SephardicGen  – www.SephardicGen.com – is a large website dedicated to providing the Sephardic genealogist with the tools and information needed to uncover Sephardic family histories. In an effort to remedy the absence of a Sephardic presence within JewishGen, a subset of the site’s early pages was donated to JewishGen <www.JewishGen.org> to form its Sephardic SIG in 2000, but today’s SephardicGen is a much larger and different site than the pages of those early days and bears little resemblance to what it was at the time.

The current website, begun in 1998, is non-commercial and has regularly expanded its offerings through the years, most recently with the addition of several important large databases contributed by Mathilde Tagger of Jerusalem.¹ Because of the site’s size, it is easy to become lost in its many pages and miss some of its resources, hence the impetus for this article. Below I describe the website and its many sections, but focus primarily on the searchable databases because they are the most recent additions.

Navigation Tools

The SephardicGen homepage has two columns of links that allow a visitor to access the major sections of the website. On the top left of each page following the site’s first page is a yellow navigation bar. The bar holds links from the home page, through the various sections which would hierarchically have brought the visitor to the currently viewed page. By clicking on the links on this navigation bar one can step back to the home page where one finds the links to SephardicGen’s main sections. At the bottom of each page is another yellow navigation section with links to the main sections of SephardicGen to further assist in navigation and avoid getting lost. Following are some of the site’s main sections.

Sephardic History

Good genealogical research requires an understanding of the history and geography of the area searched. In the SephardicGen history section are articles on the history of Sephardic Jews and how they first came to Spain, conditions of life for Jews and Christians in the Moslem world, maps of Iberia² through its various historical phases, lesser- known facts about how the relative populations of Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews changed over the centuries and a variety of other similar topics.

This section also has links to articles about the history of Sephardic Jews elsewhere on the web including such historical documents as contemporary writings by Jews at the time of the 1492 expulsion, the Pact of Omar that until very recently governed the life of Jews and Christians in Moslem lands and which is still invoked today by Islamist Sharia³ states intent on bringing it back into effect.

Sephardic Genealogy

This section offers articles for the novice on how to get started in Sephardic genealogy, describes similarities and differences between Sephardic and Ashkenazic genealogy tools and resources, discusses the history of the evolution of Sephardic names, and provides the etymology of a sample of common Sephardic surnames, locations of inquisition archives, chromosome studies and the like. Links to other general Sephardic sites of interest around the world, articles on Ladino, Haketia and other Jewish languages may be found here as well.

Websites by Country

Separate pages for various countries and groups comprise another section, including pages for the Caribbean, Crypto-Jews and Anusim, Egypt, France, Greece, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, North Africa, Portugal, South America, Spain and Turkey, among many others. On each such country page are links to additional websites which are grouped by their genealogical content or general Sephardic background interest for that region.

Databases

Here are links to numerous databases of Sephardic interest, many recently contributed by Tagger. Of particular interest are:

• The Sephardic Gazetteer where one can search for the various localities where Sephardic communities existed, including alternate names, provinces and countries, geographic coordinates (longitude and latitude) and links to maps of these locations. Places as diverse as Antigua and Bosnia to Austria and Greece are included. Only locations where Sephardic Jews actually lived are part of the database.
• The Consolidated Index of Sephardic Surnames (CISS). This new searchable database includes names culled from the many other databases found on the site. The CISS is an index of indexes with close to 50,000 names. It will soon expand considerably as more names from databases and lists are added. The result of a search for a surname in the CISS provides a results page identifying all the locations where that name or individual is mentioned and provides direct links to the actual databases from which much additional information can be found about those individuals.
• Numerous other databases grouped by country or by topic (World War II deportees for example). A current list of the databases can be found at <www.SephardicGen. com/databases/databases.html>. Of particular interest and

published for the first time anywhere is a searchable database of 3,000 names and information extracted from Galante’s nine-volume work on the Jews of Turkey⁴ and the 1,200 names and data from Nehama’s seven-volume History of the Israelites of Salonika.⁵ Also notable are the more than 1,000 names extracted from Maurice Fargeon’s book on the Jews of Egypt,⁶ a yearbook of Jews of Egypt from 1942–43,⁷ and Aure Recannati’s book on 1943 Nazi documents⁸ covering 13,500 Salonikan Jews and several lists of Sephardic Jews deported from France during World War II and lists of rabbis. Genealogists owe a great debt of gratitude to Mathilde Tagger of Jerusalem for these extensive databases.

Many Sephardim grew up in francophone homes and many are still more comfortable speaking French than English. To accommodate these researchers, the SephardicGen website also provides French versions of the database section’s main page and its various search engines. The French versions can be accessed either through a link on the English database page or directly at <www.Sephardicgen. com/databases/databasesFR.html>.

• Offsite databases. Because the purpose of SephardicGen is to provide assistance from wherever it may be found, the database page also provides links to important offsite databases, such as Daniel Kazez’s searchable database of Istanbul’s rabbinical records, French government archives, family trees in the Jewish National University Library,⁹ Israel Genealogy Society databases, and JewishGen’s Family Tree of the Jewish People and JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry which also contain some Sephardic names.
• Sephardic name lists extracted from various sources both onsite and offsite. Surnames from the five major onomastic books of surnames from North Africa can be searched in the new “Jewish Surnames from North Africa” SephardicGen database which includes 12,000 surnames. A similar database of surnames from the Ottoman Empire is in preparation.

Each SephardicGen database has an associated search engine that permits the rapid location of a name or individual of interest. Because Sephardic surnames may be spelled in various ways, the search engine permits searching by exact spelling, partial spelling, endings or soundex. A number of Sephardic surnames are compound names made up of two or more words: Cohen-Scali or Ben Susan for example. Therefore, it often is best to search for Sephardic surnames using the “contains” search option. In this fashion, searching for “contains” Cohen will find both the many Cohen names and the Cohen double names. Similarly searching for “contains” Susan will find both the Ben Susan and the Susan families.

Sephardic Surnames

Because many Sephardic surnames are so ancient, they are an extremely important and useful tool in Sephardic genealogy. They permit the tracing of family trees back many centuries. For instance, the author has found numerous mentions of individuals and families bearing the Malka surname in notarial records of the kingdom of Aragon from as early as the 1200s to as late as 1491, a year before the 1492 Spanish Edict of Expulsion and was even able to follow their move to Majorca after Aragon conquered it from the Moors. The section on Sephardic surnames includes articles on the evolution of Sephardic names and their etymologies. Here one learns to distinguish between surnames of converso families (Rodriguez, Henriquez, Nunez, etc.)— many adopted from contemporary Christian surnames—and those of Jewish families that never converted (Alhadeff, Cohen, Hakim, Malka and others)—the latter usually of Hebrew, Arabic or Aramaic etymologies or based on towns of origin (Toledano and similar). Most important are explanations of the known documented variants of Jewish names found in pre-expulsion Iberian records.

Other Sections of Interest

The SephardicGen section on archives covers the major repositories of interest to the Sephardic genealogist, but the bibliography section is not part of the archives section. It is its own separate section labeled “Bibliography” that also includes several additional donated bibliographies of articles on Sephardic topics and of books on Sephardic cemeteries.

The section on Sephardic Family Trees is of particular interest, because it provides links to the major websites of Sephardic families that contain genealogical information of value. Most are to specific family websites, but one link takes the visitor to Alain Farhi’s “Fleurs de l’Orient” superb website with its 70,000 searchable individuals. Other sites can be equally valuable when they contain references to the searcher’s particular family. The “Sephardic Family Trees” section can provide a major head start to the budding genealogist and would be the logical first place to search—with the usual cautions about not blindly accepting undocumented family trees on the web.

A section of the website provides free forms for genealogy use, a section of links to the various Internet newslists of interest to a Sephardic genealogist and even a section with tools to convert dates not only between the common Gregorian calendar and the Jewish calendar, but also from various Muslim and other esoteric calendars that the Sephardic genealogist will inevitably encounter along the way.

Notes

1. Mathilde Tagger is the 2007 IAJGS award recipient and coauthor of Guidebook for Sephardic and Oriental Genealogical Sources in Israel, Avotaynu 2006.
2. Even in 1492, the date of the Expulsion Edict, there was no such country as Spain. Spain was then a series of countries with separate rulers, separate languages, separate parliament systems and even borders with immigration controls. Though Isabel of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon were married and their states allied, when Isabel died, Ferdinand was asked to leave Castile and go back to his Aragon—which he promptly did. The New World colonies and their riches did not belong to “Spain;” they belonged to Catherine’s Crown of Castile and not to the Crown of Aragon.
3. Sharia is Islamic religious law.
4. Galante, Abraham. Histoire des Juifs de Turquie. (History of the Jews of Turkey). Istanbul, Isis, 1940. 9 v. (French)
5. Nehama J. Histoire des Israelites de Salonique. (History of the Israelites of Salonika). Thessaloniki: 1936–78. 7 v. (French).
6. Fargeon, Maurice. Les Juifs d’Egypte des origines a nos jours. (The Jews of Egypt from its origins until today). Cairo, 1938. 321p. (French)
7. Annuaire des Juifs d’Egypte 1942 & 1943.
8. Recanati, Aure. The Jewish Community of Salonika-1943. Jerusalem, 2000. Recanati garnered the information from 1943 documents that the Salonikan Jews filled out for the Nazis about their personal possessions.
9. Jewish National University Library in Jerusalem.

Jeffrey Malka is the author of Sephardic Genealogy: Discovering your Sephardic Ancestors and Their World (Avotaynu, 2002). Descended from a Sephardic rabbinic family, Malka is one of the pioneers of Sephardic genealogy and has been an invited lecturer at the Library of Congress, IAJGS annual conferences, Washington Jewish Historical Society and numerous Jewish Genealogy Societies in the U.S., Canada, Israel and Spain.

Avotaynu 2007; 23(4):10-12
DOI: 10.17228/AVOT20070410
Copyright © 2008 Avotaynu, Inc.