Pennsylvania Dutch: Ashkenazi, German encounters

Matt Singer has an interesting idea.

He's writing an independent project on the encounter between Ashkenazi Jews and Pennsylvania Germans in Pennsylvania Dutch Country as a material culture analysis.

A Penn State American studies doctoral student, his project should be of interest to Tracing the Tribe's readers. Matt was happy to share additional information with me.

He plans to document and analyze material culture reflecting the encounter between Pennsylvania Germans and Yiddish- and German-speaking (Ashkenazi) Jews from Central and Eastern Europe who settled in the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch Country from the 18th through early-20th centuries. The area is centered in Lancaster, Lebanon, and Berks counties but encompasses most of southeastern and central Pennsylvania.

While Pennsylvania Germans and American Jews have both been the subjects of extensive scholarly research, this particular history - which focuses on the interaction and influence between two Germanic people whose separate diasporas brought them to Southeastern and Central Pennsylvania - has not been studied, he says.

Matt also plans to incorporate and focus on fraktur (example left), a text-based Pennsylvania-German art-form, as part of this study.

Fraktur (example left) is the decoration of paper with calligraphic texts and related designs, figures and symbols, using pen and ink and/or watercolors. Click here (a gallery of examples and many other articles) or here for another article. The first link has many examples of this vibrant folk-art that was used for many types of documents.

Says Matt, a small but significant number of Jews worked as itinerant fraktur artists and scriveners. They functioned much like countless Jews who - typically in their earliest years in the US - earned their livelihoods as peddlers. However, traveling fraktur artists and scriveners, unlike most peddlers, left surviving evidence of their work.

A Google search for "jewish fraktur" turned up a mention in Irwin Richman's book "the Pennsylvania Dutch Country." Pages 57-58 offer information on this variety and mentions two artists, Martin Wetzler who drew a Star of David on his creations and signed his name in Hebrew, as well as Justus I.H. Epstein who lived and worked in Reading.

Fraktur incorporating Hebrew words and phrases was created by Christian Hebraists, and at least one example was made by a Pennsylvania German artist for a Jewish patron.

Finally, through the examination of fraktur in relation to traditional Ashkenazi-Jewish forms such as the ketubah (marriage contract), wimpel (Torah binder), illustrated prayer-books, and mizrachim (a wall-hanging that indicates the direction for prayer - East, mizrach), Matt will search for artistic motifs, approaches, and intentions shared (or not shared) by Pennsylvania Germans and Ashkenazi Jews and their continuity (or discontinuity) as the two distinct yet geographically and culturally related groups established new lives, communities, and cultures in the New World.

Matt, like many of us first became interested in genealogy after watching "Roots" in 1977, as a young teenager. Later, the emergence of JewishGen in the 1990s "turned this interest into a passion."

His paternal SINGER line was from the Ponevezh (Panevezys) area in Kovno Gubernia, Lithuania.

Says Matt, according to a distant cousin (now deceased) who was equally obsessed with genealogy and family history, the family moved from East Prussia to Lithuania around 1840.

"Such a migration pattern is slightly counterintuitive," he says, "and I’ve never been able to document it.

What I do know is that my great-grandfather David Singer immigrated from Neustadt Ponevezh, Lithuania, in 1886 and seemed to have moved directly to Middletown, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, a small Pennsylvania-German town outside of Harrisburg (where much of the family eventually settled).

His primary maternal line - the KLEINMAN/N) - were from the Kurland/Courland region (now southwestern Latvia) which, though absorbed by Russia in the Partition of Poland in 1795, was German in language and culture and not part of (although not far from) the Pale of Settlement.

My great-great-grandfather Abraham Kleinman immigrated from Friedrichstadt (now Jaunjelgava), Kurland, in 1887 and first settled in Lancaster, the heart of “Pennsylvania Dutch Country,” and later lived in several smaller towns in the region before ultimately settling in Harrisburg.

Counting my older brother’s children, five generations of my Jewish family (I’m also one-quarter Austrian and German Catholic by descent) have been born in “Pennsylvania Dutch Country,” and seven have lived in it (my great-great-great grandparents Elias and Sarah Rachel Kleinman—Abraham’s parents—followed their son, immigrating here in 1891).

All of Matt's Jewish ancestors were Litvaks, although he adds:

The Kleinmans represented a sort of German-Litvak hybrid, as did the Singers, I suppose, if they really did move from East Prussia to Lithuania ), as seems to be the norm in the vicinity of Harrisburg (of course, the Litvaks were preceded by Jews from southern Germany ). I believe the same is true of all of Pennsylvania Dutch Country—but that’s a matter for research far from completed!

Matt's geographical locations and names of interest include East Prussia, Singer; Courland, Kleinman, Toor, Tuch, Singer; and Lithuania, Singer, Tuch, Gerber, Garonzik, Ringer and Blau.

Do you have any written memoirs inherited from immigrant ancestors who settled in the area?

Would you share them with Matt? Readers are welcome to contact him.

DNA: Tracking Jewish glassmakers

A new FamilyTreeDNA project will track glassmaking families.

Judy Simon says she has created this project because:

Glassmaking was one of the few artisan professions where Jewish artisans were not forced to convert to Christianity and join guilds in order to continue to work as glassmakers.

As a result, many of the Jewish glassmaking families retained their Jewish identity for centuries in Christian Europe.

I thought it would be interesting to see if we can trace the Y-DNA of males who know their ancestors were in glassmaking, as well as males with any of the surnames associated with glassmaking.

Glassmaking has been a Jewish art from its Mesopotamian beginnings. According to historian Samuel Kurinsky, the spread of the craft was parallel to and coincident with the Jewish diaspora.

Scholars have traced the industry over 2,000 years as it spread from the Near East to the Ottoman Empire and Europe.

Since the glassmaking secrets were kept in the family for many centuries, there were relatively few families involved in glassmaking over the years as compared with other trades.

Surnames (most of these date back to Altari and Lorrainer glassmakers) associated with glassmaking over the centuries include:

da COSTA, DAGNIA, HENNEZEL, THIETRY, THYSAC, BRISEVAL, METREVES, GLASER, VERZELLINI, BARCALUSO, BARTOLETTI, BERGAMYN, ROBLES, ROSSO, BIGO, BARTOLUSSI and PERROTTO.

Variants were adopted in English-speaking countries (e.g., BIGO -> BAGG, THIETRY -> TITTERY).

For more information, click on the Glassmaking Families DNA Project.

Consider joining the project if your paternal ancestors were in the glassmaking business or if your surname or variation is listed.

Questions? Contact Judy Simon, who is also co-administrator of the IberianAshkenaz Project.

Belarus: Lyakhovichi site additions

Special interest groups help researchers focus their research and provide a location for geo-specific resources.

One such site is the Lyakhovichi/Lechovich (Belarus) site at JewishGen. Webmaster Deborah Glassman is always expanding this collection of valuable resources.

Recent changes include the following details:

- 230 webpages, an expansion of more than 25%.
- 5,000+ images, doubled from previous versions.
- 1,200+ New York-area gravestone photos, indexed by surname and full Hebrew name.
- 300+ data extractions - New York City Death Certificates (1893-1943) .
- Names of Lechovichers living in nearby Baranovich, Kletsk and Gorodische.

Additional data includes names from Jewish Colonial Trust documents, World War I Draft records, professional directories, etc. There are more obituaries, a 1937 list of midwives in Lechovich and Baranovich, mortality rate analyses (1834 and 1850 Revision Lists) and other Revision Lists residency changes.

If your family has a connection Lyakhovichi/Lechovich or the adjacent areas, do check out these resources at the link above; check out the "new" section.

Ongoing projects include translating original Russian records. A searchable database now includes 2,258 entries for 12 Supplementary Revision files (1858-1884). Visit the site for surnames in these records.

Congratulations to Deborah for her work on this site.

New edition: Jewish Surnames of the Russian Empire

A large volume that "lives" on the shelf above my desk is Alexander Beider's Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire (1993, Avotaynu). Each time I look up a name, I mark it, and most pages are covered in highlights and notes.

Following four years of work by Beider, an updated volume has just been published by Avotaynu, which has brought out all of Beider's books, including surnames in Poland, Galicia and elsewhere, as well as a tome on Ashkenazi given names.

The new edition is hefty at 1,000 pages - 50% more than the 1993 edition - and offers 74,000 surname entries - the 1993 book contained some 50,000.

Bill Gladstone reviewed the book for the Canadian Jewish News:

Beider considered the revision necessary because of the explosion of new sources and knowledge that has occurred over the last 15 years due to the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the rise of the Internet, and the publication of numerous related new works. He expanded the work’s geographical range, altered hundreds of entries and added many new cross-references.

The Moscow-born statistician, linguist and onomastician, who has lived in Paris since 1990, is credited with almost single-handedly revolutionizing the field of Jewish onomastics. Before Beider, most researchers rehashed names and ideas from the published literature with little scientific method and little regard to where the names occurred geographically. One of Beider’s central methodological principles was to link surnames to the geographical regions in which they originated, and he was the first to do an inductive survey of surnames based on primary sources such as old voters’ lists, censuses, civil records and other archival material.

See a sample page of the new edition here, and the corresponding page in the 1993 edition here. For a better idea of the broad scope of Beider's book, view the table of contents here.

A 200-page intro section offers information on how family names were acquired. Beider covers the history of Eastern European Jewish names, types, linguistics. patterns of adoptions, names used by both Jews and non-Jews.

An accompanying softcover volume provides the Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex listing of the surnames. The D-M Soundex was especially formulated to provide a more accurate system for Eastern European names.

The dictionary section references other Beider works to see how a surname migrated both to and from the Russian Empire.

For more information, click Avotaynu. For both books (large hardcover and accompanying softcover), the price is $118.

Read Gladstone's complete review in the Canadian Jewish News.

Vatican: Jewish street sellers expelled

There have been Jewish street sellers in Rome since Paul IV (1555-1559). Although the Pope confined the Jews to the Rome ghetto, he allowed them to conduct minor street trades.

This all changed in December 2007, when Vatican city governor Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo banned all traders from the area, and upset the Jewish sellers who claim to have been licensed by a Pope centuries before.

According to this European Jewish Press story, there are 113 licenses for souvenir selling in Rome; 112 belong to Jewish vendors.

The vendors, called urtisti ("those who bump into tourists"), sell small plaster statues, crucifixes, rosaries and pictures of saints and Popes.

Urtisti association chair Lello Zarfatti says, "I have been selling my souvenirs in St. Peter’s Square in the last 50 years thanks to an oral permission then granted by a Vatican prefect."

The souvenir sellers have appealed the decision and three vendors picketed the entrance to St Peter’s Square.

Rome Jewish community spokesman Riccardo Pacifici says, "Of the 9,000 Jewish families living in Rome, at least 400 hundred engage in street selling activities.”

The Vatican prefect pledged to meet with his Rome colleague in order to tackle the vendors’ requests.

When Italy unified in 1870 at the expenses of the Pope’s temporal power on Rome, Jews turned into souvenir sellers after obtaining ad hoc licenses from the Italian civil authorities, while some were granted such right directly from the Vatican authorities.

Rome's Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni is reportedly backing the vendors.

Read the article here.