From Ephodi to Ḥazon Ish, the genealogy of names deriving from book titles

• In Event: Jewish name changing throughout the ages

Abstract

The rabbinical tradition that consists in alluding to the name of the author in the title of a book (e.g. Beth Yosef named according to the first name of Rabbi Yosef Caro) had its counterpart in the reverse process by dint of which an author is called according to the title of his most marking book (e.g. Moshe Schreiber named Ḥatam Sofer according to the acronym of the title of his book Ḥidushei Torat Moshe Sofer). This way of deriving the nickname of the author from his most prominent work could be considered symptomatic of the progress of Hebrew printing in the main centers of Jewish traditional culture in early modern and modern times. However, the case of Profyat (Profayt) Duran (ca 1350-ca 1415), the author of Ma‘aśeh ’Efod, a book whose title alludes to the concealed Jewish identity of his forcibly converted author (’Efod = ’ani Profiat Duran “I am Profiat Duran”) and that became the basis of derivation of the pseudonym Efodi “the man of the ’Efod/ the man who wrote Ma‘aśeh ’Efod”, questions the correlation between the diffusion of the Hebrew book at the age of printing and the practice of naming the author according to his book. Indeed, Efodi died one generation before Gutenberg’s invention of printing.

What could have been the trigger that provoked the reversal of the relationship between the author’s name and the book’s title? One of the assumptions I would like to suggest is that this tradition that was initiated in Late Medieval Spain became a wide phenomenon once the center of gravity of Jewish scholarship switched from the Iberian Peninsula to Italy and the Ashkenazi world. What was originally a cryptic way of referring to the real identity of a convert like Profiat Duran, an author who preserved his Jewish identity through the writing of his grammatical magnum opus, became a way to overcome the contingent dimension of Jewish existence, often threatened by the vicissitudes imposed by the growing antijudaic intolerance in early modern Europe.

Author

• Cyril Aslanov, Aix-Marseille Université/ Institut Universitaire de France