In Jewish tradition, personal names can carry deep meaning, often connecting individuals to historical events or religious ideals. One such name – “Chanukah” – shines with the brilliance of the holiday that it honors. In honor of the Festival of Lights, we hope to trace where and when this unusual given name came to grace Jewish families as a personal name. In tracing that story, we will learn a bit about various different Jewish communities that the typical reader may not have encountered before.
Our discussion starts with a brief comment that caught my eye in the work Beis Shmuel on the Laws of Gittin (by Rabbi Shmuel ben Rabbi Uri Shraga Feivish, 17th century). When he lists how to spell various Hebrew feminine names and their associated nicknames for official documents (like gittin), he has an entry on feminine names that start with the letter mem that reads “Miriam, who is also called Chanukah.” I had never heard of the first name Chanukah before, but then I looked in the Beis Shmuel when he discusses feminine names that start with the letter chet, where he again mentions that Chanukah is indeed a woman’s name.
I later found in the work Ohalei Shem, written by Rabbi Shlomo Ganzfried (1804-1886), who also wrote the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, that there was apparently a custom for girls born on Chanukah to be named Chanukah.
But how do we explain the case of the woman named Miriam “who was also called Chanukah?” If her name was Miriam, then why was she also called Chanukah? Chanukah doesn’t quite sound like a nickname or diminutive related to the lady’s given name? I thought there was something fishy going on here, so I wanted to look into this a bit more.
It turns out that the Beis Shmuel was actually citing in very brief the conclusion reached by the Maharchash in one of his responsa. The Maharchash’s full name is Rabbi Chaim ben Shabsai (1557-1647), and he served as the chief rabbi of Salonika in Greece about a century before the Beis Shmuel lived. His responsum deals with the case of a non-Jewish slave girl who was owned by a Jew. As long as she was a slave, she was called Chanukah, but once she was manumitted and gained her freedom, she converted to Judaism and assumed the name “Miriam.” She later married a Jewish man, but when she was getting divorced from him, the question arose as to how her name should be recorded in the get.
In that case, the Maharchash concluded that they should write “Miriam, who is also called Chanukah.” This is because her Jewish name was Miriam, but some people evidently still called her by her old name Chanukah. So it turns out that Chanukah wasn’t a nickname for Miriam, but was rather her previous name from before she became Jewish.
What’s interesting is that if you look closely at the Maharchash’s responsum, there seem to be three different reasons as to why this slave girl’s name was Chanukah: When first outlining the facts related to the question he was asked, the Maharchash records that her original non-Jewish name was Juanacita (or perhaps Janacita) and that she was originally known under that name. Later, as she grew up, people started calling her Chanukah seemingly because that Hebrew name resembles the Spanish name Juanacita quite a bit (remember in Spanish the j-sound is pronounced in a similar way to how we pronounce the Hebrew letter ches).
But then in the same breath, the Maharchash writes that her owners called her Chanukah because they bought her as a slave on the holiday Chanukah. And then later in the middle of the responsum in question, the Maharchash wonders out loud if perhaps they called her Chanukah because she was born on Chanukah.
As an interesting aside that only etymologists like myself could appreciate, the name Juanacita itself sort of has a connection to Chanukah. This is because that name derives from the name Juan/John, which is a Latinization of the Hebrew name Yochanan. Of course, the name Yochanan is closely related to Chanukah because Matisyahu Kohen Gadol’s son was named Yochanan and his father was named Yochanan. But I digress.
Fast forward a few centuries later, and we get to Rabbi Aharon Azriel (1818-1879), who was the rosh yeshiva of Yeshivas Beis El in Jerusalem during the 1870s. Besides for being a well-known Kabbalist (and son-in-law of the Pele Yoetz), Rabbi Azriel also authored a work called Ozen Aharon in which he collected all sorts of lesser-known Torah factoids and halachic rulings. In that work, he discussed a get written for a man named Yehoshua ben Chanukah, and pauses to discuss the divorcer’s name. He finds its wondrous that the man’s father would be named Chanukah, as he had never heard of a man named Chanukah before. Rabbi Azriel points to the aforementioned responsum by the Maharchash to show that the name Chanukah was sometimes used as a feminine name, but finds it bizarre that a man would have that name.
But the truth is that there really is precedent for the use of Chanukah as masculine given name, even if Rabbi Azriel was apparently unaware of such occurrences. Before the Ashkenazi migration to Eastern Europe in the late 1400s, a distinct Jewish community existed in that region, speaking a language known as Knaanic, a Slavic-based Jewish vernacular. These Jews were neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardi, and had unique naming conventions. One such naming practice was the use of the masculine given name Chanukah for boys, which was non-existent in Ashkenaz. This Slavic Jewish community was largely unlearned, and without a strong written tradition they left behind little documentation. This, of course, has made it difficult for historians and linguists to fully understand their customs and language, so not much is known about them and particularly how Knaanic later influenced and was superseded by Yiddish when German-speaking Jews from the West came to Eastern Europe. Either way, Chanukah was not the only uncommon name that this community used; they would also give boys the given name Sinai, which was totally unheard of among Rhenish Ashkenazim, but later became more popular in Austria, Bavaria, and Prague (and can be found particularly among chassidim nowadays).
Moreover, the famous Karaite scholar Avraham Firkovich (1786-1874) published a book called Avnei Zikaron (Vilna, 1872) which documents the history of the Jews of the Crimean Peninsula. In that book, Firkovich claims to be presenting information from earlier records and documents, and in his work, the personal name Chanukah appears several different times: For example, Firkovich claims that a man named Chanukah ben Elazar was said to donate a Torah in the year 1157 to the Jewish community in the Kievian Rus’ town of Tmutarakan. In that book, he also purports to reproduce an 1841 document related to the appointment of Rabbi Eliyahu ben Mishael of Derbent as the leader of the Jewish community in Buynaksk and its surroundings in the modern-day Dagestan (in Russia). The first name Chanukah appears thirteen times among signators to that document (and their fathers). So it seems that the name Chanukah was still in vogue among the Jews of Crimea as late as two centuries ago. Besides for being used by Crimean Jews, the name Chanukah as a masculine given name is also found amongst Bukharan Jews and Kurdish Jews.
In private correspondence, Dr. Alexandre Beider (one of the world’s leading experts on Jewish onomastics) wrote to me that among Georgian Jews there is a surname Chanukashvili, and among the so-called Mountain Jews of Afghanistan a similar surname Chanukayoff is used. Both of those patronymic family names literally mean “son of Chanukah,” which to Beider implies that at least at some point in history, the given name Chanukah was used in those communities as well.
The use of Chanukah as both a masculine and feminine name is a fascinating break from the typical Jewish naming convention, where there is often a clear distinction – or a “virtual mechitzah” – that separates male names from female names. This phenomenon raises intriguing questions about the fluidity of naming practices in certain Jewish communities and how some names might transcend those traditional gender boundaries. I look forward to exploring this topic further in a future essay, where I’ll delve deeper into the cultural and historical implications of such naming traditions.
Postscript: The other night, we made a bar mitzvah party for my son. And the name of the photographer? Yoni Chanuka.
Last year, I gave a Zoom lecture entitled “Jewish Festal Names: Exploring their Origins and Significance,” which talks about various given names that are also names of holidays or other times on the Jewish calendar. You can watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/DBad7XdFnU4
This Shabbos Chanukah, I am celebrating the bar mitzvah of my oldest son, Binyamin Eliezer. In honor of the special occasion, I published a new sefer (in Hebrew) called “Lechem M’Merchack.” That sefer and some of my other books are available for purchase on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3Bj2dlO
