Jews in Hasenpoth / Aizpute, 1834

Male Jews lawfully entitled to reside in Hasenpoth · Courland · Latvia

This database contains over 1,000 names of Jewish males lawfully entitled to reside in Hasenpoth (now Aizpute, Latvia) in 1834, taken from material microfilmed in the Riga archives in 1941. Jewish males of all ages are listed, including a four-day-old infant not yet given his name. The names of women and female children were not recorded. A house number is given for each entry, making it possible to see how many people lived together in a household and to draw reasonable inferences about family relationships. This is the earliest list in the JewishGen Latvia Database, and it represents the first fruits of the Courland Research Group’s Herder/LDS microfilm project.

In 1940–41, prior to the repatriation of the German ruling caste to Germany, the Baltic Germans began a programme of microfilming parts of the Riga archives, and took some original archive material with them as they withdrew. These microfilms eventually came to be lodged at the Herder Institute in Marburg, Germany, where they remain today. In 1986 the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints successfully negotiated with the Herder Institute to make a copy, so the films are available on order through the global network of LDS Family History Centres. Latvia has to date refused access to the LDS for microfilming, with the effect that the Herder/LDS films are the only available microfilm source for researchers working from primary sources.

In early 1999 three active members of JewishGen — Dr. Paul Berkay (USA), Dr. Martha Levinson Lev-Zion (Israel) and Dr. Abraham Lenhoff (USA) — became convinced that these microfilms were more important to the study of Courland Jewry than had previously been appreciated. Together they formed the nucleus of the Courland Research Group, with a view to raising funds to buy a set of the Herder films and creating a database of Courland Jewish records from them.

Seven of the 127 Herder rolls were known to hold material of Jewish interest; see the Inventory of these rolls. The difficulty lay in justifying the purchase of the whole set on the chance that there was additional, previously unidentified material. After considerable debate the Steering Committee raised the funds, and after a year of negotiation a set of microfilms was delivered to Dr. Berkay in California. He set to work on an initial inventory of all 127 rolls, carrying out an image-by-image search to identify every page of Jewish interest. What emerged is a genealogical treasure chest, full of puzzles and conundrums but containing extensive original records relating to early Jewish families living in Courland and the surrounding areas. To date the Group has inventoried approximately 50 of the 127 films and identified over 1,000 previously unrecorded pages of Jewish material.

The films are beautiful but difficult. The microfilming was clearly carried out in considerable haste: pages are filmed out of order, as often as not upside down or backwards; frequently left-hand pages are filmed but not right-hand pages, or the two halves of a page end up on different rolls. It is rare for there to be a full run of pages relating to a single list. Once the ordering is understood, however, there are many lists where the handwriting is reasonably clear and where an index of names can be created.

The task the Courland Group set itself was to create a complete and comprehensive inventory of the whole of the Herder/LDS films relating to Courland; to reconstruct the documents by grouping the various lists together and reuniting the parts, so as to make complete lists available where possible; to establish whether some of the missing material can be tracked down, either from the archives in Riga or from the many other repositories to which material previously held in Riga was dispersed during the war and the Soviet occupation; to create a Jewish name and image index for all films, so that they are more easily accessible to ordinary researchers; and to promote and take part in ongoing research projects relating to the history of the Jewish communities of Courland. The Group has also made a commitment to the LDS to create a usable name index to the Jewish families recorded in these documents.

The Baltic Germans labelled this list an Oklad, or tax list, and that name has been adopted by the LDS in its inventory. Further research suggests that it is not, in fact, a true Oklad list:

• The 1834 Hasenpoth list is broadly alphabetical. Tax or Oklad lists were drawn up by family number and were not alphabetical.
• The 1834 Hasenpoth list is not cross-referenced to any other list such as Oklad or Revision Lists. Oklad lists almost always contain cross-referencing to the most recent Revision List or the last Oklad list number assigned to the family.
• The list is unique in that it is one of the very few lists that contains house numbers. Oklad lists do not contain house numbers.

In genealogy it is important to differentiate between what we actually know and what we assume. Adopting fixed positions too early can block research that eventually leads to a richer understanding of the Jewish communities of the past. What we do know is that the ability to prove a family’s roots in Courland predated 1835 became important: by an Ukase [law], Jews enumerated in the census of that year or earlier were granted full rights of residence in the Province of Courland. Those who came later remained on sufferance, and from time to time there were calls for expulsion. Being able to produce evidence of a legal right to reside mattered, and it is one of the many reasons why Jews were unwilling to give up their registrations in their towns of origin.

Courland had become part of the Russian Empire in 1795, but this list is in handwritten German Fraktur script rather than Cyrillic, because the language of culture and administration remained German, as it had been for some 500 years since the conquest of the area by the Teutonic knights.

Take the Palem family as an example of how the patronymic works here, from the list where they are entries 761–765:

Entry	Name	Age
761	Palem, Mendel Lewy	58
762	Palem, Marcus Mendel	21
763	Palem, Juddel Mendel	19
764	Palem, Borchard Mendel	15
765	Palem, David Mendel	7

Entries 761–765 of the original list: the Palem family.

The reasonable inference to be drawn is that Mendel Palem is the father of Marcus, Juddel, Borchard and David. The use of the name Mendel in respect of the sons functions as a patronymic and would have been understood as such by contemporaries. Similarly, the likely name of Mendel’s father is Lewy (Levi).

The ages in this list are given with unusual care. Many children’s ages appear as fractions — Abraham Schwartz aged 1½, Lieb Behr Schnitte aged ¾ — and even adults occasionally, as with Salomon Hirsch Trembe, aged 64¼. The infant with no name was four days old and had not yet had his bris. No bris, no name.

• This list begins to take families back to the very earliest period of surnames.
• There are sometimes 3 generations of a family represented as alive at the same time.
• As well as direct ancestors, there are also likely to be collateral lines given. You can spot these because the surname is the same but the father’s name is different.
• The list takes families back to the 18th century. In the example of the Palem family set out above, Mendel Lewy Palem is aged 58 at the time that the list was made. This means he would have been born in or about 1775 and it is likely that his father Lewy can be dated some 20–25 years before that. This effectively traces the Palem family back to about 1750.

The list has been tested against the families searching through the JewishGen Family Finder. Twelve families are listed searching 17 different names; nine of them will find information relevant to the name they seek, or a close spelling match on the Soundex — nearly 75 per cent. Of the 17 Aizpute surnames listed, 14 (some 82 per cent) have matches in the 1834 list and in the database generally. In some cases the information takes the family tree back to 1775 and earlier. Although Jewish families suffered dislocation for many reasons, including large-scale emigration, another picture also emerges here: the remarkable stability and vitality of Jewish family life and institutions in Courland towns, where many families can be traced for over 250 years in the same ancestral town.

This database can be searched via the JewishGen Latvia Database or the JewishGen Unified Search.