Jewish Naming Customs

HUNGARIAN SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP (H-SIG)
A Jewish-Gen SIG
http://www.jewishgen.org/Hungary/

Jewish Naming Customs in Hungary from the Turn of the Twentieth Century until the Holocaust

Kinga Frojimovics
The 23^rd International Conference on Jewish Genealogy, July 20-25, 2003, Washington DC

Abstract

Jewish Naming Customs in Hungary From the Turn of the Twentieth Century Until the Holocaust

My aim is to describe the fundamentally different naming customs of the Neology and the Orthodoxy in Hungary from the turn of the twentieth Century until the Holocaust. The differences can be seen not only in the family names and the first names, which is quite well researched, but also in the Hebrew/Yiddish names. My analysis is based upon the names in the registers of births of four important Jewish communities: the Orthodox Jewish communities of Eger and Paks, and the Neolog Jewish communities of Kecskemét and Zalaszentgrót.

From the point of view of the history of the Jews in Hungary, the period I am concerned with can be divided into two sub-periods. The first, the second half of the era of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, was a period of assimilation promoted by the liberal Hungarian political elite. For example, a massive wave of name-magyarization characterized this period. In the second period, after the First World War, a Conservative-Christian political elite rose to power in Hungary. Against the previous assimilation-promoting policy, they adopted a nationalist, exclusive policy towards the religious and/or ethnic minorities of Hungary. I shall analyze the names accumulated in the four registers of births between 1890-1910 and between 1920-1940.

The simultaneous examination of the Jewish first, family, and Hebrew names enables us to analyze complex historical processes within the Jewish society. While the first and family names inform us about the relationship between Jews and the surrounding society, the Hebrew names show the different relationship of the Jews belonging to the two major religious trends to the Jewish traditions.

Types of Names

Family Names

Table 1: Types of the Orthodox family names between 1890 and 1940

Types of Names	Total (No.)	1890-1910	1920-1940	Total (%)	1890-1910	1920-1940
Hebrew	51	37	14	3.1	2.6	5.9
Hungarian	97	85	12	5.9	6.0	5.1
German	1398	1202	196	85.0	85.5	82.7
Slav	95	81	14	5.9	5.8	5.9
Other	2	1	1	0.1	0.1	0.4
TOTAL	1643	1406	237	100.0	100.0	100.

Table 2: Types of the Neolog family names between 1890 and 1940

Types of Names	Total (No.)	1890-1910	1920-1940	Total (%)	1890-1910	1920-1940
Hebrew	40	32	8	2.8	2.8	3.5
Hungarian	326	258	68	23.3	21.9	29.8
German	970	829	141	69.0	70.4	61.8
Slav	42	37	5	3.0	3.1	2.3
Other	27	21	6	1.9	1.8	2.6
TOTAL	1405	1177	228	100.0	100.0	100.0

Hebrew family names: The most frequent Hebrew family names are: Kohn and Lévi (or variations of Levi such as Lőwy, Lövy and Lövi). These two names make up the 80% of the total occurrences of Hebrew family names within the examined Orthodox communities, and 87,5% of the examined Neolog communities.

Slav family names: The most frequent Slav family names consist of two parts. The first part is either a Hebrew/Yiddish name, or a Hebrew/Yiddish name with a diminutive suffix. The second part is an attached -vics/vits/vitz (somebody’s son). Examples: Davidovits (son of Dávid), Jontovics (son of Jom Tov), Lebovits (son of Leb), and Berkovics (son of Beer-ko), Herskovits (son of Hers/Hirs-ko), Moskovits (son of Mose-ko). Within the examined Orthodox communities these types of names make up the 44% of the total number of the family names. Within the examined Neolog communities these types of names make up the 33% of the total number of the family names.

German family names: There are no dominant types. However, we can see that within the examined Orthodox communities the most frequent 3 names—Schwarcz, Weisz, and Klein—make up the 22% of the family names. Within the examined Neolog communities the most frequent 3 names—Weisz, Steiner, and Stein—make up the 11.5% of the family names.

Hungarian family names: There are no dominant types.

First Names (Given Names)

Table 3: Orthodox and Neolog first names between 1890 and 1940

Types of Names	Total (No.)	1890-1910	1920-1940	Total (%)	1890-1910	1920-1940
Orthodox	1656	1415	241	53.7	54.5	49.9
male	875	748	127	52.8	52.9	52.7
female	781	667	114	47.2	47.1	47.3
Neolog	1426	1179	247	46.3	45.5	50.6
male	772	636	136	54.1	53.9	55.1
female	654	543	111	45.9	46.1	44.9
TOTAL	3082	2594	488	100.0	100.0	100.0

Until the First World War

The 10 most frequent male first names listed according to their frequency are: Sándor (142), József (117), László (82), István (82), Imre (78), Jenő (75), Gyula (50), Béla (50), Miklós (48), Ferencz (47), György (46), Pál (39). These names, or their variations, were given to the 52% of the male babies.

The most frequent male first names given by the Orthodoxy are: Sándor (69), József (73), Jenő (39), Imre (36), Béla (32) and Miklós (32).

The most frequent male first names given by the Neology are: Sándor (73), József (63), István (62), László (51), Imre (42).

The 10 most frequent female first names, listed according to their frequency are: Erzsébet (129), Ilona (122), Róza (106), Margit (101), Mária (65), Júlia (46), Gizella (44), Sarolta (36), Anna (34), Jolán (29). These names, or their variations, were given to the 49.6% of the female babies. Concerning female first names there are no differences between the Orthodoxy and the Neology.

Inter-War Period

The most frequent male first names given by the Orthodoxy are: Sándor, György, László.

The most frequent male first names given by the Neology are: István, Sándor, József.

The most frequent female first names given by the Orthodoxy are: Éva, Judit, Róza.

The most frequent female first names given by the Neology are: Éva, Magda/Magdolna, Zsuzsanna.

Hebrew Names

Table 4: Orthodox and Neolog Hebrew names between 1890 and 1940

Types of Names	Total (No.)	1890-1910	1920-1940	Total (%)	1890-1910	1920-1940
Orthodox	1488	1259	229	57.2	58.9	49.5
Male	794	674	120	53.4	53.5	52.4
female	694	585	109	46.6	46.5	47.6
Neolog	1114	880	234	42.8	41.1	50.5
Male	609	483	126	54.7	54.9	53.8
female	505	397	108	45.3	45.1	46.2
TOTAL	2602	2139	463	100.0	100.0	100.0

The most frequent male Hebrew names given by the Orthodoxy listed according to their frequency are: Jichak (32), Avraham (30), Joszef (30), Mose (28), Mordechaj (23), Jakov (22).

The most frequent male Hebrew names given by the Neology listed according to their frequency are: Avraham (44), Jichak (40), Joszef (35), Mose (34), Haim (22), Jakov (22).

The most frequent Yiddish names given by both trends were: Beer (Hebrew: Dov), Hirsch or Hers (Hebrew: Cvi), Leb (Hebrew: Arje) and Wolf (Hebrew: Zeev).

The most frequent female Hebrew names (they are Hebrew or Yiddish) given by the Orthodoxy listed according to their frequency are: Rahel (43), Eszter (41), Hana (38), Lea (37), Sara (35), Rivka (30) Mirjam (27), Gitl (25), Bela (23), Rezl (20), Jentl (13), Jitl (13), Mindl (13) Perl (12).

The most frequent female Hebrew names (they are Hebrew or Yiddish) given by the Neology listed according to their frequency are: Bela and Bile (68), Blima and Blime (53), Bluma and Blumele (47), Certl and Cetl (26), Bracha (21), Brindl (18), Buna (15), Ciperl (11).

Article

        Bernát Munkácsi (1860-1937), the famous linguist and the inspector of the schools of the Neolog Jewish Community of Pest,[1] was an enthusiastic researcher of his family’s history. His daughter, Noémi Munkácsi, a well-known writer, wrote the following: “The jihus, the recording of the names and merits of one’s ancestors, the sense of belonging together as a family, were sacred notions in the eyes of my father.” Bernát Munkácsi believed that the key of the survival of the Jewish people is the possession of a historical self-knowledge. He viewed the writing of family histories and genealogical research in general, as a crucial device of obtaining such knowledge. He, himself, collected data about his large family, the Munk family, for decades. His son edited this monumental work, and it was published in 1939, two years after Bernát Munkácsi’s death. This work, which was published under the title of The Genealogy of the Munk Family, has an important place in the history of the Hungarian Jewish Genealogical research, since it appeared as the first volume of a series entitled The Genealogy of Hungarian Jewish Families, which was launched by the Hungarian Jewish Museum. According to Michael Silber, “the genealogy of the Munk family acquired an additional significance when from a work of private passion it was chosen to become the paradigm of the ‘genealogies of the Hungarian Jewish families.’”[2] Thus, Bernát Munkácsi’s view concerning the importance of genealogical research became official. Genealogy became an honored and scientifically accepted field of research and also an efficient device for strengthening Jewish identity.

        The topic of this presentation, naming customs, is closely related both to genealogical research and to the issue of Jewish identity. By following Bernát Munkácsi’s notion of connecting genealogical and historical research in order to deepen our knowledge of Jewish history, I aim at describing the fundamentally different naming customs of the two major Jewish religious trends, the Neology and the Orthodoxy, in Hungary from the turn of the twentieth Century until the Holocaust. The differences can be detected not only in the family names and the first names, which topics are quite well researched, but also in the Hebrew names. My analysis is based upon the names in the registers of births of four important Jewish communities: the Orthodox Jewish communities of Eger and Paks, and the Neolog Jewish communities of Kecskemét and Zalaszentgrót. These registers are kept in the Hungarian Jewish Archives. In the sample I have researched, thus, both the Neolog and the Orthodox trends are represented by two important Jewish communities. Therefore, while we can deduce the major differences between the attitudes of the trends concerning the issues of assimilation and Jewish tradition, we have to abstain from generalizing our findings concerning the naming customs as being characteristic of the entire trends.

        From the point of view of the history of the Jews in Hungary, the period I am concerned with can be divided into two sub-periods. The first, the second half of the era of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, was a period of assimilation promoted by the liberal Hungarian political elite. For example, a massive wave of name-Magyarization characterized this period. In the second period, after the First World War, a Conservative-Christian political elite rose to power in Hungary. Against the previous assimilation-promoting policy, they adopted a nationalist, exclusive policy towards the religious and/or ethnic minorities of Hungary. I shall analyze the names accumulated in the four registers of births between 1890 and 1910 and between 1920 and 1940.

        The simultaneous examination of the Jewish first, family, and Hebrew names enables us to analyze complex historical processes within Jewish society. While the first and family names inform us about the relationship between Jews and the surrounding society, the Hebrew names show the different attitudes of the Jews belonging to the two major religious trends towards Jewish traditions.

        The Jews in Hungary had to have a bipartite name consisting of a permanent family name and a first name from January, 1788 as a consequence of Joseph the Second’s famous decree.[3] Even though the decree ordered the Jews to acquire German first names, it is obvious that the majority of the naming committees responsible for the execution of the decree, and the Jews, themselves, interpreted it that way that the entire name should be German. Of course, the fact that the decree aimed at assisting the Germanization of the multinational Habsburg Empire supported this interpretation.[4] From then on, the Jews in Hungary had three names: a family name, a first name, and a so called Hebrew name. Let us examine these three types of names in the selected Neolog and Orthodox Jewish communities.

        At first, I shall analyze the family names. Among the three types of names the scrutiny of the family names offers the best opportunity to examine the relationship between the Jews and the surrounding society. Family names indicate both the extent of the inclination of the Hungarian society and its political elite towards assimilating the Jews, and the extent of the readiness of the Jews to assimilate. Name-Magyarization,[5] an action recorded by governmental offices, makes possible the assessment of these issues. The Magyarization of one’s name during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be seen as a declaration of one’s joining the Hungarian nation.

        Because of the famous and partly misinterpreted decree of Joseph the Second, the majority of the Jews in the territory of the Habsburg Empire had German family names since the end of the eighteenth century. In Hungary, however, as a consequence of the strong Hungarian national movement, the revolution and freedom fight of 1848/1849, and the liberal policies of the Hungarian elite after the Compromise of 1867, many Jews, like the members of other ethnic minorities, Magyarized their names. In the period of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, from the Compromise of 1867 until the end of the First World War, more than half of the people who Magyarized their names were Jewish. The choice of a Hungarian name unambiguously declared that the individual is part of the Hungarian nation.[6]

        The issue of name-Magyarization became a public concern in the period of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. In the 1880s the press and some civil organizations, and from the middle of the 1890s, also government organs supported it openly and explicitly. The government of Baron Dezső Bánffy (1895-1899) was the first to regard name-Magyarization as a political device for strengthening the Hungarian nation-state-character of the country, in which many ethnic minorities lived. Name-Magyarization in this era, however, was not only the result of governmental pressure, since this was a period of quick linguistic Magyarization too.[7]

        Already in the 1880’s, during the first wave of name-Magyarization, the differences had emerged between the kinds of newly chosen family names preferred by Jews and Christians. Christians preferred real or imaginary geographical names bearing the derivative suffix “i.” Nobles wore these kinds of names, although the names of the nobility usually ended with “y” rather than “i.”[8] By contrast, the Jews chose mainly “civil” names, such as names of various trades like Smith, Gardener, Miller (Kovács, Kertész, Molnár), common adjectives like Small, Black, White (Kis, Fekete, Fehér), names of various peoples like Kun, Polish, German (Kun, Lengyel, Német), proper names like Luke and Ladislaw (Lukács, László), and common nouns like hatchet bearer (Bárdos).

        Public opinion categorized the issue of name-Magyarization as a Jewish matter during the period of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Not only that the majority of those who Magyarized their names were Jews, but the two champions of the cause of name-Magyarization, Simon Telkes and Zoltán Lengyel, were Jews who converted to the Christian faith. Simon Telkes (1845-?) worked for the Statistical Office, and he founded the Central Society for Name-Magyarization (Központi Névmagyarosító Társaság) in 1880. This society was the civil organization which was the most active in promoting name-Magyarization in the era of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Its members took the floor in the parliament on several occasions promoting the cause of name-Magyarization. The central figure of the movement was Simon Telkes, who changed his name from Rubin to Telkes in 1881 and whom Franz Joseph ennobled in 1907. Telkes’ book, How to Magyarize Family Names (Hogyan magyarosítsuk a vezetéknevet) was published many times at the turn of the century. Zoltán Lengyel (1873-1940), a lawyer and politician (Függetlenségi-, majd Kossuth-párti politikus), also gave wide publicity both in the press and in a book to the cause of name-Magyarization in the first decades of the twentieth century. Telkes, who consciously chose the strategy of full assimilation to the surrounding society, argues for name-Magyarization as follows:

By embracing Christianity through baptism, a person becomes a Christian and wins admittance into the Christian society. The same way, by Magyarizing his name, by embracing this “national baptism,” a Hungarian person with an alien name becomes completely and irrevocably part of the Hungarian society, becomes a true son of the nation. From social and patriotic points of view, this latter kind of baptism is even more important than the first kind, since while the first kind of baptism gives only a first name and a religion, the Magyarization of one’s name changes the entire family’s name. By that it strengthens our faith in one another, assists equality, in other words, it has an important ethical role in the gathering and keeping together of our nation.

A Hungarian name is virtually a declaration of political faith for a Hungarian. The Hungarian identity and sensibility of a person who bears a Hungarian name cannot be doubted, since it is possible to change one’s Hungarian name into something else if one does not want to be a Hungarian any more.[9]

The politician Zoltán Lengyel argued for name-Magyarization within the framework of a democratic civil political program:

There is no creative work without democracy. There is no democracy without a civil society. There is no civil society without national unity. There is no national unity without the dominance of the national language. And the trade mark of the dominance of the national language is the dominance of national names.[10]

The attitude towards the assimilation of ethnic groups viewed as alien by the Hungarian society, changed dramatically in the inter-war period. As a consequence of the Trianon Peace treaty, which followed the end of the First World War, Hungary lost more than two-thirds of its territory. Moreover, from being part of a multinational European power, it suddenly became a small nation-state surrounded by hostile countries. In the period of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the Hungarian nation could ensure its advantage in numbers, its hegemony that is, over other ethnic groups only by consciously assimilating—at least as far as linguistic and cultural Magyarization goes—those members of other ethnic groups who were willing to assimilate. After the First World War, after becoming a small nation-state, Hungary did not need this strategy any more. The majority of the ethnic groups that threatened the Hungarian hegemony in the previous era, lived in those territories which were cut off from the country at the Trianon Peace treaty. Both the Hungarian public and the political elite viewed the ethnic groups that had remained in Hungary—mostly Germans, Slovaks, Rumanians, and Jews—as internal enemies.

Thus, in the inter-war period, name-Magyarization was certainly not promoted officially. After 1919, for instance, the trustworthiness of every person who applied for Magyarizing his/her name was checked from the point of view of fidelity to the Hungarian nation. In other words, the applicant’s behavior during the revolutions of 1918/1919 was examined. Moreover, the applicant had to prove that he/she was not “unworthy of wearing a Hungarian name” [11] As a consequence of these restrictive measures, the name-Magyarizing movement strongly declined in the 1920s. The name-Magyarizing of the Jews declined even more sharply. While during the period of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Jews constituted more then 50% of the people who Magyarized their names, in the year of 1920, they constituted only 13% of the total name-Magyarizing population. This proportion decreased even further: between 1923 and 1929, Jews constituted only 2,2% of the total name-Magyarizing population. From 1938—the year of the codification of the first (anti)-Jewish law—every application for name-Magyarization by a Jew was turned down, even though the name-Magyarization of Jews was never officially prohibited.[12]

Contemporaries, such as the leading Hungarian statistician of the inter-war period, Alajos Kovács, also realized the decline of the name-Magyarization movement within the Jewish community. The anti-Semitic Alajos Kovács by mixing up causes and effects wrote the following: “As a consequence of the experiences of Communism [the Hungarian Soviet Republic (1919) – F.K.] a certain distrust concerning the Jewry can be sensed. Owing to this, the Jews, themselves, do not make efforts to Magyarize their names since the war.”[13]

Keeping this historical background in mind, let us examine the assimilational strategies and tendencies of the Jews belonging to the two major Jewish religious trends in Hungary, as far as it can be detected in the process of name-Magyarization.

I established five categories according to the origin of the family names: Hebrew, Hungarian, German, Slav, and other. The next two tables show the types of family names worn by the Orthodox and the Neolog Jews of the examined Jewish communities:

Table 1: Types of the Orthodox family names between 1890 and 1940

Types of Names	Total (No.)	1890-1910	1920-1940	Total (%)	1890-1910	1920-1940
Hebrew	51	37	14	3.1	2.6	5.9
Hungarian	97	85	12	5.9	6.0	5.1
German	1398	1202	196	85.0	85.5	82.7
Slav	95	81	14	5.9	5.8	5.9
Other	2	1	1	0.1	0.1	0.4
TOTAL	1643	1406	237	100.0	100.0	100.0

Table 2: Types of the Neolog family names between 1890 and 1940

Types of Names

Total (No.)

1890-1910