By Martin Jaffee, JTNews Columnist
Several years ago, on the first day of class, I made casual mention of Abraham. Immediately a hand shot up.
“Yes?” I invited.
“Abraham who?” was the response. I then knew, as did Dorothy Gale after that bump on the noggin, that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore!
But my student’s ignorance opened an interesting question: where did Jewish surnames come from, anyway? Nobody in the Bible had one. For centuries Jews were simply known as so-and-so, the son or daughter of so-and-so. Every now and then, we find a sage referred to by his occupation – Rabbi Yohanan the sandalmaker, for example, or Nahum the scribe. Maybe today’s Sandlers and Sofers – not to mention Schusters and Saffers – descend from such ancestors. But these weren’t family names in Talmudic times.
Some sages had clever nicknames, like the great Babylonian master, Rav. His colleagues, impressed by his height, called him Abba Arikha, which could be translated, I suppose, as “Daddy Longlegs.” But you wouldn’t find Rav listed under “Arikha” in Pumbedita’s phone directory.
It may be that Jewish surnames arose in medieval times to designate families with ties to communal functions. So a family of renowned prayer leaders might come to be known as Shatz, the abbreviation of the Hebrew word for “public prayer leader” (shaliach tzibbur). The Schechters, no doubt, came from a long line of kosher butchers. And, of course, there were various names for the descendants of the priestly families of ancient Israel. They are the ancestors of today’s Cohens, Kahanas, Kaplans and – I now approach my theme – Katzes.