Chapter 6

  LEGENDS OF DEAD JEWS

  AMERICAN JEWS ARE A HIGHLY EDUCATED GROUP OF people—and not just educated, but great at asking annoying questions. In the most recent Pew Survey, 49 percent of American Jews claimed that a key part of their Jewish identity involved “being intellectually curious.” In other words, American Jews see themselves as people who don’t merely value their university degrees, but also their skepticism, their critical-thinking skills, and their refusal to take anything at face value.

  So I didn’t think it was a big deal a few years ago when I gave a public lecture at a Jewish institution and casually mentioned that the family story so many American Jews have heard, that their surnames were changed at Ellis Island, is a myth. At Ellis Island, which has been up and running as a National Park Service museum for over thirty years, this is routinely announced on public tours. More recently, we have entered an era of trendy genealogy, bolstered by cheap DNA testing that has led tens of thousands of Americans down the rabbit hole of ancestry research, with ample guidance from online forums, TV documentaries, family tree construction software, and accessible archival databases. With this public glut of information, I hardly thought my mention was news.

  Wow, was I wrong.

  After that talk, I was mobbed by people—angry people, in a scrum. These were well-read, highly educated American Jews, each of whom furiously explained to me that while maybe most people’s names weren’t changed at Ellis Island, their great-grandfather was the exception. None of these people offered any evidence, other than to assure me, “My great-grandfather wouldn’t lie!”

  I didn’t lose any sleep over my Ellis Island mob. But then it happened again. I wrote an article for a Jewish publication in which I compared the “My name was changed at Ellis Island” story to similar historical material, such as Washington chopping down the cherry tree, the CIA killing Kennedy, and the lunar landing being faked to impress the Soviets. In the comments section, hundreds of people explained to me how I was totally wrong, because . . . well, instead of evidence, they then inserted a five-hundred-word anecdote about their great-grandmother, so there.

  My angry hecklers have taught me a great deal about the power of founding legends, about mythmaking and its purpose. But now I know I have to get the facts out of the way first. So, for the record: No, your family’s name was not changed at Ellis Island, and your ancestors were not the exception. Here is how we know.

  First of all, there was no language problem at Ellis Island. Immigration inspectors there were not rent-a-cops. These were highly trained people who were required to be fluent in at least three languages, and additional translators circulated to ensure competency—and in this context, the languages spoken by Jewish immigrants were far from obscure. Second, immigration processing at Ellis Island wasn’t like checking ID at today’s airports. These were long interviews, twenty minutes or more, because the purpose of this process was to weed out anyone who was likely to become, in the jargon of the time, “a public charge.” So this was not a situation where some idiot behind a desk was just moving a line along.

  Even if it were: nobody at Ellis Island ever wrote down immigrants’ names. Immigrants’ names were provided by ship’s manifests, compiled at the port of origin. Ships’ manifests in Europe were based on passports and other state-issued documents. Those compiling ships’ manifests were very careful to get them right, because errors cost them money and potentially their jobs. Any immigrant who was improperly documented on board these vessels had to be sent back to Europe at the shipping company’s expense.

  Yet there is ample evidence of name changing: thousands of court records from the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s of Jewish immigrants and their children filing petitions in New York City Civil Court in order to change their own family names.

  In her book A Rosenberg by Any Other Name, the historian Kirsten Fermaglich tracks these court filings. For legal name changes, petitioners had to provide the court with their reasons for changing their names. And that’s where we see the heartbreaking reality behind the funny stories about Ellis Island. In these legal petitions, as Fermaglich unemotionally reports, we meet thousands of American Jews, most of them born in the United States, explaining under oath that they are changing their names because they cannot find a job, or because their children are being humiliated or discriminated against at school, or because with their real names, no one will hire them for any white-collar position—because, essentially, American antisemitism has prevented their families’ success.

  In her analysis of thousands of name-change petitions, Fermaglich notes many clear patterns. One is that those with Jewish-sounding names overwhelmingly predominated such court filings. In 1932, for instance (nearly a decade after the closure of Ellis Island), over 65 percent of name-change petitions in New York were filed by people with Jewish-sounding names. The next-largest group, those with Italian-sounding names, made up a mere 11 percent of filings. Granted, the Jewish population of New York that year was twice the size of the city’s Italian American population—but not six times the size. Another pattern Fermaglich uncovered is that petitioners with Jewish-sounding names often filed name-change petitions as families; frequently the motivation cited for the name change involved the educational and professional prospects of the petitioners’ children. In these petitions that Fermaglich rather dispassionately describes, we witness ordinary American Jews in the debasing act of succumbing to discrimination instead of fighting it.

  American antisemitism during the decades that followed the mass migration was, as Fermaglich puts it, “private” and therefore “insidious.” In the earlier part of the twentieth century, such discrimination was not subtle, appearing in job advertisements with the warning “Christians Only” or at hotels and restaurants posting signs declaring “No Dogs or Jews Allowed.” (My childhood piano teacher, a Juilliard alumnus and retired cocktail pianist, once told me how he was hired as a young man in the late 1940s to play the lobby of Florida’s prestigious Kenilworth Hotel, where performing musicians were named on lobby signs. As he approached the hotel, he saw the dreaded sign reading “No Dogs or Jews Allowed,” and wondered how he, Alan Wolfson, would manage to pass. He soon found himself playing a grand piano beside a marquee the hotel had provided, announcing: “Tonight’s Performer: Alain de Wolfe.”) By midcentury, these explicit markers had morphed into an elaborate glass ceiling that was an open secret, expressed at first through carefully worded advertising for employment or public accommodations (“sabbath observers need not apply”; “churches nearby”) and later through byzantine job and school application forms that, as Fermaglich explains, demanded information not only about the applicant’s birthplace and citizenship but also equally mandatory and entirely irrelevant information about the applicant’s parents’ and grandparents’ birthplaces, parents’ professions, mother’s maiden name, and grandparents’ surnames. Fermaglich points out the profound, “corrosive” effect of this type of intense and unacknowledged discrimination on the target population: “The unofficial nature of American antisemitism encouraged many Jews to resist discrimination by using bureaucratic name change petitions to reshape their personal identity rather than civil rights activism to change an unfair society.”

  Fermaglich is careful to note that the vast majority of Jewish name-changers did not actually take on new non-Jewish identities; most continued contributing to Jewish organizations and participating in Jewish communal life. Fermaglich presents this point optimistically, as a grand refutation of the popular assumption that such people rejected their Jewish roots. But to me, this fact demonstrates just how profoundly oppressive the situation must have been, if even those who chose to participate in organized Jewish communities felt that a name change was necessary. These people were not “self-hating Jews.” They were simply staring down a reality that they could not deny. And as the wording of their petitions reveals, they also could not allow themselves to admit exactly what that reality was.

  As I pored through Fermaglich’s selections from this ream of archival material, what I found most heartbreaking was witnessing how these Jewish name-changers participated in the very humiliation that they were seeking to escape. They did so not merely by changing their names, but by censoring their own self-expression during the very act of changing those names—because in their court filings, as Fermaglich reports, virtually no petitioners identified antisemitism as their motivation.

  Instead, the Jewish petitioners almost uniformly referred to how their names were “foreign-sounding” or “difficult to spell and pronounce”—even, Fermaglich notes, “when the name was spelled phonetically.” “The name Greenberg is a foreign-sounding name and is not conducive to securing good employment,” one very typical petition reads. Rose Lefkowitz declared her last name “difficult to pronounce.” (Is there more than one way to pronounce “Lefkowitz”?) Louis Goldstein declared his name “un-American, uneuphonius, and an economic handicap”—a petition that was rejected by the judge, whose name was also Louis Goldstein. (Those who beat the odds in an unfair system, of course, are the ones most invested in claiming the system is fair; if they didn’t need a workaround, there must not be anything to work around.) Max Hymowitz described how his son Emmanuel found their shared surname “cumbersome” and “an annoyance”; his father felt that changing their name would “substantiate and promote his son’s comfort and interests, socially, educationally, economically, and patriotically.” One couple, pleading on behalf of their family, testified that “The name of Tomshinsky is difficult to remember and properly spell, and because of this, petitioners and their children have been subject to embarrassment and your petitioners believe that it would be to the best interests of their children as they mature, to have the family name changed to the proposed name of Thomas.” In fact, the only petitioners Fermaglich cites whose filings actually mention antisemitism are non-Jews seeking to change their Jewish-sounding names, so as not to be mistaken for Jews.

  Of course, many names circulating in the United States during this period were “foreign-sounding” and “difficult to pronounce and spell”—for example, LaGuardia, Roosevelt, Juilliard, Lindbergh, DiMaggio, Vanderbilt, Earhart, Rockefeller, and Eisenhower. Yet as the remarkably low numbers of non-Jewish name-change petitioners in New York City demonstrate, such families and their forebears do not appear to have been “subject to embarrassment” or affected “socially, educationally, economically, and patriotically” by having names that were “difficult to pronounce and spell.” Fermaglich interprets these Jewish petitioners’ concealing of the actual problem to mean that, as she gently puts it, “Jews were uncomfortable talking about antisemitism, and may have even been ashamed of their experiences with antisemitism.” The difficulty these American Jewish families were facing had nothing to do with spelling or pronunciation, but none of them could admit it. And thus the process of hiding one’s name became embedded within the more elaborate process of hiding the reasons why.

  This brings us to the reality behind the funny family stories of names that were “changed at Ellis Island.” The Ellis Island legend is simply the final step in this multigenerational process of denying, hiding, and burying the reality that American Jews feared most—namely, the possibility that they were not welcome here.

  So now we know the myth, and we know the reality. And now we can ask the more interesting questions: Why did so many American Jews’ ancestors tell this story about their names being “changed at Ellis Island”? What purpose did it serve then, and why do educated skeptical people still want to believe it now?

  Those people who accosted me at my talk and online weren’t merely uninformed. They were responding to something enormously powerful and important. This mythological story about the Jews’ arrival in America is shared by plenty of Americans from other ethnic groups, immortalized on film in the classic scene of Vito Corleone’s arrival at Ellis Island in The Godfather II. But it is also part of a deep pattern in Jewish history, one that is much bigger than a single generation of immigrants and their children, one that goes back centuries.

  Nearly every diaspora Jewish community in world history has at least one founding legend, a story about its origins that members of that community accept as fact, no matter how ridiculous that story might be. The Jews of medieval Spain, for example, in some ways resembled American Jews today, a group that included many people who excelled professionally and politically in the society in which they lived. One of those accomplished medieval Spanish Jews was a twelfth-century man named Abraham ibn Daud. The leading philosopher of his generation, he also had a sideline writing groundbreaking books on astronomy—and in his spare time, he published Sefer Ha-Qabbalah (The Book of Tradition), the most widely accepted history of the Spanish Jewish community. In that book is a story about exactly how the Spanish Jewish community became the center of the Jewish world, and the story is so ridiculous that it’s amazing that anyone in their right mind ever thought it was true.

  Two centuries after the “fact,” ibn Daud recounted this origin story: Four important rabbis from Babylonia, the center of Jewish scholarship for centuries, were traveling by ship on the Mediterranean in the year 990—and then, on the high seas, their ship was captured by a royal Spanish fleet. All four rabbis were taken as captives and sold as slaves in different places around the Mediterranean, and in each place, local Jewish communities bought the captives’ freedom. One of the captives, Rabbi Moshe, wound up in the Spanish city of Cordoba. One day, the newly liberated Rabbi Moshe, now a penniless refugee, sat in the back of a Torah study class. When he began offering brilliant answers to the class’s Torah questions, the community recognized his gifts and made him their new leader. And thus, says ibn Daud, the crown of Torah was transferred from Babylonia to Spain, making Spain the next link in the chain of Jewish tradition.

  This story has some truthiness to it, but as the twentieth-century historian Gerson Cohen has thoroughly explained, it’s impossible. The story claims that the leader of the royal fleet that hijacked the rabbis’ ship was Abed al Rachman the Third. This would have sounded plausible to ibn Daud’s readers, since Abed al Rachman the Third really was the king of Spain. Unfortunately, Abed al Rachman died thirty years before this story allegedly took place, among many other factual errors. Nearly every event that “happens” in the story is lifted directly from another source—the medieval version of an internet meme. The story about the unknown pauper Rabbi Moshe wowing senior scholars in the study session, for instance, is suspiciously similar to a story in the Talmud about the rise of the Roman-era rabbi Hillel the Elder. So why would an obviously intelligent person record this story as official history? And why did centuries of smart Jews in Spain believe it?

  One could ask the same question about the founding of the Jewish community in Poland. When the Jews arrived in Poland a thousand years ago, the story goes, the head of the Jewish community announced in Hebrew, “Poh-lin”—“Here we will dwell,” and that name spread to the local people and stuck. In case that didn’t make Poland Jewish enough, the Jews coming to Poland, afraid of persecution in this new land, hid during the day in caves in the Polish forests, studying Talmud. They then sneaked out at night to carve the names of the tractates they were studying onto the trunks of trees. The local Polish people noticed this and began revering these places as holy. Later, Jews who arrived in Poland discovered just how welcome they and their traditions were in this bountiful new land, because the names of all the tractates of the Talmud were already carved onto the trees of the Polish forest, waiting for them.

  These ridiculous stories were not only in fashion in the generations following the Jewish migration to Poland centuries ago, but they were also repeated as fact by respected modern Jewish authors—including the wildly popular nineteenth-century Polish Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz, who essentially owned Yiddish publishing for fifty years, and also by the twentieth-century Polish-born Hebrew writer S. Y. Agnon, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966.

  There are endless examples of such origin stories. Jewish communities in France claimed that Jews had lived there since the time of the First Temple in Jerusalem, nearly 3,000 years ago—it’s not true, but it was a great alibi for explaining to their Christian neighbors why they weren’t involved in killing Jesus. Jewish communities in parts of Algeria similarly claimed they had been living there since the time of the Second Temple, two thousand years ago—also not true (though it was true in other parts of North Africa), but it was a great alibi for telling Muslims that they were already there before the Islamic conquest. One of my favorite founding legends is a story about the very first Jewish “diaspora” community, the Israelites’ biblical sojourn in Egypt. Rabbinic tradition claims that one reason the Israelites survived their time in Egypt was that they never changed their Jewish names. But anyone who’s ever read the Torah knows that the very first Israelite in Egypt was Joseph, and the book of Genesis explicitly describes how he changed his name to an Egyptian one. Of course, Joseph’s name change is nothing compared to the later biblical Book of Esther, in which the title character, who bears the Hebrew name Hadassah, becomes the queen of the Persian Empire and keeps her Jewish identity a secret—helped along by her new name, borrowed from the Persian goddess Ishtar. Jews have been changing their names to non-Jewish ones and lying about it for a long, long time.

  There’s a clear pattern to these legends, which are all about living in places where you are utterly vulnerable and cannot admit it. These stories express the Jewish community’s two highest hopes and deepest fears. The first hope is that the Jews in this new place will remain part of the chain of Jewish tradition, and the second hope is that the local population will accept them. The fears, of course, are the inverse—of being cut off from that chain going back to Mount Sinai, and of being subject to the whims of the non-Jewish majority. These fears couldn’t be more real, because being a diaspora community means being vulnerable. It is a highwire act of the highest order. There are political strategies for dealing with that vulnerability, but these founding legends are an emotional strategy, and their power is unmatched.