defenders of rigorous study, not to mention, later, the maskilim drawn to Jewish Enlightenment. We have no attested testimony indicating which side the Szejnfeld family leaned toward; honesty requires not to resolve what the sources leave silent. But this very silence is instructive: it reminds us that the vast majority of Polish Jews were first a crowd of anonymous faithful, whose piety left no other trace than the loyalty transmitted from generation to generation.

The nineteenth century was also one of growing politicization. Jonathan Frankel has traced the birth, within the Jewish world of the Russian Empire and Poland, of the great movements that were to change everything: socialism, nationalism, Zionism [J. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 1981 ; ref:8]. Antony Polonsky, in the second volume of his magnum opus, describes this community caught between modernization, urbanization and rising tensions [A. Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia, Volume II: 1881 to 1914, 2010 ; ref:11]. The Szejnfeld, like so many others, had to choose: remain faithful to tradition, embrace modernity, or leave.

Many departed. The great Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe, between the 1880s and 1914, then in the interwar years, dispersed Polish families westward and overseas. The Szejnfeld surname bears concrete witness to this. It is found notably in Argentina, a major land of refuge for Ashkenazi migration. The vast majority of Argentine Jews descend from immigrants who came from Europe; these Ashkenazi Jews emigrated from small towns or shtetls of Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Germany, Romania, or Ukraine, leaving behind most of their loved ones. [hebrewsurnames]

This transatlantic dispersal is the painful and fruitful counterpart to the name's history: wherever the Polish field was abandoned, the name of the "beautiful field" was carried away like a viaticum. Genealogical databases record holders of the name linked to Jewish families of Warsaw [Geni, Szejnfeld Genealogy], confirming the surname's anchorage in the Polish capital before diasporic dispersion.

Here emerges another virtue of the Memory of Israel: the relationship to the stranger, to exile, to welcome. A People of wandering since Egypt, Israel made the experience of the stranger a commandment — "you shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt". The Szejnfeld emigrants, who became strangers in Argentina, the United States, or elsewhere, embodied in turn this figure of the wandering Jew who rebuilt, on new soil, a community, a synagogue, a school. The arduous work, the patient economic action of the immigrant merchant or craftsman — a virtue that Schiper already analyzed for the Middle Ages — continued in the suburbs of Buenos Aires as once in the alleys of the shtetlekh.

The twentieth century broke Polish Jewry. The third volume of Polonsky's opus embraces this iron period, from the First World War to the annihilation of the Shoah, then to its aftermath [A. Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia, Volume III: 1914 to 2008, 2012 ; ref:9]. Memorial databases also link bearers of the name Szejnfeld to victims of the Shoah [Geni, Victims of the Nazi Holocaust]: a sober and implacable reminder that this name, like so many others, was struck by the destruction of Polish Jewry.

Yet the name survived, and it still bears today, on Polish soil itself, a public face. Adam Szejnfeld is a Polish politician of Jewish origin [Wikidata, Q351039], a member of parliament in his country, whose presence in the public life of contemporary Poland offers a discreet form of continuity: after annihilation, a bearer of the name of the "fair field" sits in the institutions of the country where the name was born. There is something like a response of history to the previous chapter — engagement in the city, involvement in collective life, continuing within the framework of a modern State.

This fragile continuity speaks to something of the most tenacious virtue of the People of Israel: fidelity to life, the will to rebuild and to participate, still and despite everything. The tradition calls it tikkoun — the repair of the world — and she'erit ha-pletah, the "remnant saved" that bears witness. The name Szejnfeld, minor in history, becomes a witness among thousands.

From this lineage without an acknowledged dynasty, without any recorded great rabbi or celebrated fortune, what will we retain? Precisely this: the exemplarity of the faithful anonymous. The name Szejnfeld—"beautiful field"—does not belong to the aristocracy of talmudic learning nor to the prestigious courts of hasidic dynasties; it belongs to the great ordinary people of Jewish Poland, those who prayed, worked, helped one another, and transmitted, from generation to generation, leaving no other trace than perseverance.

What this lineage will have, among all virtues, best expressed is humility combined with faithfulness to collective life. Humility of a name which, for lack of land to possess, gave itself as its only emblem the beauty of an imagined field; faithfulness of those who, from the Polish shtetl to the outskirts of Buenos Aires, and even to the institutions of contemporary Poland, continued to make community, to depart and to begin again. In the modest mirror of the Szejnfeld is thus read the entire destiny of Israel in Poland: the millennial rootedness, the fervor, the exile, the mourning, and the obstinacy to rebuild. A beautiful field, in short, that one believed lost and which, here and there, grows green again.