Alexander Beider
By Alexander Beider
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Opinion No, Sephardic Pronunciation Is Not More ‘Correct’ Than Ashkenazi
Many people believe that when it comes to the Hebrew language, the Sephardic pronunciation is the correct one. It’s common to hear that this is the reason that modern Israeli Hebrew pronunciation is based on the Sephardic one. People have told me for instance that the phonetics of the Sephardic speech is closer to the…
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Opinion Why Do So Many Jewish Last Names Come From Women?
There’s a strange phenomenon that pops up surrounding the last names of Jews in the Russian Empire during the 19th century. A lot of them were derived from women’s first names, which is known as “matronymics.” The existence of last names like Belkin, Dvorkin, Malkin, and Rivkin, derived from Belka (Beyle), Dvorka (Deborah), Malka, and…
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Opinion Did Jews Buy Their Last Names?
As with many aspects of Jewish culture, religion, genetics and heritage, the origins of Jewish last names are ensconced in more myth than fact. There are many explanations out there attempting to explain the origins of Jewish surnames from Eastern Europe. Some see in them “Sephardic” roots, while others see a putative link to Antiquity…
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Opinion That Time Hebrew Disappeared For 300 Years
All cultures have a tendency to make their building blocks into part of a collective myth, oversimplifying them in textbooks and in the collective consciousness of their members. We Jews are hardly immune from this impulse. Indeed, we have performed this very simplification upon a touchstone of our culture: the Hebrew language. Hebrew plays a…
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Opinion Many ‘Sephardic’ Jews Aren’t Actually Sephardic
During my childhood in the 1960s and 70s in the USSR, the only books published about Jews were ideological works that criticized Zionism, Israel and what the Soviets considered the “national Jewish mentality.” As you might imagine, thanks to these books, many of us had a totally distorted picture of our true origins as Jews….
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Opinion The Khazarian hypothesis is not the only junk science origin story of Jews
In a recent piece in these pages, I addressed a popular myth: that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Khazar pagans who converted to Judaism. Though this idea gets a lot of attention, it is fully based on bunk science. Genetics, linguistics and onomastics — the study of names — all disprove the Khazarian hypothesis. But…
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Opinion Ashkenazi Jews Are Not Khazars. Here’s The Proof.
In 2010 I was contacted by the chief editor of a volume called “Khazars: Myth and History,” put together by the Russian Academy of Sciences. She knew my books on Ashkenazic names, and was familiar with my ongoing study of the history of Yiddish, eventually published by Oxford University Press in 2015 as “Origins of…
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