Kinnui
Encyclopedia
Kinnui
Many Jewish men and women have two names, a religious name (in the Hebrew language)and a secular name, called the "kinnui" or "kinui" ((כנוי)translated from the Hebrew as "nickname").
The religious name is in Hebrew (for example, Moses ben Maimon; Joseph ben Gershon; Shlomeh Arieh ben David HaLevi;; Gershom ben Judah
; Devorah bat Avraham), and the secular name is in whatever language is in use in the geographic locality (for example, Isaiah Berlin
; Solomon Lyon Barnard
; Sigmund Freud
; Golda Meir
; Etta Cone ).
History
When Jews
arrived in a new country, a secular name was often chosen from the local language. In Central and Eastern Europe, Yiddish was the secular language, so a Hebrew name was used in religious and Jewish community contexts and a Yiddish name was used (the kinnui) in secular contexts. In France
, the secular name was in French
; in Spain
in Spanish
], in North Africa
and the middle East in Arabic, in ancient Babylon
, the kinnui was in Babylonian and so on. Some kinnuim (the Hebrew plural of "Kinnui")are based on synonyms (words that have the same or similar meaning but are spelled differently); for example, Mikhail = Yekhiel; Menahem = Mendel; Asher = Anshel. Some Kinnuim represent the ancestral tribes of Israel, referencing the animal-like attributes of four of the sons of Jacob
and one of his grandsons: Judah, the lion
(eg. the family name Lyon, Loewe); Benjamin, the wolf (eg. the family name Woolf); Naftali, the deer
(eg. the family names Hirsch,Hersch, Harris); and Issachar
, the ass
(or the bear
) (eg. the family names Bar, Baer, Barell, Barnard
, Bernhardt
, Berthold, Schulter ); plus Ephraim
, the fish
(eg. the family name Fish)..
The Austrian Emperor, Joseph II Habsburg, who controlled a substantial part of Europe in the late 18th century, was the first head of government in Europe to require Jews to register a permanent family surname. His decree required (on pain of substantial fines for non-compliance) that this surname be (or, at least, sound like) German . A translation of this 1787 decree is published on the Polish-Jewish genealogy website, Shoreshim . The frequency of German surnames for Jews in the Russian Empire, may be due to migration from Western Europe. Thus, Jews were compelled to take surnames with a German sound, and usually, they could not choose them. These arbitrary family names generally had no relationship with either the trade or craft, nor the physical attributes, nor the geographic origin of the persons so named. For example, Schwarz, Klug, Weiss, Gross, Klein, Fein and Roth. There are also many names formed with two German roots such as Morgenstern, Morgenstein, Apfelbaum, Birnbaum, Rosenberg, Rosenblum, Rosenbaum, Weinbaum, Weinberg, Bernstein
. The spelling of these names varied considerably, especially when they migrated through Poland or Russia .
Subsequently, in 1808, Napoleon returned from victories in Germany
and proclaimed the religious freedom of the Jews, granting them political rights in France
. He also demanded that all Jews within his empire take a family name. Many Jews were still known only by a Hebrew name or "shem hakodesh" (hakodesh meaning "the sacred"; shem meaning "name") (for example, Yaakov ben Yehudah). Under this directive, many Jews took names derived from towns where they traded, such as Hamburger
, Berliner
, Mainz
or Frankfurter
, while others used occupations as names such as Miller, Schuster, Schneider, Cantor or Bronfenbrenner. Others used characteristics, such as Friedman, or used a patronymic or tribal name such as Jacobs or Benjamin. When Napoleon conquered Westphalen, a German principality, he imposed these regulations on the Germans as well.
Among Arabic-speaking Jews, Arabic names were adopted, such as Ḥassan, Abdallah, Sahl; or Hebrew names were translated into Arabic, for example, Eleazar into Manẓur, Maẓliaḥ into Maimun. "Ibn" (analogous to the Hebrew "ben") was used to form a family name. Examples of this formula are Ibn Aknin, Ibn Danan, Ibn Laṭif. In the Jews of Arab lands a linguistic mixing happened and names appear with both Hebrew and Arabic elements in the same name, for example, Abraham Ibn Ezra
. A peculiarity of the Arabic names is the "kunyah," the by-name given to a father after the birth of his son, by which the father is named after the son (using the prefix "Abu"). For example Abu al-Walid is a "kunyah" or by-name for the father of a son named Jonah
. "Abu" also forms family names, as in the case of Abudarham, or Aboab. The Arabic article "al" appears in quite a number of names, as in Al-Ḥarisi.
Usage
The secular name is the name that appears in civil documents. The "shem hakodesh" usually appears only in connection with Jewish religious observances, for example, a record of circumcision
(brit), in a marriage contract (ketubah
), a writ of divorce (get) or on a memorial stone.
Many Jewish men and women have two names, a religious name (in the Hebrew language)and a secular name, called the "kinnui" or "kinui" ((כנוי)translated from the Hebrew as "nickname").
The religious name is in Hebrew (for example, Moses ben Maimon; Joseph ben Gershon; Shlomeh Arieh ben David HaLevi;; Gershom ben Judah
Gershom ben Judah
Gershom ben Judah, best known as Rabbeinu Gershom and also commonly known to scholars of Judaism by the title Rabbeinu Gershom Me'Or Hagolah , was a famous Talmudist and Halakhist.Rashi of Troyes Gershom ben Judah, (c. 960 -1040? -1028?) best known as Rabbeinu Gershom (Hebrew: רבנו גרשום, "Our...
; Devorah bat Avraham), and the secular name is in whatever language is in use in the geographic locality (for example, Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin
Sir Isaiah Berlin OM, FBA was a British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas of Russian-Jewish origin, regarded as one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century and a dominant liberal scholar of his generation...
; Solomon Lyon Barnard
Barnard
- People :Some of the Barnard family are believed to have been Huguenots who fled from the Atlantic coast region of France to England, Ireland, Holland and the New World circa 1685 or earlier than that date. See,...
; Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
; Golda Meir
Golda Meir
Golda Meir ; May 3, 1898 – December 8, 1978) was a teacher, kibbutznik and politician who became the fourth Prime Minister of the State of Israel....
; Etta Cone ).
History
When Jews
Jews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
arrived in a new country, a secular name was often chosen from the local language. In Central and Eastern Europe, Yiddish was the secular language, so a Hebrew name was used in religious and Jewish community contexts and a Yiddish name was used (the kinnui) in secular contexts. In France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, the secular name was in French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
; in Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
in Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
], in North Africa
Africa
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...
and the middle East in Arabic, in ancient Babylon
Babylon
Babylon was an Akkadian city-state of ancient Mesopotamia, the remains of which are found in present-day Al Hillah, Babil Province, Iraq, about 85 kilometers south of Baghdad...
, the kinnui was in Babylonian and so on. Some kinnuim (the Hebrew plural of "Kinnui")are based on synonyms (words that have the same or similar meaning but are spelled differently); for example, Mikhail = Yekhiel; Menahem = Mendel; Asher = Anshel. Some Kinnuim represent the ancestral tribes of Israel, referencing the animal-like attributes of four of the sons of Jacob
Jacob
Jacob "heel" or "leg-puller"), also later known as Israel , as described in the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, the New Testament and the Qur'an was the third patriarch of the Hebrew people with whom God made a covenant, and ancestor of the tribes of Israel, which were named after his descendants.In the...
and one of his grandsons: Judah, the lion
Lion
The lion is one of the four big cats in the genus Panthera, and a member of the family Felidae. With some males exceeding 250 kg in weight, it is the second-largest living cat after the tiger...
(eg. the family name Lyon, Loewe); Benjamin, the wolf (eg. the family name Woolf); Naftali, the deer
Deer
Deer are the ruminant mammals forming the family Cervidae. Species in the Cervidae family include white-tailed deer, elk, moose, red deer, reindeer, fallow deer, roe deer and chital. Male deer of all species and female reindeer grow and shed new antlers each year...
(eg. the family names Hirsch,Hersch, Harris); and Issachar
Issachar
Issachar/Yissachar was, according to the Book of Genesis, a son of Jacob and Leah , and the founder of the Israelite Tribe of Issachar; however some Biblical scholars view this as postdiction, an eponymous metaphor providing an aetiology of the connectedness of the tribe to others in the Israelite...
, the ass
Donkey
The donkey or ass, Equus africanus asinus, is a domesticated member of the Equidae or horse family. The wild ancestor of the donkey is the African Wild Ass, E...
(or the bear
Bear
Bears are mammals of the family Ursidae. Bears are classified as caniforms, or doglike carnivorans, with the pinnipeds being their closest living relatives. Although there are only eight living species of bear, they are widespread, appearing in a wide variety of habitats throughout the Northern...
) (eg. the family names Bar, Baer, Barell, Barnard
Barnard
- People :Some of the Barnard family are believed to have been Huguenots who fled from the Atlantic coast region of France to England, Ireland, Holland and the New World circa 1685 or earlier than that date. See,...
, Bernhardt
Sarah Bernhardt
Sarah Bernhardt was a French stage and early film actress, and has been referred to as "the most famous actress the world has ever known". Bernhardt made her fame on the stages of France in the 1870s, and was soon in demand in Europe and the Americas...
, Berthold, Schulter ); plus Ephraim
Ephraim
Ephraim ; was, according to the Book of Genesis, the second son of Joseph and Asenath. Asenath was an Egyptian woman whom Pharaoh gave to Joseph as wife, and the daughter of Potipherah, a priest of On. Ephraim was born in Egypt before the arrival of the children of Israel from Canaan...
, the fish
Fish
Fish are a paraphyletic group of organisms that consist of all gill-bearing aquatic vertebrate animals that lack limbs with digits. Included in this definition are the living hagfish, lampreys, and cartilaginous and bony fish, as well as various extinct related groups...
(eg. the family name Fish)..
The Austrian Emperor, Joseph II Habsburg, who controlled a substantial part of Europe in the late 18th century, was the first head of government in Europe to require Jews to register a permanent family surname. His decree required (on pain of substantial fines for non-compliance) that this surname be (or, at least, sound like) German . A translation of this 1787 decree is published on the Polish-Jewish genealogy website, Shoreshim . The frequency of German surnames for Jews in the Russian Empire, may be due to migration from Western Europe. Thus, Jews were compelled to take surnames with a German sound, and usually, they could not choose them. These arbitrary family names generally had no relationship with either the trade or craft, nor the physical attributes, nor the geographic origin of the persons so named. For example, Schwarz, Klug, Weiss, Gross, Klein, Fein and Roth. There are also many names formed with two German roots such as Morgenstern, Morgenstein, Apfelbaum, Birnbaum, Rosenberg, Rosenblum, Rosenbaum, Weinbaum, Weinberg, Bernstein
Bernstein
Bernstein is a German and Jewish surname meaning "amber". The German pronunciation is , but in English it is often . It may refer to:-People:* Dan Bern , American musician who previously performed under the name Bernstein...
. The spelling of these names varied considerably, especially when they migrated through Poland or Russia .
Subsequently, in 1808, Napoleon returned from victories in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
and proclaimed the religious freedom of the Jews, granting them political rights in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
. He also demanded that all Jews within his empire take a family name. Many Jews were still known only by a Hebrew name or "shem hakodesh" (hakodesh meaning "the sacred"; shem meaning "name") (for example, Yaakov ben Yehudah). Under this directive, many Jews took names derived from towns where they traded, such as Hamburger
Hamburg
-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...
, Berliner
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
, Mainz
Mainz
Mainz under the Holy Roman Empire, and previously was a Roman fort city which commanded the west bank of the Rhine and formed part of the northernmost frontier of the Roman Empire...
or Frankfurter
Frankfurt
Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...
, while others used occupations as names such as Miller, Schuster, Schneider, Cantor or Bronfenbrenner. Others used characteristics, such as Friedman, or used a patronymic or tribal name such as Jacobs or Benjamin. When Napoleon conquered Westphalen, a German principality, he imposed these regulations on the Germans as well.
Among Arabic-speaking Jews, Arabic names were adopted, such as Ḥassan, Abdallah, Sahl; or Hebrew names were translated into Arabic, for example, Eleazar into Manẓur, Maẓliaḥ into Maimun. "Ibn" (analogous to the Hebrew "ben") was used to form a family name. Examples of this formula are Ibn Aknin, Ibn Danan, Ibn Laṭif. In the Jews of Arab lands a linguistic mixing happened and names appear with both Hebrew and Arabic elements in the same name, for example, Abraham Ibn Ezra
Abraham ibn Ezra
Rabbi Abraham ben Meir Ibn Ezra was born at Tudela, Navarre in 1089, and died c. 1167, apparently in Calahorra....
. A peculiarity of the Arabic names is the "kunyah," the by-name given to a father after the birth of his son, by which the father is named after the son (using the prefix "Abu"). For example Abu al-Walid is a "kunyah" or by-name for the father of a son named Jonah
Jonah
Jonah is the name given in the Hebrew Bible to a prophet of the northern kingdom of Israel in about the 8th century BC, the eponymous central character in the Book of Jonah, famous for being swallowed by a fish or a whale, depending on translation...
. "Abu" also forms family names, as in the case of Abudarham, or Aboab. The Arabic article "al" appears in quite a number of names, as in Al-Ḥarisi.
Usage
The secular name is the name that appears in civil documents. The "shem hakodesh" usually appears only in connection with Jewish religious observances, for example, a record of circumcision
Circumcision
Male circumcision is the surgical removal of some or all of the foreskin from the penis. The word "circumcision" comes from Latin and ....
(brit), in a marriage contract (ketubah
Ketubah
A ketubah is a special type of Jewish prenuptial agreement. It is considered an integral part of a traditional Jewish marriage, and outlines the rights and responsibilities of the groom, in relation to the bride.-History:...
), a writ of divorce (get) or on a memorial stone.