Dietz Bering. Der Name als Stigma: Antisemitismus im deutschen AlItag, 1812-1933. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1988. 567 pages.
Just as I was about to begin sixth grade in 1948, I was told that Judy Yankowitz was no longer Judy Yankowitz. She was Judy Young. This came as a shock to me, and I was puzzled. Something was wrong. When I asked my parents why Judy had made this change, I learned that it was not Judy who had asked to have her name changed, but her father. He was a lawyer, my own father told me, and he did not want to be tagged as Jewish. It was not good for his business, and he wanted to be accepted by the gentiles.
From that point on, I felt shame and anger-shame for Judy and her family, who were trying to deny being Jewish, and anger at the gentile world for making people feel ashamed of being Jewish. But, even stronger than those feelings of shame and anger, I felt stamped myself. From then on, I looked at my name as a mark of my Jewishness. Though proud of my name, I began to feel anxious that gentiles, whoever they were, could take advantage of me if they knew what my name meant. Even though my last name Zipes is not typically Jewish, and even though my parents, first-generation Jews, had taken great care to give me the first name Jack instead of Jacob as a step toward greater possible assimilation, I associated my full name with my Jewishness. And I was not the only one.
Given the fact that Zipes is not a "common" name-that is, not easily identifiable in America as a good white Anglo-Saxon namepeople have always asked me the origin of my name; and more often than not, the person asking the question has not always been merely curious. Implicitly many people have wanted to know whether I was Jewish, and if not Jewish, whether I was a "true" or "pure" American. In short, I have generally been asked the question to mark myself; and ever since the Yankowitz affair and other personal antisernitic experiences, I have been reluctant to give my name away, to give myself away, to define myself in ways that might stigmatize me. I am suspicious of those who ask me what my name means. I have felt and feel that, through my name, they want to get a hold of me, peg me, place me in a particular category that has nothing to do with who I am and what I believe.
Intuitively I have always associated the personal questions about my name with a larger social aspect of antisernitism without being able intellectually to substantiate my feelings. Dietz Bering's formidable study has provided a basis for explaining why I have felt shame, anger, and anxiety over the years of questioning about my name. Although Bering's book focuses on how the naming of Jews contributed to widespread daily antisemitism in Germany from 1812 to 1933, his findings have ramifications that go well beyond German antisemitism and can contribute to our understanding of how names have been used and continue to be used in antisernitic ways throughout Western culture. In fact, he makes a major statement about the "banality of evil,"1 or how apparently trivial aspects of daily life are momentous in establishing customary attitudes, perceptions, and behavior toward minority groups and can be disastrous for the people subjected to those attitudes, perceptions, and behavior. I shall return to this point, but first I want to give a detailed account of Bering's book to demonstrate its far-reaching implications.
Bering begins his study by recalling an incident that happened in the Reichstag building in Berlin on 12 May 1932. Four members of the Nazi Party attacked and beat Dr. Otto Klotz, a member of the Social Democratic Party, because in a brochure he had exposed the homosexual tendencies of the SA leader Ernst Rohm. The police who arrived were led by the Deputy Chief of the Berlin police, Bernhard Weiss, who was known to be Jewish. As soon as he made his appearance in front of the entire assembly, the Nazi representatives began to yell, "Isidor! Isidor!" The police responded immediately by climbing over the balustrades to silence them. During the melee, Joseph Goebbels, a Nazi deputy at that time, yelled out, "There comes that Jewish pig Weiss in here and provokes us with his presence!"
Bering asks why the name "Isidor" was a signal for the police to attack the Nazi representatives. After all, the name does not derive from Hebrew tradition but from the Greek and means "Gift of Isis." Of course, nobody knew the origin of the name at that time. What they did know was that many Jews had this name. For gentiles, it had come to represent a pejorative stereotype of a Jew and was thus a derogatory, antisernitic word, particularly when used against someone whose real name was something else. Therefore, it was only natural for the Nazis to use "Isidor" to mark Weiss, and it was only natural for the police to understand that the use of "Isidor" was a slur against their deputy chief. Moreover, this notorious case was not exceptional. It was common to find antisernitic name-calling and jokes that made fun of the name Isidor throughout Germany during the Weimar period (and, of course, before this). Why? What had happened in the course of German history that had made antisernitic name-calling second nature and acceptable among the populace?
To answer the questions he poses in his introduction, Bering presents the results of his research that took him six years to accumulate and assess while he worked in archives in Berlin, London, Vienna, Potsdam, Diisseldorf, and Merseburg. His book is divided into a historical part, which recounts the legal usage of names and the laws to change names in relation to the emancipation of Jews and their treatment in Germany, and a systematic part, which analyzes empirical data in light of sociolinguistic and psychological theories.
In his historical section, Bering begins with the important date of 11 March 1812, when the Prussian edict of emancipation of Jews declared them citizens but compelled them to do away with the traditional genealogical system of bestowing names according to the father's first name. For instance, Moses ben Mendel (Moses the son of Mendel) or Philip ben Aron (Philip the son of Aron) had to be changed to Mendelsohn and Aronsohn respectively, or other names had to be selected according to Prussian law. Basically Jews became free to choose their own names unless they were already bearing declared family names. Despite protests by the Orthodox Jews, who wanted to maintain traditional Jewish custom, the Jews did not have a choice. They were supposed to assimilate, and they were to assimilate on Prussian terms.
The envisioned equality did not have the unconditional character of an offer. In reality it was a challenge or, indeed, a compulsion to assimilate. In short, it was the pact of assimilation which was often invoked by the government to obligate the despised minority to dissolve itself in the respected majority. Nobody thought about letting the despised minority become a respected one.2
The difficulty with Jewish emancipation for many Germans was that it would prevent Jews from being recognized if they stopped wearing distinctive clothes and beards, spoke in German, and had the same names as Germans. After hundreds of years of associating Jews with the Antichrist and the devil, most Germans were not ready for religious tolerance. The result was that the nineteenth century witnessed a gradual erosion of the freedom given to Jews to choose their own names. The majority of the German population wanted to keep all Jews distinctive, even those who converted or those who simply wanted to assimilate and were possibly agnostic. For instance, as early as 1816, a law was issued that prohibited Jews from changing their names "arbitrarily" and from giving their children Christian baptismal names. The laws that followed up to 1848 kept limiting the choice of Jews so that they were prevented from choosing Christian first names and were compelled to choose from lists of names that were common among Jews. Despite the fact that it was practically impossible to designate exactly what was a Jewish first name or surname, since Jews in the Diaspora had generally assumed names common to their country of residence and had a great variety of first names and surnames, the Germans began arbitrarily to categorize certain names as Jewish. These names were accepted as Jewish names because they helped Germans to mark Jews and to stigmatize them.
Because of such stigmatization, Jews who wanted to be fully assimilated in German society sought to change their names. Bering's study of hundreds of petitions by Jews (and in some cases by Christians) to have their first names or surnames changed to make them less Jewish, anonymous, or assimilated reveals the psychological and social pressures that Jews felt because of being singled out by their names in a discriminatory way. By 1870 with the shift in antisernitism from religious discrimination to racist prejudice, the laws stipulating how and whether Jews could change their names became increasingly stricter. For instance, in 1894 the Minister of the interior issued an order that the desire to escape antisernitic harassment would no longer be accepted as a sufficient reason for Jews to change their names. In 1898 the arbitrary change of Jewish first names was prohibited. In 1900 even the spelling of an apparent Jewish name could not be changed, and the Minister of the Interior was given exclusive authority to decide whether people of the Jewish religion or Jewish ancestry could change their family names. In 1903 the right of Jews to change their names upon conversion to Christianity was also denied.
Of course, after the defeat in World War I, there were reforms during the Weimar period and up to 1933, and Jews were granted greater permission to change their names. However, the damage had already been done. By the turn of the century, the laws issued by the German government, the implementation of those laws by the civil service, and the attitude and behavior of the German people had established a network of discrimination through names that stereotyped and stigmatized Jews and made them into objects of mockery and degradation-the dangerous other, the insidious anti-Christian, the second-class citizen.
Bering's second section contains a thorough and systematic examination of the referential network that led to the stigmatization of Jews by their names. Based on his research of hundreds of cases in which Jews petitioned for new names, Bering demonstrates how family names such as Cohn, Moses, Lev(w)y, Kohn, Schmul,, Itzig, Berliner, Rosenthal or Silberstein became marked as Jewish and how first names such as Isidor, Isaac, Abraham, Moses, Max, Moritz, Jacob, or Samuel became transformed into typical Jewish names. After establishing how Germans used laws and customs to keep Jews, even those who were assimilated and emancipated, in an onomastic ghetto and how numerous Jews sought desperately to break out of this ghetto by attempting to change or by actually changing their names, Bering focuses on the sociopsychological aspect of this historical development:
Even psychological positions that are at opposite ends of the spectrum are in agreement about the function of the name as a constructive point of the personality. The opinion of G. W. Allport, the famous researcher in the area of personality, can be considered as the communis opinio: the name functions as the "most important symbol to provide anchorage for self-identity throughout the life.."3
Whether it be the first name or surname, most specialists in the field of psycholinguistics agree that attacks on those names through systematic stigmatization or isolated slurs are virtually attacks on the person's identity and can have lasting emotional effects. For example, Bering elaborates on his sociolingusitic research to show that the act of giving the name to a baby at birth is momentous and sacred because it implies a reference to some quality, object, or notion in the society. As the child matures and endows his or her name with specific qualities, the society also marks the name with certain attributes according to a specific referential system of communication. It is against the sociocultural referential system and within that system that the person seeks to create an identity with his or her first and family names. The recognition of one's name is thus much more than an acknowledgment of an etiquette: It is a recognition of identity.
Bering summarizes the significant social and ontological meaning of the name in the following way:
It is in the name that the individual saves himself or herself from the danger of being reduced to mere terms or numbers. The individual thus documents a self- interpretation as one of a creature sui generis and attains, protected in this way, its acceptance in the society because this very society accepts the name and the claim made in it for a personal human existence. The goal of the systematic antisernitic marking of names was to thwart all of this.4
The fact that the names had become terms in and of themselves made the daily antisernitic attacks on Jews through name-calling so effective in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-and this namecalling furnished the Nazis with a powerful arsenal. In other words, as Bering notes ,5 you can call someone whose name is Franz Muller a "Judas" or "Quisling," but he will remain Franz Muller, who keeps his identity intact. However, in Germany an "Isidor" or a "Cohen" assumed a social meaning or negative attribute that robbed the Jewish person of his or her identity. In other words, the Jewish names were transformed into concepts in and of themselves and prevented the persons bearing those names from establishing their own identities. The logical consequences of this development were the Nazi laws of 1938 and 1939 that revoked all changes that Jews had made in their names and forced all Jewish women to assume the name of "Sara," all Jewish men the name of "Israel."
Bering argues that the basis for annihilating Jewish identity must be linked to the racist ideologies and economic developments of the latter part of the nineteenth century. From 1873 on, the Jews were made into scapegoats for a series of economic collapses, and their worth was tied to the notion of usurper, exploiter, capitalist, dirty money, and so on. Supposedly Jews brought havoc with them and threatened social stability. Furthermore, Jews were ostracized in the army and branded as pacifist or antimilitary because they did not totally conform to the German way of life. Of course, Jews could not conform totally because the Germans did not consider them "born" for authority. If they were not "born Germans," then they were not trusted and were systematically kept out of key positions within the German bureaucracy. Finally, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the word German became more and more the equivalent of Christian; and thus to be a pure German, one also had to be a pure Christian. It was on this basis that even converted Jews were denied petitions to have their names changed at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Bering concludes his analysis as follows:
What options existed for the Jews after the 1870s? If they kept their distinctive names, then many of them had to put up with mockery and could be arbitrarily hauled about as examples for onomastically clear cases of non- assimilation-even if they had in fact incorporated themselves in the society. If they changed their names, then this was considered as proof of the alleged Jewish art of disguise. Driven into a corner in which it was impossible for the Jews to protect themselves from attack, it was certainly correct for the Jewish minority to choose what most of them actually did: They did not let themselves be onomastically separated from their original group.6
Although Bering does not deal with the majority of those Jews who kept their Jewish names and did not put themselves through the trauma of trying to assimilate through name-changing in a society that basically denied assimilation, his study reveals, nevertheless, the daily antisernitic conditions under which most Jews led their lives and to a certain extent continue to lead their lives-and not only in Germany. Here I would like to address the question of the banality of evil that Bering's book exposes, for his work provides a link to Hannah Arendt's major thesis.
I do not want to rehash the controversy concerned with Arendt's argument that the European Jews could have resisted more than they did and in some ways contributed to their own destruction. In fact, this controversy has clouded the real contribution of her book toward understanding how evil is socially produced and functions in Western societies-namely, in banal actions such as accepting laws and customs as though they were conceived by and legislated by the people as norms. In other words, brutality and savagery are the results of nonthinking individuals who blithely accept and practice what the dominant social groups and governments of a country decree as acceptable social and legal behavior. Therefore, we must look to the most trivial and common social practices to determine how evil is formed. Bering's study clearly demonstrates that the onomastic practices of the non- Jews as the dominant group in Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were banal acts that led to the worst kind of evil imaginable.
Jews were trapped in this "banality of evil." If they sought to become emancipated and to change their names, they became ultimately what jean-Paul Sartre has referred to as unauthentic Jews.7 By trying to deny their Jewishness in changing their names, they only contributed more to antisemitism by making it seem that there was indeed something wrong or evil in having a so-called Jewish name. Of course, the majority who kept their names were also trapped because their names were stigmatized by the gentile German world. Through their names, Jews were given no choice; and in their everyday lives in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they experienced both physically and psychologically the process of reification that turned them into marked objects and enabled the Nazis to carry out their elimination of the Jews without great opposition in the gentile world.
If we consider that opposition to the Nazi discriminatory laws of the 1930s and to their "final solution" was meager both in Germany and outside Germany, then we must ask ourselves what in the conscious and the subconscious of non-Jews might have conditioned them to accept such treatment of Jews as acceptable. Do names play a significant role in the formation of beliefs, ideologies, and stereotypes? Bering's investigation of names as stigmas demonstrates that ever since the Greeks we have believed that to be able to name something gives us power over the person or object that is named and that name-calling has an ideological function in every society. Tragically, even after the Holocaust, Jewish names and the namecalling of Jews continued to function as stigmas, though there is no longer systematic control over what Jews can do with their names. Yet, even with this freedom of choice, whether it be in Germany or America, the stigmatization of Jewish names continues. I remember not only Judy Yankowitz from 1948, but also my former college roommate from 1959, Howie Greenberg, who changed his name to Howard Green. Dieter Bering's research provides us with a better understanding of the manifold and insidious ways that antisernitism can maintain its power through the perpetual marking of Jewish names.
NOTES
1. See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jersalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York, 1963).
2. Bering, Der Name als Stigma, p. 47.
3. Ibid., p. 260 (citing G. W. Allport, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation [New York, 19371, p. 127).
7. See jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and few, trans. George J. Becker (New York, 1948).
