Little attention was dedicated so far to the research of female given names of the Jews in the Levant. The most recent dictionary by the late Mathilde A. Tagger[1] deals mainly with Sephardic given names and barely touches the given names of the Mizrahi Jews[2]. The present paper is based on a list of given names of Baghdadi females compiled from a recent discussion on the very active Hebrew Facebook group called (in translation) “Preserving the Iraqi Language” [3]. The group was established in 2014 and last October celebrated reaching 50,000 members. Most of its members are children of immigrants from Iraq and only a small fraction is composed of those who were born in Iraq (either came to Israel as children in the great exodus of 1951 or managed to escape from there in the early 1970s).

Most of the posts to the group deal with folklore, exchange of recipes and meaning of words and expressions used back mainly in Baghdad. On October 15^th,2017 a member posted a request to write down given names of Iraqi Jews. The response was quick and overwhelming.  Members posted names of relatives they remember. It is clear that they remember given names of parents, grandparents and relatives, most of whom were  born after WW1 and most of them are not alive anymore. The most striking phenomenon is the presence of European given names, something which is absent in the Baghdad Chevra Kadisha(Burial Society) donations registrar of 1929 and other documents of the Jewish community from around that decade and which were recovered in Baghdad after the American invasion of 2003[4]

It seems that during the 1930-1950s the Jewish community experienced opening towards European educational systems both British and French (through the Alliance schools) and Jewish youth adopted European given names, something which was rare earlier. However, most of the given names are Arabic and only few are Hebrew/Biblical. It should be emphasized that it is not a complete list, it is rather fragmental and relates to basically to the second quarter of the 20^th century and based what members of the Facebook group remember. It is part of a wider project which aims to index and explore the given names of Baghdadi males and females from the midst of the 19^th century until the demise of the Jewish community there in the 1970. The transliteration into Latin characters is not according to academic rules but tries to reflect the way they were pronounced.

Catalog of Female Baghdadi Given Names (as of December 2017)

Notes

[1] Tagger, Mathilde A., Dictionary of Sepharadic Given Names, New Haven (2015)

[2] By Mizrahi(Oriental) we mean Jewish communities in Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan and partially in Ottoman Palestine which differ from the Sephardic Jews of North Africa and the Mediterranean Basin.

[3] https://www.facebook.com/groups/zahavb/

[4] https://www.ija.archives.gov/IraqiJewishArchive