NAMES ANALYSIS REPORT
You searched for:"HaLevy",
Here's what we found
There are many indicators that the name HaLevy may be of Jewish origin, emanating from the Jewish communities of Spain and Portugal.
When the Romans conquered the Jewish nation in 70 CE, much of the Jewish population was sent into exile throughout the Roman Empire. Many were sent to the Iberian Peninsula. The approximately 750,000 Jews living in Spain in the year 1492 were banished from the country by royal decree of Ferdinand and Isabella. The Jews of Portugal, were banished several years later. Reprieve from the banishment decrees was promised to those Jews who converted to Catholicism. Though some converted by choice, most of these New-Christian converts were called CONVERSOS or MARRANOS (a derogatory term for converts meaning pigs in Spanish), ANUSIM (meaning "coerced ones" in Hebrew) and CRYPTO-JEWS, as they secretly continued to practice the tenets of the Jewish faith.
Our research has found that the family name HaLevy is cited with respect to Jews & Crypto-Jews in at least 5 bibliographical, documentary, or electronic references:
The Jews of the Balkans, The Judeo-Spanish Community , 15th to 20th Centuries, by Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue
This volume is a history of the Sephardi diaspora in the Balkans. The two principal axes of the study are the formation and features of the Judeo-Spanish culture area in South-Eastern Europe and around the Aegean littoral, and the disintegration of this community in the modern period. The great majority of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 eventually went to the Ottoman Empire. With their command of Western trades and skills, they represented a new economic force in the Levant. In the Ottoman Balkans, the Jews came to reconstitute the bases of their existence in the semi-autonomous spheres allowed to them by their new rulers. This segment of the Jewish diaspora came to form a certain unity, based on a commonality of the Judeo-Spanish language, culture and communal life. The changing geopolitics of the Balkans and the growth of European influence in the 19th century inaugurated a period of westernization. European influence manifested itself in the realm of education, especially in the French education, dispensed in the schools of the Alliance Israelite Universelle with its headquarters in Paris. Other European cultures and languages came to the scene through similar means. Cultural movements such as the Jewish Enlightenment (haskalah) also came to exert a distinct influence, hence building bridges between the Ashkenazi and Sephardi worlds
A History of the Jews in Christian Spain,Volume 2, by Yitzhak Baer.
Traces the economic, social, legal and political life of the Spanish Jewish community from the 11th century re-conquest of Iberia from Muslim rule to the expulsion of 1492. Based on many years of study in the Spanish archives by a Professor from The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel.
History of the Sephardic Israelite Community in Chile by Moshe Nes-El. Editorial Nascimiento, Chile, 1984.
Most Jews arrived in Chile between 1934–1946, half being from Eastern Europe, 40 percent from Germany, and 10 percent were Sephardic Jews. Many Chilean Jews fled Chile in 1970 after the election of socialist Salvador Allende Gossens as president.
Judios Conversos (Jewish Converts) by Mario Javier Saban. Distal, Buenos Aires, 1990. The ancestors of the Argentinian Jewish families.
This best-selling work traces the immigration of Conversos from Portugal to Argentina and Brazil. It contains many Sephardic names and family trees within its 3 volumes. Many of the individuals listed appeared before the Inquisition and were secret Jews. Some later converted and intermarried. Many of the names listed here represent the famous names of Jewish/Sephardic Argentina. Over 100 pages of genealogies, well detailed, are provided.
In Sure Dwellings: A Journey From Expulsion to Assimilation, by Margot F. Salom
In 1492, the last professing Jews in Spain were driven out of their beloved Sepharad where they had formerly been accepted as an important part of a thriving, pluralistic society for seven centuries of Islamic rule. The Christian Reconquista in the last of those centuries, spelt the beginning of the end for the Jews of Spain as well as for the convivencia (cooperation) that had long existed between Jew, Muslim and Christian in what has been called the "Golden Age". Many of the expelled Spanish Jews spread out around the surrounding Muslim lands where they found some refuge. Others found a brief hiatus of safety in Portugal. Decades later many of the expelled Jews travelled to the mercantile centres of the Mediterranean, northern Europe and the New World where they participated in the burgeoning trading empires of Holland, England the Italy. It is this fascinating history that the author has attempt to trace, using her ancestors as a paradigm. Realizing that this narrative of the western Sephardim is all but forgotten with the secularisation of a resolute assimilation process, she has written a story that both describes the history of the countries of her ancestors' settlement as well as her personal search through many of the lands of their diaspora, in an attempt to establish the journey of her ancestors as they travelled from fifteenth century Spain to nineteenth century Australia. It was in Australia that this lineage finally became established in a land of "sure dwellings" and where the inevitable outcome of assimilation was the loss of an ancient faith - a loss that has created the primary impetus for the telling of this story
Around the 12th century, surnames started to become common in Iberia. In Spain, where Arab-Jewish influence was significant, these new names retained their old original structure, so that many of the Jewish surnames were of Hebrew derivation. Others were directly related to geographical locations and were acquired due to the forced wanderings caused by exile and persecution. Other family names were a result of conversion, when the family accepted the name of their Christian sponsor. In many cases, the Portuguese Jews bear surnames of pure Iberian/Christian origin. Many names have been changed in the course of migration from country to country. In yet other cases "aliases", or totally new names, were adopted due to fear of persecution by the Inquisition.
