(Jewish Group) Antisemitism: It's a name changer

Do the names Erich Weisz, Natalie Hershlag, Bernice Frankel, and Chaim Witz ring a bell? You’ve read about them with great interest, but under the names of Harry Houdini, Natalie Portman, Bea Arthur and Gene Simmons. Which begs the question: would they have achieved star status under their original Jewish names? I don’t have an answer, but if you’re smugly smiling, thinking, “We don’t have to do that anymore, look at Sarah Silverman and Jerry Seinfeld,” I caution you to take a parallel peek at yesteryear’s antisemitism with today’s rising hate talk and violence, and then reconsider.

Agreed, name changing in Jewish annals has been there from the start, beginning with a tiny tweak transforming Sarai to Sarah and Abram to Abraham, to the more dramatic metamorphosis of Jacob to Israel. Those were name changes signifying a purpose, while Joseph’s transition to Zaphnath-Paaneakh signaled a desire to fit in with Egyptian society. Pretty much what the gang above determined to do. The question is “why?”

As a picture book author for school-age children, history intrigues me. During an internet research ramble, I landed on a book entitled A Rosenberg of Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America by the scholar Kirsten Fermaglich. This book, which surveys the cultural, psychological and sociological motives for Jewish name changing, does not point to the fabled Ellis Island joke of Sean Ferguson (the anglicization of the Yiddish term Shain Fergessen — I’ve forgotten — when asked for a name). Rather it proves the impact of antisemitism during the first half of the 20th century, that as Fermaglich pointed out in a 2019 interview “affected people’s lives to the point that they felt the need to change their personal identities and that of their families. Antisemitism had a more powerful impact on people’s daily lives than historians realized.”

Nothing new to Jewish history; far from exclusive to the United States. If we dig hard enough, all of us will find name alterations in our lineage. I certainly can. My paternal family fled Portugal during the Inquisition over five centuries ago under the name of Esperanza. Making their way to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, they ended up in Vienna where Esperanza became the German equivalent of Sprinzeles.

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