Hi,

 

It is often necessary to check the existence and spelling of Jewish surnames from various geographic origins. For this purpose, Steve Morse created a one-step web tool to search a name among several reference dictionaries of Jewish surnames. Two significant extensions were recently made:

 

The search tool for Ashkenazi reference books located at

https://stevemorse.org/phonetics/beider.php

now includes some 1,100 surnames published in Alexander Beider’s 1994 book, Jewish Surnames in Prague (15th-18th centuries), now out of print.

 

An entirely new search tool for Sephardic reference books is available at

https://stevemorse.org/phonetics/faig.php

It searches surnames from any of the four following dictionaries:

1. Dicionário Sefaradi de Sobrenomes, Guilherme Faiguenboim, Paulo Valadares, and Anna Rosa Campagnano (Rio de Janeiro 2003), around 16,600 surname entries.
2. Judíos de Toledo, 2 vols., Pilar León Tello (Madrid 1979), about 1,000 surname entries.
3. A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Maghreb, Gibraltar, and Malta, Alexandre Beider (2017). Approximately 10,840 surname entries.
4. A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Italy, France, and Portuguese Communities, Alexander Beider (2019), around 9,740 surname entries.

 

The tools can search the names either exactly, by Daitch-Mokotoff soundex or according to language-dependent Beider Morse Phonetic Matching (BMPM).

 

Both tools can also be accessed from Steve Morse root page (https://stevemorse.org) under the Phonetic Matching section.

 

 

Jean-Pierre Stroweis

Jerusalem, Israel