Jewish girls’ names
Names from the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish tradition, including names in continuous use for three thousand years.
Hebrew names are among the oldest in continuous use anywhere. Sarah, Rachel, Leah, Rebecca, Miriam, Deborah, Naomi, Ruth and Esther have been given to daughters for something close to three thousand years without interruption, which almost nothing else in this library can claim.
What is distinctive about Jewish naming is less the vocabulary than the practice. Ashkenazi custom names a child after a deceased relative and avoids naming after a living one; Sephardi and Mizrahi custom does the reverse, and naming for a living grandparent is an honour rather than a hazard. The same family tree read under the two customs produces completely different sets of names, and the divergence is old enough to be a reliable indicator of ancestry.
Many Jewish children carry two names — a Hebrew name used in religious contexts and a vernacular one for daily life. The Yiddish layer produced its own tradition: Golda, Bluma, Feige, Shayna, Rayzel — names from Germanic and Slavic words rather than Hebrew ones, several of them meaning flower, gold or beautiful.
Esther is worth a note. The name appears to derive from the Babylonian goddess Ishtar rather than from Hebrew, and the book itself gives the character a second, Hebrew name, Hadassah. Both are used. It is a small reminder that even the most established traditions are made of borrowings.