Your Real Family Tree
Does your family name have its roots in a tree?
ELIZABETH APPLEBAUM
AppleTree Editor
ro
olish and Russian Jews have a saying:
Shevat.nyi brat (Shevat is not a broth-
er), meaning that the month of Shevat
(which began Jan. 14) generally has the
coldest, fiercest weather of the winter. To borrow a
line from Shakespeare: It is the cruelest month; it
is not our friend; it is not a brother. .
Yet, in the Land of Israel, the middle of Shevat is
when the winter rains have tapered ofF, the sap
starts to rise in the trees, and new fruit begins to
form.
Thus, it is on the 15th of Shevat, the Talmud
ew year of tithing tree-borne fruit
says, when
begins. Originally nothing
adopted names that had a link to the original
name-bearer's characteristic (occupation, physical
feature, community status, etc.), and others select-
' ed names based on symbols from house signs,
1 some Jews acquired names that had no relation to
them at all.
Scholars believe that in what is today Germany
1 (before 1871, Germany was a collection of
independent states), governments forced Jews to
1 take names from various categories of words, such
as animals (Adler, eagle; Fuchs, fox), rocks and
1 minerals (Goldstein, Bernstein, amber), flowers
I (Rose, Lillienthal) and trees.
In most Ashkenazic communities, the tree
names are well known. The basic name is Baum,
1 which simply means "tree" (L. Frank Baum, who
wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was not
1 Jewish). To this are added many prefixes, which
denotes various varieties of tree.
I Of course, there is Apfelbaum (and its English
variants, Applebaum and Appelbaum), which
probably is the nicest of the names. There also are
1 Birkenbaum (birch tree), Birnbaum, (pear tree; the
1 original name of the late comedian, George
Burns), Buchsbaum or Buxbaum (box tree),
1 Eichenbaum (oak tree), Feigenbaum (fig tree),
Kirschenbaum (cherry tree), Mandelbaum
(almond tree), Nussbaum (nut tree), Rosenbaum
(rose tree), Tannenbaum (fir tree), Teitelbaum
(date tree), Weidenbaum (willow tree).
Clearly, some of these trees never grew in
1 Germany. (Apparently, when it came to names,
1 imagination was given free reign.) Also, a number
of these trees were known from passage,s in the
1 Bible.
Sometimes, other characteristics were combined
I Chronicles 7 :10) .
with "bawd to come up with a name that did not
point to any specific variety of tree, such as
s German Tree Names
Grossbaum (big tree), Hochbaum (tall tree),
1 Kleinbaum (little tree), Gruenbaum (and its
Many family names common
English equivalent, Greenbaum, green tree).
among Ashkenazi Jews are derived
As these names traveled eastward, they occasion-
from trees. Most European Jewish sur-
!
ally
took on a more Yiddish pronunciation. The
names were first adopted in the late 1700s
"baum"
part changed to boim or boyrn, and, thus,
and early 1800s. In some communities, such
Birnbaum
could become Berenboim (like the
as Prague and Frankfurt-am-Main, Jews had
1
musician,
Daniel Barenboim). In other cases, the
surnames centuries earlier.
In every place, however, Jews took on family 1 "baum" part remained, but the prefix became
Yiddish, as in the case of "chestnut tree,"
names because they were ordered to by the
Kastanienbaum in German, but Kastenbaum or
Christian authorities. Whereas many Jews
more than a bookkeeping day, Tu b'Shevat has,
through the years, taken on the status of a semi-
holiday. Called the "New Year of the Trees" or
Jewish Arbor Day" in some places, Tu b'Shevat
was seized upon by kabbalists — Jewish mystics —
as a day of momentous meaning. In the late 1800s
to early 1900s, the Jewish National Fund made Tu
1 b'Shevat its special day for donating money to
plant'trees in the barren plains, valleys and hills of
Eretz
Yisrael (Land of Israel).
1
Today, even sober, rationalistic, non-mystical
Jews acknowledge Tu b'Shevat by at least eating
fruit from trees, especially those fruits native to
1 Israel such as figs, dates, pomegranates, olives,
apples and pistachios.
Tu b'Shevat also is an appropriate time to think
about how trees, and fruit from trees, have figured
in Jewish history and culture.
One way in which they have played a
prominent role is names.
Tree names occasionally are found in
the Tanach (Jewish Bible). In mod-
em Israel, words denoting trees
are common both as given
names and as family names.
These include alon (oak; the
late Yigal Alon was Israel's
foreign minister), erez
(cedar), oren (pine), rimon
(pomegranate; see II Samuel
4:2), tamar, tomer and dekel
(date palm; Tamar was the
daughter-in-law of Yehudah,
see Genesis 38:6), zeitan
(derived from zayit, olive; see
"
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