<p>In the Torah, chosen has a specific definition: chosen to uphold a relatively specific set of obligations. That has been converted over the years to the 600+ commandments/Mitzvot and all that entails, drawing a fence around the Torah, etc. This was changed by Christianity because it claims exclusivity - as the sign I saw on the street yesterday said “Jesus is the only way to God” - and wanted to root its assertion in a preceding but replaced claim of exclusivity as a new covenant standing in for the old. An interesting point is essentially raised by James Carroll in his new book about the reality of Jesus’ Jewishness, along with Paul’s, etc.: was this really a Jewish argument made by Jews for Jews? It makes sense then, more than if the exclusivity extended to all people because it would be a literal substitution of one chosen set of obligations for a new, revised set for the original group. </p>
<p>I know that many have added interpretations to the meaning of “chosen” but I think the original is many times demonstrated as “this story is about this group and no others”. That it has become a Bible for more than one tradition is an accident never intended when the stories were developed much earlier. And that tradition of not caring about how other people worship is true today, more so the more you move out on the devotion scale; the most devout essentially isolate themselves as much as possible from larger society. </p>
<p>When it comes to “cotton pickin’” I think much is contextual. As in the song “I never picked cotton” about white sharecroppers in Oklahoma. Not racist. Classist, but not racist. </p>
<p>In fact, a significant number of Finns have Swedish names and Swedish ancestry, and Swedish names do use the “son” patronymic, in various spellings.</p>
<p>I am half Finnish, and have a Finnish surname of the type that is constructed with the “nen” suffix that means “of the.”</p>
I was only referring to Poland, not how Russia treated people.
Name change- NOT urban lore, heard the explanation from the friend who wasn’t Scandinavian with the --son name. I grew up where distinguishing by -son and -sen could help determine if Norwegian, Swedish or Danish but have forgotten which (my N and S ancestors did not have either, -son was on Icelandic distant relatives).
Historically being Jewish meant a lot of discrimination in the US but not anymore that I can figure out ( no more so than for any others). btw- someone once told me the -ski ending indicated higher standing. Not in my peasant family tree… Yes, remember the backwards swastika. But a culture shouldn’t have to give up its symbol because of another group. No symbols allowed by anybody then to be fair.
Woman physician here who needed to see a solo practice specialist physician this year. Nice guy. Middle aged (younger than I am) and said to take paperwork to the “girls” out front. So I called him “boy” in a friendly manner (we are peers) because it annoys me that men too often refer to grown women as girls. Didn’t think about it until later- he’s black (this is Florida, home to KKK groups in the not too distant past as well). I grew up in the north and never thought about how things regarding race were in the south decades ago. Interesting how different things are noticed depending on your background and context. Things you only read about really were an every day occurrence for many.
I sometimes forget how many English are in this country since I’m from beyond the east coast early settled areas- I can claim some of that, too. Decades ago I had an elderly patient while in Indiana who said he was from the “old country”. His name was Smith or Jones or similar but he did not have a British accent. I was mystified, couldn’t figure out his origins so I asked him. The "old country " was Virginia! I had to remember my HS history and how settlers went westward to KY and IN et al. I remember going to a bank once in a WI city where we heard a young teller saying a few Polish words to a customer. My idea of the old country is NOT anywhere in the US.
Interesting how we view the world based on our individual backgrounds.
I live in a place where a huge chunk of the population is Jewish. (I’m half Jewish myself.) My last name is very Jewish sounding but I don’t appear to be Jewish at all. I don’t take offense when people call me a Jew or see me as being half Jewish. It depends on the individual I suppose.
“Interesting how we view the world based on our individual backgrounds”
Absolutely. Where we live and how we grew up influences us. I think it is very difficult to undertand a situation and people well without knowing the background and culture that are part of their experience.
This is why I do still tend to give people the benefit of the doubt, and also consider that people do learn from each other. If someone has misconceptions about me, or Judaism, I’m happy to teach them about it- not in any attempt to change their religion or choice of beliefs but because I think the more we know about people, the better we understand.
http://www.polishroots.org/Research/SurnameSearch/Surnamesendings/tabid/118/Default.aspx
Wis75 - re the notion that “-ski denotes higher family status” - at one point it did. but not for a few hundred years. This is a particularly helpful article. Also, while generally -ski is Polish and -sky is Russian, there are tons of exceptions, especially when letters are being transliterated from Cyrillic or (for Jews) Hebrew.
Don’t know why, but I am personally more comfortable with being called “Jewish” than “a Jew”. There just seems to be a potentially derogatory connotation to the latter.
Re: “name change at Ellis Island” (or other immigration entry point)
Wouldn’t some such “name changes” be due to incorrect rendering of names presented in non-Latin alphabets? Or perhaps something as mundane as sloppy handwriting somewhere?
The names were rendered IN THE OLD COUNTRY. The people who perpetuate this myth keep acting as though the EI people gave some kind of official name change that then followed the person around. Nothing of the sort happened. If your manifest said Schleibkowdsky and the EI guy checked you off, YOU were the one who subsequently exited the island and decided to go by Smith. The EI people didn’t authorize or certify name changes at all!
Yes, there could be sloppy handwriting or misspellings. Yes, transliteration from non-Latin alphabets could be an issue. But don’t forget many of these immigrants were illiterate and had little need in everyday life for last names. There was not necessarily a uniform spelling of the name to get "mangled’ in the first place.
The myth that the EI official asked the name and “didn’t like it” because it was too unwieldy and foreign-sounding and decided to shorten it to Smith is still a myth. EI had zero power on what you called yourself after you left the building, so even if they had desperately wanted to see you called Smith, they did not give you a single paper that named you Smith. YOU did that. Don’t believe me, take it up with the folks at Ellis Island.
And who your father was was of no meaning to them, so they had no vested interest in “coining” you “xxxx-son” (or whatever derivation of son). It’s not an American construct and they had no incentive to call you that.
My grandfather was from Russian-occupied Poland and spoke both Polish and Russian. His name on the manifest was --cki (actually -cka, the feminine version, due to a mistake). When he applied for naturalization, he spelled it --tzki, which is the same sound. He could have chosen to spell it -tski, -tsky, -tzky. None of those would have been “incorrect.” There wasn’t one Platonic form of the name, just a set of sounds. Later, the family “Anericanized” the ending to --tzker, which reflects how a German/Yiddish speaker might have altered the name. But the presence of multiple spellings doesn’t mean anyone made mistakes or that nefarious people stealthily tried to alter things
I was into genealogy about 10 years ago and corresponded with experts on Polish/Jewish/Russian names as I pieces my family tree together. Mine is about as boilerplate as they come. All experts in the field agree name changes weren’t done at EI. That’s the bottom line.
Jews who are interested in researching their family history may want to use the Daitch Mokotoff Soundex. (Google for it.). It’s an algorithm which attempts to address exactly what ucb suggested - the issue of transliteration. It’s very helpful.
To reinforce Pizzagirl’s post: our ancestors came over listed on ship manifests so they had names written down. These were checked. Sites like ancestry.com have many ship manifests listing passenger names with descriptions.
At the Museum of the Murdered Jews of Europe, there is a room which lists the various countries of Europe and how many of their Jews were killed in the Holocaust. The Polish Jews were by far the most numerous. Why was that? Were they simply more numerous in terms of population, or was there also an anti Polish bias by Hitler et al?
There are still 2 people in this thread who insist their name or a friend’s name were changed at EI, Lergnom! It’s a really widespread and prevalent myth. And an appealing one, too - it fits into the narrative of having been the victim of xenophobia / prejudice (“they cut off my heritage”). There certainly was xenophobia and prejudice, but it wasn’t manifest through forced name changes at EI.
My other ancestors came in through the port of Philadelphia and I got those records on microfiche through the LDS. They may be electronic today - this was 10+ years ago.
3,000,000 Poland
2,525,000 USSR
756,000 Romania
500,000 Germany
445,000 Hungary
357,000 Czechoslovakia
300,000 UK
250,000 France
191,000 Austria
156,000 Netherlands
Of course, being a battleground between Germany and the USSR (both unfriendly to Poland in general) certainly did not help either.
Sobering statistics of Jews in Europe and how many were victims of the Holocaust. According to this one, Poland had 3,300,000 Jews prior to the war, with 3,000,000 of them murdered.
So I was on a different thread and the term “gypped” was used to mean cheated or robbed - it was used openly with the qualification that the poster means no offense so therefor one shouldn’t take offense.
My family lived in Poland for several generations. Their papers, under “Nationality” said Jew, not Polish. Poland was an anti-Semitic country for decades before Hitler; it is no coincidence that the worst death camps were built in Poland. My mother once said that she could forgive the Germans to some extent because they truly believed that they were better than everyone else, but she could never forgive the Poles because they were also despised by the Germans but took it out on the Jews.
Only in recent history are the terms “Jewish” and “Jew” interchangeable. “Jewish” is more the religion, "Jew"is more the ethnicity/racial background, even if one is not religiously Jewish. (Yes, being Jewish was considered a race as much as being black.) Many individuals were slaughtered because one of their grandparents were born Jewish, even if the families had been Catholic for generations. Converts to Catholicism (including those who became nuns, monks and priests) were still considered Jews, despite clearly not being Jewish.
I think this one is laid to rest with our generation, but I know my mom can not keep straight calling someone asian vs oriental. I usually just say, mom, orientals are rugs, not people. At 80 it’s now almost a lost cause.
Did anyone ever read Sarah’s Key? I had never known about the Jews in France being rounded up and sent off to concentration camps.
I find the term “Jew,” in many contexts somewhat jarring purely because of historical context. In my grandparents generation in particular, “Jew” was used as a taunt - “she’s a Jew” was likely to be disparaging, while “she’s Jewish” was informative. The construction “Jew doctor” or “Jew lawyer” might also be used offensively.
However, context matters. For instance, I would not be offended by the following dialogue:
Again, that phrasing would sound somewhat strange and jarring to me, but it wouldn’t offend me, any more than any other awkward turn of phrase would offend me. I wouldn’t be offended by the Merry Christmas either, but that’s another story.
Re the Ellis Island myth: the ships’ manifests were created in the “Old Country” but the “Old Country” in question would be the port that the ship left from, not necessarily the country of origin. So, some clerk in Liverpool or Le Havre may well have written down an Anglicized or Franco-phonic spelling to a (possibly illiterate) immigrant’s name.
Also, the immigrant may have been TOLD orally, whether by officials or interpreters at Ellis Island or by others they encountered early in their days in the country, “how to say their name in English.” So Sawmgefdftf Brfujbfdyhb might have been TOLD by someone that in English his name is pronounced “Sam Brown.” There’s obviously a long history of “translating” foreign names in English; think of the Italian we call “Christopher Columbus,” for example.
Ironically, this caused problems in the naturalization process because the Ellis Island records had Sam Brown – who had by then been using that name consistently for years in this country – recorded in the ship’s manifest under his original name.