ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 2484
http://www.s-gabriel.org/2484
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16 Apr 2002
From: Raquel Buenaventura 

Greetings from the Academy of St. Gabriel!

You wrote to us asking for advice in selecting a name for a Jewish 
woman living in the city of Cordoba between 700 and 1100 C.E.  You 
were interested in learning whether <Catalina de Cordoba> was an 
appropriate name for this time and place.  If <Catalina> was not 
appropriate for your period, you asked if we could suggest a similar- 
sounding name used by Jewish women in Cordoba. 

<Catalina> does not appear to have been in common use in Spain before 
the fifteenth century, although by the sixteenth century it had 
become extremely commonly used.  We have no evidence for it having 
been used at any time during the period you are interested in.  The 
earliest use of a related name that we can find is <Cathalana> which 
we can date to 1200 in Northern Spain [1].  This is the very end of 
your period, and we don't have evidence of it having been used in 
Cordoba or by Jewish women.  Therefore, we do not recommend that you 
use it unless you choose to shift your persona to Christian Spain in 
the 15th or 16th century.

Jewish women in Arabic-speaking communities primarily used Arabic
names.  We believe this was also the case in the Jewish community of
ninth century Cordoba.  The following lists are names we know to have
been used by Jewish women in Arabic-speaking communities around the
time you're interested in.  We've selected names beginning with the
same sound as <Catalina>, and a couple which sound somewhat similar in
other ways.  If you would like a wider selection, please write again.
The names in the list below were used by Jewish women in Egypt [2].
The <'> notation represents a glottal stop.  This is the sound between
the two syllables in "uh-uh".

Karima 
Kassah 
Khafar 
Khalifa 
Khazariyya 
Khiba' 
Khulla 
Kifa' 
Kufu 
Kitman
 
The names in the next list were used by Arabic-speaking Jewish women 
in Sicily.  Sicily was ruled by Arabs until the late 11th century and 
retained a substantial Arabic-speaking population for some time 
afterward [3].  All these names are Arabic.  The first two were 
recorded in Arabic- or Hebrew-language sources, while the rest 
appeared in Latin documents and so have been Latinized to some 
degree. 

Qabiila (c. 1060) 
Khalila (c. 1045) 

Actaluna (1299) 
Cabile (1298) (cf. <Qab{i-}la> above) 
Charufa (1287), Carufa (1298), Charufa (1299) (3 women) 
Chasuna (1298) 
Chavecia (1298) 

We believe that these names could also have been used in the Jewish 
community of Cordoba in the later part of your period.  Without more 
data on actual names being used in that community we can't say for 
sure, but we think that one of these would be a reasonable recreation 
for the place and culture you're interested in. 

It is possible that a Jewish woman living in Cordoba during this time 
might have used a locative byname, however <de Cordoba> is 
inappropriate for the following reasons: first, a Spanish locative 
name would not have been used in an Arabic-speaking community, and 
secondly, a byname meaning 'of Cordoba' would probably not have been 
used by a woman who was living in Cordoba.  If such a byname was used, 
it would have been in Arabic, in which 'woman from Cordoba' would be 
<al-Quturbiya>, but we would not recommend this as your best choice.
 
In both Muslim and Jewish cultures, a woman was usually identified as 
her father's daughter.  In Arabic, a woman named <Kitman> who was the 
daughter of <Yusef ibn Sulemin> would typically have been known as 
<Kitman bint Yusef> "Kitman daughter of Yusef".
 
I hope that this letter has been helpful.  Please do not hesitate to 
write again if any part of it was unclear, or if you have other 
questions.  I was assisted in researching and writing this letter by 
Catriona inghean ui Bhraonain, Pedro de Alcazar, Juliana de Luna, 
Julie Stampnitzky, Talan Gwynek, Arval Benicoeur and Aryanhwy merch 
Catmael.
 
For the Academy, 

Raquel Buenaventura 
April 15, 2002

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[1] Menedez-Pidal, Ramon, _Crestomati'a del Espan~ol Medieval_ 
(Madrid: 1971) 

[2] Juliana de Luna, "Jewish Women's Names in an Arab Context: Names 
from the Geniza of Cairo", (SCA: KWHS Proceedings, 2001) 

[3] Simonsohn, Shlomo.  The Jews in Sicily (Vol. 1: 383-1300). Leiden, 
New York, and Ko"ln: Brill, 1997.