African-American culture gives appreciation for Jewish names, language and dress

What’s a good way to get in the mood for Pesach?

I have three suggestions. Consider:

“Ice-T.”

“Corn rows.”

And “Ain’t.”

Those three are, of course, prominent features of current African-American culture.

Ice-T is the non de plume of Tracy Lauren Marrow, a popular rap-hip hop music artist and actor of TV and music fame. Corn rows are the hair style of three-strand braids, based on many African cultures, which became a growing trend in this country a half century ago, during the Black Pride movement, and are increasingly a fashion-and-grooming statement among many Black men and women. And “ain’t,” frowned upon by users of standard cited– aka “White English” — as ungrammatical, is a frequently used part of what has come to be termed Ebonics (aka “Black English”), the vernacular dialect of many African-Americans.

What do the three have to do with the Jewish Festival of Freedom?

They can serve as a reminder of how two different peoples have had to recreate and rebuild their cultures in their individual diasporas. They demonstrate how disparate groups, ripped from their physical and spiritual roots, address the challenge of self-sustaining in different ways. And they show by comparison the inherent difficulties that the Jewish community has been able to overcome – a success that we celebrate at the seder each year.

Passover, the most-popular holiday on the Jewish calendar, reminds us of how, in an expression attributed to our sages, our ancestors merited to be delivered from slavery in Egypt.

And it reminds us of various ways that different communities deal with freedom in what is, fundamentally, unfamiliar surroundings.

The well-known adage that “We were led out of Egypt because we kept three things intact: our name, our clothing, and our language” is a distillation of a few different midrashic declarations (notably from Vayikra Rabba, and Pesikya Zutrata) that use similar, but not identical language, and put forward similar, but not identical, traits of admirable Israelite strength. These midrashim were combined in the ethical will of the 18^th-19^th century Chatam Sofer scholar, who lauded the importance of distinctive clothing, language and names for survival in an age of creeping assimilation.

Scholarly research seems to back up this midrashic assertion. ” Evidence from surviving textual sources confirms that Jewish names (including names such as Solomon, Aaron, Abraham, and Samuel) proliferated throughout Egypt,” according to an article about Jews in ancient Egypt that appeared in BYU Studies Quarterly.

Since the 1800s, this trio of Jewish behaviors has come to be accepted by many Jews, and cited by rabbis at this time of year, as the reason why the Israelite slaves in Egypt, immersed in the country’s paganistic culture, and inordinately influenced by its idolatrous practices — descending to the 49^th (of 50) level of spiritual impurity — were deemed worthy to be redeemed. And why Jews today need to maintain these three aspects of (largely secular) identity.

In other words, according to the accepted thinking on this subject, although the slaves did not lead ostensibly religious Jewish lives (did not abide by the principles of the Patriarchs in a pre-Matan Torah era; e.g. they did not circumcise their sons), they remembered that they were Jews. They declared that fact daily in the way the they named themselves, in the way they dressed themselves, and in the way they spoke to each other. By hanging onto uniquely Jewish names, they eschewed names that often expressed “devotion to a particular god” (according to Ancient Egypt Online.)

Those Jewish acts were visible and audible statements of their identity. Statements of pride in their own culture that African-Americans, in their own way, publicly and unapologetically make. Statements that are often puzzling to many members of the dominant Caucasian culture.

We hear names like 50 Cent (nee Curtis James Jackson III), Snoop Dogg (Cordozar Calvin Broadus Jr.), or Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Sr.). ”These are names?” we, as outsiders to African-American culture, often think. We sneer condescendingly.

We belittle at our own risk, unaware of our own history, and of the invented names’ cultural symbolism and importance.

The discarded old names are viewed as “slave names”—the last names, given and registered at a slave’s birth, were passed down through the generations from that of a slave owner who originally “owned” the Africans whence the current generations are descended. Those names, assigned by most – but not all slave owners — were far removed from those that the Africans who were brought to a land of slavery from present-day Angola, Cameroon and Nigeria had borne.

“Enslaved people remained legally nameless from the time of their capture until their purchase by American enslavers,” according to the ncpedia.org website. “Many enslaved people were allowed to keep their original African names or names assigned them elsewhere (as reflected by the frequency of Spanish and Portuguese names among the first generation of enslaved people in the Carolinas.) Throughout the colonial period, as many as one-fifth of the enslaved people in North Carolina retained African names; Quash, Cuffee, Mingo, Sambo, Mustapha, and Sukey were among the most common recorded.”

The fact that the Israelite slaves in Egypt were reportedly able to keep their Jewish names – i.e., not take or accept Egyptian ones – makes that feat even more remarkable. And it makes the determination of a minority in a majority-White society to determine how they choose to name themselves even more relatable to us.

In recent decades, some African-Americans, in a return-to-roots action, have made an effort to incorporate for themselves names with roots in African languages, names with clear religious or geographical meanings.

But the meaning, or symbolism, of other self-assigned names – DMX, or Q-Tip, for example –are not always clear to, or understood by, outsiders to the African-American community.

Maybe that’s the point. It’s their culture.

What the new names mean does not matter as much as who is choosing the names – the bearers themselves. Because they are free to do it.

These are names that we may not choose. We may not understand the statements that the names make. But we can appreciate that they are a reflection of the individual’s right to choose his (or her) own name.

Can we blame contemporary African-Americans – descended from literal African-Americans – from shedding the names that serve as reminders of servitude?

Besides Moses (Moshe in Hebrew), who was named mishitihu (“I drew him” from the water) by Pharaoh’s heroic daughter, who rescued the Hebrew infant in a basket floating on the Nile, how many of us would want to carry names with connotations of our years as slaves in ancient Egypt?

Hence, we often prefer biblical first names.

And consider the familiar last names that many of us carry, names like Goldberg or Applebaum or Lieberman …

These are common German surnames, originally bestowed on or claimed by the people who owned these monikers as a reflection of a facet of their character or surroundings or livelihood. Typical in many parts of Europe, most Jews did not get surnames until the early 19^th century; in some countries, that took place earlier. At some point they were ordered, by the government authorities, to do it for tax purposes; sometimes a government official simply assigned a name.

For Jews, no more simply Ploni ben (or bas) Ploni – the Hebrew equivalent of John Doe; i.e. son, or daughter, of someone. Although some Jews in German-speaking countries returned to “son of” names, like Mendelsohn or Schneersohn.

Similarly, among Jews from Slavic-speaking lands, Rabinowitz or Rabinovich means “rabbi’s son.”

This was largely an Ashkenazic phenomenon; among Sephardim, hereditary surnames date back to the 1500s.

The goal of the newly adopted names was authenticity and familiarity, a name to be readily understood and accepted. Names like Roth (red, usually for one’s hair color), Schreiber (writer, one’s profession), Eisenberg (iron mountain, where one lived), or Klein (small, describing the head of the household). Sensible names, which no one in the Jewish community would question nowadays.

A disproportionate number of Jews, no matter their families’ place of origin, have German last names, because many Jews a few centuries lived in places where German or Germanic Yiddish were common.

These Jews a few centuries ago had control over their identities.

As do African-Americans in the 21^st century USA.

Are the names taken on by African-Americans who wish to shed their families’ slavery past any less authentic?

Or Native American names? Think, “Dances with Wolves.”

Don’t we accept a name like those?

Countless Black people in this country, largely descended from residents of west African who came to these shores as chattel against their wills, beginning five centuries ago, have no direct connection with most aspects of the lives that defined their forebears’ existence – their religions, their professions, their culture, their ways of life. And yes, their names, their dress, their languages.

At best, they can revive the spirit of their traditions in small, symbolic, very personal ways.

Corn rows?

They are an assertion of a man or woman’s dress code.

The dress patterns in Africa were too varied to reintroduce here in a single, inexpensive style. But hair braids, authentically African in many regions of the continent, are an accessible way to assert one’s African heritage.

As slaves, Blacks in the United States had little control over their lives. Within reason, they could dress – or comb their hair – as they wished. This level of autonomy has carried onto the slaves’ descendants.

And “ain’t”?

A common contraction of negation, it’s the most-noticeable – and arguably most-controversial – aspect of a widely-used African-American argot. Indicative of a larger language pattern it’s not, some linguists assert, ungrammatical or poorly spoken English, but a legitimate speech patois recognized and practiced in many Black circles in this country. It’s not “sloppy English.” It’s a way to assert and preserve the speaker’s ethnic identity, and establish an in-group bond. It’s a means, for people cut off from the African languages the speakers’ forbears spoke when they were brought to this country in chains, to assert one’s linguistic distinctiveness. Albeit by doing it in a form of English, not by returning to a lost proficiency in Swahili or Wolof or Yoruba.

(Ain’t, by the way, isn’t always looked down on as unacceptable. What about “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”? )

African-Americans are reclaiming a lost part of their families’ and wider communities’ cultures.

We should respect this.

We have not had to do this; a continuity with the generations who lived, as Jews, millennia ago, has not been lost. We remind ourselves of this at our seders each year.

We have a direct connection to Sinai – any man called to the Torah (I habituate Orthodox synagogues, where an aliyah continues to be a male domain) with a Hebrew name that concludes with the designation haCohen or haLevi can trace his lineage back to someone from the tribe of priests who accepted the Torah.

3,300 years ago.

How many Black people in this country can cite such an ongoing slice of oral history, let alone a written record, of his or her family that predates the antebellum South – in other words, a connection with men or women who grew up in Africa and were forced to become part of the frequently fatal Middle Passage to the land that became the USA?

Slavery robbed countless African-Americans of the African part of their past that came before the American part.

We, who came out of slavery and weathered centuries of exile and persecution, have managed to hang onto crucial, defining parts of our tradition.

We know who we are and who we were.

Which is one of the themes of the seder.

The attempts by many African-Americans to assert their historical and sociological distinctiveness remind us of this, of our good fortune.

As Jews, we should be grateful, more than many other peoples – after millennia of dispersal and discrimination and attempts to extinguish our culture – that we have not lost contact with what keeps us Jewish. Such expressions of Yiddishkeit as how we dress, how we name ourselves, and how we speak. We don’t have to reinvent or restore our traditions, re-establish or re-assert them in a foreign milieu, as other groups have had to do.

Next week, when I sit down at my seder, I will keep in mind that I have a Jewish name – Zerach. I will keep in mind that I will read the Haggadah in a Jewish language – Hebrew. I will keep in mind that I will be dressed as a Jew – with a kipa on my head.

I will keep in mind the freedom that made all these acts possible.

That’s how I get in the mood for Pesach.