Index of Participants and Subjects at the fifteen Biennial
International Conferences on Jewish Onomastics (1993–2021)
by Aaron Demsky
Founder and Director of the Project for the Study of Jewish Names
Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry
Bar-Ilan University
Ramat-Gan, Israel
(June 10, 2024)
The primary goal of the Project for the Study of Jewish Names, founded in 1991, was to establish Jewish onomastics as a recognized academic field of study and research. Within the framework of the Koschitsky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University, we were able to achieve this goal. This project was based on three aspects. Primarily, teaching Jewish onomastics in undergraduate and advanced classes in the department and in the Department of Hebrew Language. Some students went on to do an MA and even a doctorate with honors.
The second aspect was to organize regular international conferences on this wide field of study. The fifteen biennial gatherings brought together senior scholars as well as young academics. Over the years, hundreds of speakers participated in these conferences, in addition to thousands of interested laymen in attendance, drawing media coverage. The abstract booklets can be found in the sites of Academia.edu and ResearchGate.
The third aspect in creating a new and vibrant academic field of study is to encourage publication. Evolving from the conferences was the peer-reviewed series of collected essays These are the Names: Studies on Jewish Onomastics(TATN) vols. 1–5 featuring articles in Hebrew and English. In addition, a second series of collected essays and monographs in English on specific topics was created, e.g., The Sephardic Diaspora , Yemenite Jewish Names and Rumanian Names during the Old Kingdom. Other publications of articles and books evolved out of these lectures, while some of the lectures were excerpted from larger studies by established scholars in the field.
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