When
Jews arrived in a new country, a secular name was often chosen from the local language. In Central and Eastern Europe,
Yiddish was the secular language, so a Hebrew name was used in religious and Jewish community contexts and a
Yiddish name was used (the kinnuy) in secular contexts. In
France, the secular name was in
French; in
Spain in
Spanish and other vernacular languages, in
North Africa and the
Middle East in
Arabic, in ancient
Babylon, the kinnui was in
Babylonian and so on. Some kinnuyim (the Hebrew plural of kinnui) sound similar to the corresponding Hebrew name, for example Mendel for Menachem, Anshel for Asher. A few kinnuyim are based on the animal-like attributes of four of the sons of
Jacob and one of his grandsons:
Judah, the
lion (cf. the family name Lyon, Loewe); Benjamin, the
wolf (cf. the family name Woolf);
Naphtali, the
deer (cf. the family names Hirsch, Hersch, Harris); and
Issachar, the
donkey (or the
bear) (cf. the family names Bar, Baer, Barell,
Barnard,
Bernhardt, Berthold, Schulter); plus
Ephraim, the
fish (cf. the family name Fish). Among Arabic-speaking Jews, Arabic names were adopted, such as Ḥassan, Abdallah, Sahl; or
Hebrew names were translated into Arabic, for example,
Eleazar into Mansur,
Ovadia into Abdallah, Matzliah into
Maimun. A peculiarity of the Arabic names is the
kunya, the by-name given to a father after the birth of his son, by which the father is named after the son (using the prefix "Abu"). For example,
Abu Yunus is a kunya for the father of a son named
Jonah. "Abu" also forms family names, as in the case of
Abudarham or
Abulafia. The Arabic article "al" appears in quite a number of names, as in Al-Ḥarisi. ==Usage==