The Innocents Abroad

August 21, 2024PersonalPhilip

Those who have followed this blog over the last 14 years, or even those more recent to it, may have wondered why I haven’t been updating it of late. The answer is that I’ve been busy on a project that has taken up all of my time. That project is not genealogy-related, but may be of interest to those with an interest in literature and history.

I have been working on, and finally published, a new edition of Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad. Whenever you see quotes from Twain about the Holy Land, they likely came from this book. It was the book that made him famous, and his best-selling book in his lifetime. In the book, Twain joins a group of American tourists on what was probably the first commercial cruise to Europe and the Middle East. For five months Twain recorded his views on the people and places he visited.

This new edition has all of the illustrations from the first edition (published in 1869), many based on photographs taken on the journey, or photographs collected by passengers. It also retains all of the original page headers from the first edition. More importantly, there are over 1200 footnotes in this edition, covering the people, places, and events mentioned in the book. Footnotes include information on history, biography, geography, mythology, art, and biblical and literary references.

The book is currently available as a Paperback and print replica eBook through Amazon, and as a Hardcover everywhere. If you buy a copy, let me know what you think.

Top Ten Israeli Given Names from 1948 to 2021

February 15, 2023Nameshebrew names, insta, israel, namesPhilip

I recently found a dataset at the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics that shows the number of people born each year with each given name, from 1948 to 2021. I thought it might be interesting to see how names change in popularity over time, but it’s a massive amount of data, so I came up with a simpler goal. I selected the ten most popular names from 1948, and the ten most popular names from 2021, and then plotted all of them on a graph over time.

For Jewish boys, the ten most popular names in 1948 were Moshe, Avraham/Abraham, Yoseph/Joseph, Yaakov/Jacob, Yitzchak/Isaac, David, Chaim, Shlomo/Solomon, Shmuel/Samuel, and Yisrael/Israel. In 2021, they were David, Ariel, Lavi, Yoseph/Joseph, Ari, Raphael, Noam, Uri/Ori, Moshe, and Yehuda/Judah. Ari doesn’t show up in the list until 1953 (and still misses some years until 1959). Lavi doesn’t show up until 1959 (and misses years until 1972). All of the other names show up in 1948, but only three names (Moshe, Yoseph/Joseph, and David) show up in the top ten in both 1948 and 2021.

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Another look at Jewish given names in the Ultra-Orthodox community

March 29, 2022Namesinsta, jewish, jewish genealogy, jewish names, namesPhilip

Over the past few years I’ve collected many lists of Jewish given names. Lists come from books from the 19th and early 20th century, including from Poland in 1886 and 1928, from the US in 1925 and 1939, and the more recent lists of Israeli names. For a full look at the name lists I’ve published, see the Names page.

Recently I published a list of articles on names from an Ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) group in Israel. This is an area I’ve long wanted to analyze, but haven’t had enough data. There are many reasons this group is interesting, but one is that they continue to use names that have fallen out of favor with the rest of the Jewish community, in particular Yiddish names (although Yiddish names were not preferred by the previously mentioned Israeli group). While I myself am Orthodox, I wouldn’t consider myself an expert on the lives of the Ultra-Orthodox community, which in the US is centered in New York, particularly in sections of Brooklyn. One of the problems I had was finding a source of names that was accurate, and available to me online, when this community tends to avoid using the Internet. Another problem I had was the desire to have the names in both English and Hebrew. While one could find ways of collecting names from newspapers, they would usually be in only one language. Having the names in both languages is helpful for identifying unusual names, and also lets one see the variations of how a name in Hebrew is used in English (more on that in a bit).

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An Ultra-Orthodox view of Jewish Names

February 24, 2022Namesharedi, insta, jewish, jewish names, namesPhilip

I’ve collected many lists of Jewish names over the years, which you can see on my Names page, but my latest find is a bit different from the books of names from which I’ve published lists. This list is actually a list of names published by an Ultra-Orthodox organization in Israel a little over a decade ago. There are close to a thousand articles (some a sentence or two, some pages long) that provide a unique perspective on Jewish names. In general these articles were written in response to people asking about the names, either because they themselves had the name, or because they were interested in bestowing the name on a child. The question being answered is if, from the ultra-Orthodox perspective, these names are appropriate.

For example, they reject almost all names that are not Hebrew in origin. Some names from Aramaic are accepted, but even Yiddish names are not. It’s not clear to me if that is because it’s an Israeli organization, or because the organization was connected to Rav Shmuel Eliyahu, who is the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Tzfat (and the son of former Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel Mordechai Eliyahu). Other names panned in the articles are those of biblical figures that were considered bad, such as Aviram, who rebelled against Moses, or Omri who was a king that was described in Kings as doing more evil than all preceding kings.

The organization was called Moriah. The web site itself shut down some time in 2009. I collected this list, and the links to the articles, on archived pages from the Internet Archive. You can go to the name list on the site, but it’s quite difficult to navigate, since the sequential pages were captured by the Internet Archive on different dates, so going from one page to the next might either skip a bunch of names, or show names that overlap with the previous page.

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101 Most Popular Jewish Girls Names in Israel in 2020

January 24, 2022Nameshebrew names, insta, israel, jewish names, namesPhilip

The Israel Central Bureau of Statistics released the baby name data for 2020 last month. As I’ve done for 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017-2018, and 2019, I’m posting the top 101 Jewish girls names. These are the most popular names given to Jewish girls born in Israel during 2020. Below you can see the number of girls that were named each name, and the ranking for 2020, as well as 2019 and 2018 for comparison. For numbers and rankings from earlier years, see the annual posts linked to above. For the parallel boy’s list, see 101 Most Popular Jewish Boys Names in Israel in 2020.

Six girls names entered the top 101 list in 2020 – Reef (entered at 78), Emanuelle (103 to 82), Niv (108 to 94), Eli (112 to 95), and Shoham (109 to 96). The girls names that exited the list were Feiga (101 to 106), Hili (100 to 107), Gili (97 to 111), Carmel (87 to 117), Darya (99 to 119), and Annael (90 to 127).

All the columns in the table below can be used to sort the table, so you can sort the table to see the order of ranking for each year, or by the spelling of the name in Hebrew or English. You can also search the table using the search field on the top right of the table.

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