SEMINAR AT THE NATIONAL LIBRARY

A DAY AT THE LIBRARY
I spent a day at the National Library, on the Givat Ram campus of the Hebrew University, the week before last. The library staff, particularly Mrs. Elona Avinezer, the Head of the Judaica Reading Room, want to better serve visitors who come with genealogy questions, so they invited several genealogists to give talks to the staff about what we do and how we do it.

We had the whole morning, from about nine o'clock until nearly one. I was the last of the morning presenters and I did a case study of the family of Peretz Pikholz of Skalat. I wanted to touch briefly on a large number of sources, ending up with a non-document that moved our main question from "beyond a reasonable doubt" to "beyond a shadow of doubt." As time was running out, I tacked on a bonus conclusion about the next generation up, even though the supporting evidence is far from conclusive.

After a break to visit the cafeteria, we had several presentations by library staff about resources that they thought we may not have known about. We finished up at about a quarter past five.

The whole program was generally well-received by the forty-fifty participants. It was open to the public, though it did not get much publicity.

A few things that I learned. Irit Shem-Tov, of the Israel Genealogical Society, discussed the notion of family numbers. These numbers were assigned to a family unit and remained with it no matter where they went. Irit was mostly interested in Lwow, but this idea is relevant to Hungarian research as well.

Professor Yitzhak Kerem is a Sephardic researcher and it would not be much of an exaggeration to say that he seems to find Sephardim every place you look, even in Ashkenazic communities. I spoke with him afterwards about the Scharf family tradition that Shimshon Scharf (who married Bassie Ruchel, the daughter of Peretz Pikholz) was in fact a Turkish Jew named Arak. I gave our Scharf-Pikholz researcher his address and perhaps he'll be able to help out with that.

I also spoke to him about the theory that our Pikholz family might have come from Vyskovo (then Hungary, now sub-Carpathian Ukraine) where there were some minor Hungarian land-owning nobility named Pikholcz. The idea here is that our family were living on their land and when required to take surnames, too the name of the landowner - as happened with for instance many of the newly-freed slaves in the United States. Kerem thought that made perfectly good sense and as I type these words I realize that can solve another problem that has been nagging me for the last ten years and has been aggravated by our latest DNA results. Finding actual evidence, however, is another matter entirely.

Shalom Bronstein gave a better idea about what is actually going on with the Paul Jacobi Archives, a subject which until now has generated much talk.

Gil Weissblei of the library staff spoke about a number of lesser-known collections. I was intrigued by the David Tidhar collection. Tidhar published a nineteen-volume set (in Hebrew) called "The Encyclopedia of the Founders and Builders of Israel" which has some 6000 brief biographies of Israeli personalities in the years leading up to 1960. It turns out that Tidhar had sent questionnaires to all these people and those questionnaires are available for research at the National Library. I imagine that they contain information which was not included in the completed work. Tidhar was also a private detective and his files from that work are also in the Library's collection.

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Housekeeping notes:

I have an article in the next issue of Avotaynu. I have not seen the final version yet, but I assume the title "GETTING IT WRONG" will remain intact. The article is about being careful about possibly recording incorrect information and how such information is likely to cause damage later on. That has been a mantra of mine of late.

I sat down a few days ago to look at my presentation for the conference in Boston, four weeks from now. I knew it needed a bit of reworking and updating since I last gave the talk six months ago. What I had forgotten until now is that the entire Power Point presentation is in Hebrew, so I have to redo the whole thing.

Barbara Stern Mannlein has graciously agreed to introduce my talk at the conference.

I have approached a large number of Pikholz descendants about DNA testing lately, prompted by the company's $99 sale on Family Finder (autosomal) tests. Some ordered kits immediately. No one said "no." Most are either ignoring me or thinking about it. The sale lasts until 25 July.

A couple of months ago, I wrote about redoing my office. Here are some photos of the more-or-less finished product.













Jewish law requires leaving an unplastered piece of wall
as a rembrance of the Temple in Jerusalem.
I have incorporated twelve illustrations from an old Passover Haggaddah
so that the redemption of old will remind us of the redemption to come.

Curse you, Blogger, for not leaving these images where I put them!



EINSTEIN, ROTHSCHILD, BUZAGLO, MALMILIAN, PICKHOLZ

(or Names I Never Thought I'd Be Writing About in This Blog)

I suppose every language has a few surnames which become part of the local idiom, occasionally as a verb but usually as a noun or an adjective. Sometimes the name comes from a specific person, sometimes a family.

Einstein, for instance, is a synonym for "genius" and there is no need to explain why. Sometimes that would be used in a straight-forward sense, but often it's sarcastic, as in "Way to go, Einstein," which probably appears in some English-language literature, as well.


Rothschild, of course, refers to the banking family and means "filthy rich." "What am I, Rothschild?" is the Hebrew equivalent of "You think I am made of money?"

Both Einstein and Rothschild are easily understandable to a non-Israeli - even a non-Jew. No so Buzaglo and Malmilian.


Aharon Barak condescending


   Thirty-odd years ago, the State Prosecutor (and eventual Supreme Court President) Aharon Barak, was handling the high-profile case of Asher Yadlin, the candidate for Governor of the Bank of Israel, who had been caught in a financial scandal involving the ruling Labour Party. In making the point that the elites would not enjoy any favoritism that would place them above the hoi polloi, Barak said "The law for Yadlin is the law for Buzaglo," using a surname typical of Morroccan Jews.

Although the "Buzaglo principle" has undergone a few iterations over the years, the name remains the archtype for a regular guy who should have no aspirations to anything exceptional. (I always found the use of Buzaglo in that sense to be remarkably condescending, even before Barak became openly condescending to everyone. But that's me.)

Uri Malmilian played soccer for Betar Jerusalem years ago and later served as their coach. The team was good back then and Malmilian was much beloved, particularly among the Buzaglos of the Mahane Yehudah market.

I am not well-informed either about soccer nor about the goings-on in the Mahane Yehudah market, but my wife's son informs me that "Malmilian" means "very good quality" - as in "Every watermelon we have is a real Malmilian."

And then there is Pickholz.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at the National Library, where I do an occasional stint as a volunteer genealogy consultant for a program they are trying to put together. While I was there, Mrs. Elona Avinezer, the Head of the Judaica Reading Room at the National Library, showed me a website called JPress, which I had seen before, but never really worked with. JPress - or more properly Historical Jewish Press -  has interfaces in Hebrew, English and French. They have search capabilities for many Jewish newspapers in Israel and abroad, going back to the 1800s.

So I went to the Hebrew papers and looked up Pikholz. Among the results were three - from 1920, 1954 and 1960 - which used an expression which I had heard before but not for many years.

שוטה בן פיקהולץ

Literally that would be "Fool, son of Pickholz" but of course "son of" is not meant literally.



The search that produced the three references to "Shoteh ben Pickholz"


The 1920 reference is a cartoon in the long-defunct newspaper HaZefira. At the time, the only Pikholz here in the holy land was Dr. Eliezer Pikholz who ran an agricultural school in Petah Tikva (more on him in a few weeks) and it is highly unlikely that he would have been the model for this disparaging term. So my guess is that it was used in Europe. I am thinking that perhaps the trigger was the connotation of wood in the name Pikholz and that "ben Pikholz" meant something like "blockhead." Nothing personal or anything. I think.

Rough translation (assistance from Shira Gvir):

"And you are a fool-son-of-Pickholz, sitting over your notepads, counting and calculating your meagre profits. Isn't it better to see what is happening outside: everyone is grabbing the Persian oil debentures at an expensive bargain.  Getting rich in a world becoming upside-down and you, fool-son-of-Pickholz...

Oh, they will beat you!"

 In the note the man is holding, it says "4% [something] premium loan"

The second piece was in the Socialist paper Davar in 1960. It was a story about a gentle man named R' Tuvia who raised pigeons. When people would ask "what kind of way is that for a Jew to make a living?" He would say "Shoteh ben Pickholz, of course it's a proper way for a Jew to make a living."

The third reference is from a 1954 piece, also in Davar - perhaps a financial opinion column presented as a story. Two friends - Archi and Parchi (which would be like calling them Hoi and Polloi in English) - are  debating whether discovery of oil in Israel, as predicted by an American "expert," would be good for the country. At some point, Parchi calls Archi "Shoteh ben Pickholz." Everyone seemed to know what he meant.

"Blockhead" seems about right to me. But at least one Pickholz will tell you that he thinks Pickholz means "lumberjack" and the expression reflects a stereotype of a lumberjack as a person who is not very bright.