ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 2484 http://www.s-gabriel.org/2484 ************************************ 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 was an appropriate name for this time and place. If was not appropriate for your period, you asked if we could suggest a similar- sounding name used by Jewish women in Cordoba. 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 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 , 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. 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 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 , 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 who was the daughter of would typically have been known as "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 ______________________________________ [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.