Jewish Genealogy Comes of Age

Today, Jewish genealogy is more popular than ever thanks to a plethora of online genealogy resources available to Jews anywhere in the world. In part two of a multi-part interview, Shalom Life speaks to Schelly Talalay Dardashti, noted Jewish genealogist, journalist and award-winning blogger (tracingthetribe.blogspot.com), about the origins of her interest in Jewish genealogy and the different research methodologies for tracing Ashkenazi, Sephardic and Mizrahi family histories.

How did you originally get interested in genealogy?

My intro to genealogy was through our daughter. Prior to that I was a prolific needlepointer and embroiderer. In her bat mitzvah class at Valley Beth Shalom (Encino, California) many moons ago, she brought home a one-page assignment: List your name and Hebrew name, your parents’ names, grandparents’ names and great-grandparents’ names (if you know them), and where they came from. That weekend we had a major life cycle event in my husband’s huge Persian Jewish family – hundreds of guests. We asked questions and came home with stacks of little cocktail napkins scribbled all over with names. Instead of the one page assignment, she created four large poster boards covered in pink and blue labels. Needless to say, she got an A. And I haven’t picked up a needle since!

Her parsha was to be Chukat (the red heifer). She told the rabbi she didn’t want to do that but did want to speak on her genealogy project and he gave the OK. At that point, she turned to me and said “now we have to do your side.”

I was completely stymied and perplexed as our Ashkenazi (so we thought then!) family was very small, the complete antithesis of a “normal” Persian family. Everyone that could have helped was already dead. Genealogists call this the curse of genealogy. When we are not interested, everyone wants us to hear stories and we avoid listening. When we become very tuned in to our ancestry and its history, there’s no one left to ask.

You’ve done extensive research on your ancestry. How far have you gone back?

For my husband’s Persian family, we’ve gone back to about 1750 using only oral history, extensive interviews of our family’s senior “walking encyclopaedias” and some chance inscriptions in an old Siddur that provided three additional generations. There are no actual records for Persian Jewish genealogy other than documents a family might have preserved itself, such as a ketubah or an old property deed.

On my side, we’ve gone back to about the same time using a combination of archival records from the Minsk (Belarus) and other archives, interviews of far-flung branches, along with records of immigration and census. Additionally, I’ve found documentary evidence of our family’s oral history, which states that “Talalay (Talalaya) was our name in Spain.”

We now have documents from Spanish archives dated 1353 with several mentions through 1396, when the family disappears from Spain as far as we can tell.

What’s different about Jewish genealogy versus non-Jewish? (ie Christian, using church records for example)

Jewish research covers a wide swath of history, immigration (forced and voluntarily), such horrible periods as the Inquisition and the Holocaust. With such a history and people in countries around the world, more languages are needed to read original documents and we must cast a much wider net. As just one small example, there were Ashkenazim in Constantinople/Istanbul from the 14th century, as well as the Sephardic community, mostly descended from Inquisition refugees who arrived in 1492 and joined the smaller community already there.

Christian church records require Latin or Greek, sometimes the secular languages of the country. That’s a lot easier than Jewish records written in Hebrew or Yiddish, compounded by Ladino, Polish, Russian, Farsi, Arabic and dialects within these and other major languages. More alphabets, more languages to learn to read, more obsolete handwriting to decipher, such as solitreo (a kind of Rashi Hebrew used in Turkey – only a handful of people can read it today).

Is it harder for Jews to trace their families back many generations?

To the contrary, I believe it’s getting easier every day. The Jewish genealogy community is one based on collaboration and development of resources by dedicated individuals who really want to help many others interested in the same names and places. Every day, another online accessible/searchable database is either updated or added to various websites. Documents are still discovered in archives around the world by other dedicated researchers and archivists and made available to the researchers who need them. The Internet sparked a revolution in our favorite endeavour.

Is there a different between Ashkenazi and Sephardic/Mizrahi in terms of how one goes about looking up ancestors?

Ashkenazi

Good question. Ashkenazi research means there are archives to access the old-fashioned way as well as online resources. The problem with Ashkenazi resources is that many Ashkenazi European Jews did not have surnames until as late as the 1800s in some places. Without a surname, one must rely on Jewish naming patterns, occupations, geography and, today, DNA genetic genealogy helps connect people who have no paper trail.

Sephardic

Sephardic research means that surnames have been used for a thousand years and records using those surnames are in Spanish archives dating to the year 1000 or even earlier. Sephardic surnames changed according to the language (Spanish, Arabic) with spelling variations that can be discerned rather easily by a dedicated researcher. The archives contain huge numbers of records detailing the mundane (selling of cattle) to notarial records covering the sale and purchase of houses and lands, as well as settling of estates, marriages and much more. The records are there, one just needs to find them (and the researcher may need to know Latin as well as various Spanish historical languages such as Catalan and Castilian and other dialects to decipher them). One problem is that in Catalunya, for example, Spanish scribes at certain times were trying to write down testimony given in Catalan when the scribes’ language was Castilian.

Mizrahi

Mizrahim, Jews of the Eastern communities (such as Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, etc.), do have a more difficult time of it.

In Iran, for example, there was no centralized repository for Jewish records until the office of the Chief Rabbi was created in the mid-20th century. Today, those records remain in Teheran. To my knowledge, none have been copied or sent elsewhere, and to extract information from these large chronological registers (there is no index), one needs to know the exact information you are looking for. In other words, if you are looking for a marriage record for couple A and B, you need to know the date. If you knew the date, you wouldn’t need that marriage record, except to add to your files. If you were looking for the birth of A, you would need to know the parents’ names and the date. If you knew those items, you likely would not need the birth record, other than as confirmation. In the case of the Persian Jews, surnames were not required until Shah Reza came to power in the early 20th Century. Some families, such as our DARDASHTI, had been using specific names since they arrived in Teheran in about 1840. Our family is documented in Elkanan Adler’s 1898 book of travels to Jewish communities. Among the community leaders he met was Haji Eliyahu Dardashti. “Haji” was the honorific given to Jews who had been to Jerusalem, as well as to Muslims who had been to Mecca.

The concept of family names was new, and people kept changing their surnames for “better” ones. For example, one family in our genealogy had the name of ROGHANI, one who sold or made oil. As they made their upwardly mobile ascent through business and education, they changed the name to SHADGU, one who speaks well, leaving the oil seller far behind.

One “rule” of the new surname law was that only one family in each town could have the same unique surname. So, if you are looking for example for a BROOKHIM, you need to know if the family was originally from Teheran, Shiraz, Isfahan, Kashan, Hamadan or elsewhere. We had BROOKHIM in Teheran from all these places and they were not related. In another case, one of our DARDASHTI branches came up from Isfahan to Teheran in the 20th century and took the name DARDASHTIAN even though he was entitled to take DARDASHTI as a close relative. When he came home and told the family their name, everyone was very upset, but it couldn’t be changed. When I started the family research, I found them, and “our” family said they weren’t related. However, after speaking to them, and to the son of the man who took the name, I heard the real story, and learned the names and the relationship of their branch to ours. It was a surprise to our side of the family as they thought they were not really related at all.

What about other “Eastern communities”?

For Iraqi records, many were taken to Israel during the mass exodus in the late 1940s. I believe it is the same for Syrian records, which may be in the U.S. and in Israel. Afghan records are even more of a problem than the Iranian records as surnames are still not a requirement in that country. Jews lived in many communities in Afghanistan.

In Egypt, registers exist, but access is tightly controlled and it takes an extremely long time, due to the very small numbers of people who have access. There are plans to make this process easier, but nothing has yet really come to light.

It seems like a daunting task to begin the research. Where to start?

My experience is that, for Mizrahi, Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities, the first line of research is extensive interviewing of senior family members. If someone has a person to talk to, run - do not walk - to interview them, using written notes, audio and video. There’s an African proverb that goes: “When an old person dies, it is as if a library has burned down.”

What if your background includes “crypto-Jews” as your blog mentions?

Thanks to some incredible researchers, books and websites, it is becoming much easier to trace families. One book that was a major resource was Sangre Judia, first published in 1998 by my good friend journalist Pere Bonnin in Barcelona. He himself is a Chueta, descendant of Mallorcan Jews forcibly converted in 1391 and never allowed to forget it, persecuted since then. Pere first compiled a list of names documented as Jewish from Inquisition court documents, archival documents and other sources. It was just a list of names in his book “Sangre Judia,” which also includes a sort of primer to Judaism offering Jewish history in Spain, Jewish history, holidays, cuisine and much more. However, his latest fourth edition (2006) required that he go back over his files and add the year of the document containing the name as well as the geographical location indicated. Now the book, which contains the primer to Judaism, also has a list with surnames, dates and places, is an amazing genealogical resource. It gives a researcher a place to start. He is now working on a completely different second book which will be more genealogically oriented and Sephardic researchers are very excited about this.

http://Sephardim.com , organized by Harry Stein, contains a name search engine index of tens of major books on Sephardic history. http://SephardicGen.com , by Sephardic genealogy pioneer Dr. Jeffrey S. Malka, is a wonderful compilation of myriad resources by country for Sephardic researchers. His book Sephardic Genealogy (2008) is a must for Sephardic and for Crypto-Jewish researchers.

What are you up to at the moment?

Genealogy blogging has been a major step forward for me. I participate in special geneablogger panels at the Southern California Genealogical Society Jamboree conferences, have presented programs on genealogy blogging, as well as on DNA projects for Jewish genealogy. I’ve spoken in London for the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain’s annual seminar. In February, I’ll be speaking at the Hong Kong JCC – and spending Purim there – on my way to the Australian National Jewish Genealogy Conference in Melbourne (March 7-9), and then again in Hong Kong on my return. At Jamboree (June 11-13), I’m presenting our IberianAshkenaz DNA Project from the administrator’s viewpoint (how to set up a DNA project for family or geographic region, goals, encourage people to participate and explain/analyze the results).

I’d like to encourage everyone interested in Jewish genealogy – regardless of experience level – to attend this year’s Jewish genealogy conference. All details can be found at http://www.jgsla2010.com