Introduction
Meaning
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Early Barzilays
The ancestry
Family tree
Guestbook
Introduction
Brassily…
'Barzilay? My, such an odd name! Must be Hungarian?' I've heard that kind of reactions all my life. Just like all the corruptions of my name, whether on purpose or not, from 'Brazilian' to 'brassily'. That made me as a matter of course become interested in the true meaning and origin of this name. Besides, from my childhood on I can remember that there has been some speculation about it. To close relatives –parents, uncles and aunts– there was little known. It would be a Jewish name (it also seemed to appear in the Bible) and there were rumours that we originally came from Poland. But others were saying that the ancestors came from South America. Nobody knew the details. The meaning of the name was not known as well (son of something?), nor the exact location in the Bible where the name was to be found.
Little known
In the years that passed, there have been several Barzilay's (unknown
to me) who contacted us to find out whether we were relatives or not.
That chance wasn't very small, because of the low frequency of occurrence
of that name. Unfortunately it didn't become clear, most of the time.
In the eighties it increasingly annoyed me that there was that little
known about it. In the meantime I'd become familiar with the meaning of
the name Barzilai/Barzillay and the places of occurrence in the Bible,
because that was easily looked up in any concordance, but still I knew
nothing more. So I started looking for those who may have done research
after the origin of the name Barzilay. One of the family rumours was about
a certain R.E. Barzilay M.A. (the same initials as I have, by the way),
whom I've 'met' before as the signer of letters concerning my scholarship
('To Mr. R.E. Barzilay', signed by R.E. Barzilay M.A. – first I
thought about a joke or a confused secretary). This man would have investigated
a lot.
An important meeting
It seemed useful to me to track this man. This was easier said than done: he had switched a lot between departments. Finally I was about to be put through with him, and yes, I was connected with this man called Rob Barzilay ('Rob Barzilay speaking', 'Yes, Rob Barzilay speaking. Are you the one who knows a lot about the background of our surname?'), but he turned out to be a cousin of mine. He had no idea where the name Barzilay came from, and that just fitted perfectly well in our family tradition. However, it is true that after some research I didn't contact R.E. Barzilay M.A., but Louis Paul Steinberg, from Amsterdam. His mother's maiden name was Barzelay and she'd passed away shortly before. Many of his relatives had died in concentration camps, and with the death of his mother the name Barzelay/Barzilay had disappeared from his near family. He was interested and he examined the archives of the Portuguese synagogue, assisted by mister Dave Verdooner; now he could trace his family tree up to this Abraham Barzilay, a member of the V.O.C. (Dutch East India Company), who came from Venice to Amsterdam in the last decades of the 18th century.
With the data of Louis Paul Steinberg in my hand I searched the register of population of Rotterdam and soon I could make out the connection with his genealogy tree. We didn't descend from Ashkenazi Jews according to a family rumour, but from Sephardic ones: an amazing discovery! As a matter of fact, we (amongst others) appeared to spring from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (in that order, just like the arch fathers)!
addition needed
In order to invalidate the family rumours once and for all I wrote the data down, provided with some general information from writings about the Sephardic Jews who went this route Portugal-Venice-Amsterdam. This story is written in 1991. My sister's son, Arjen Haayman, brought forward to put it on the internet, which was an excellent idea and I am very grateful for that. The benefits are plenty: all interested relatives, close and distant, can easily take notice of it. Besides, it would be nice if through this website I'd get in touch with others who could add or correct some matters. One of my greatest wishes is, for example, to get to know more about the ancestors of Abraham from Venice. Examination should be done in the archives in Venice. But other additions are most welcome as well.
Wezep (Holland), Rob Barzilay
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