With apologies to the Bard, names are not meaningless. Names do matter. If the “rose” had another flower like Sneezeweed or Corn Cockle, there would be no issue. Questioning the true value of labels carry immense cultural, psychological, and historical weight.
Names are often our first introduction, significantly influencing our first impressions.
Research on names reveals that easy to pronounce names are often judged more positively and certain names unconsciously evoke specific stereotypes or societal expectations. Beyond Shakespeare’s exploration of his famous idiom, it continues to be used when we challenge conventional norms, separating a person’s intrinsic worth from the labels society places on us.
Whether a name is just an arbitrary word or defying characteristics, the phrase prompts us to look beyond superficial titles and focus on the true essence of a person or an object.
Consider how parents spend countless hours choosing a name for the baby.
Do we have the power to single-handedly shape our destiny? No. But names are mirrors of ourselves, containers of our deeply held hopes and profoundly felt intuitions. While we should never reduce ourselves to our name, it pays to appreciate the power of names and naming.
While historians often frame name-changing as a story of triumph or rebirth, it is simultaneously a history of grief — a literal massacring of lineage.
When a name is dropped into the wastebasket of history, centuries of ancestral endurance, specific geographic origins, and familial honour vanish in a single legal signature.
When names are actively chosen rather than passively inherited, they don’t stop mattering. Changing your name does not erase your identity, history, or who you are. It is a powerful reminder that while states and ideologies erase a word on a piece of paper, the human need for genuine, unbroken roots is much harder to kill.
Psychological studies show that children who know their history have higher self-esteem and stronger emotional resilience.
It is becoming a fad testing your DNA to find out where your ancestors came from. May be for fun, curiosity, or genetic health risks, but first comes the name.
There are several reasons why individuals or celebrities change the original name. Hollywood is quite fond of erasing birth names to names that are more appealing on the marquee. The famous Mohamed Ali was once Cassius Clay and Malcolm Little became Malcolm X, understandably “Little” was too little. The undertaking of changing the names of the citizens of a whole country is a massive burden, erasing a personal and cultural identity that was carried for a thousand years. It should create mass confusion, but it may be a necessity.
The widespread practice of Hebraisation of shifting surnames in Israel is unparalleled.
Names of Europeans born and lived in countries like Poland, Ukraine, Russia, generation after generation were Poles or Russians or Germans since the 10th-11th century. When the Zionist movement and early immigrants arrived in Palestine, changing their names became a rejection of their native lands.
Changing names is a deliberate act of re-invention. Most of the immigrants came from Jews of European descent, known as the Ashkenazi. The Sephardic/ Mizrahi Jews from Middle Eastern countries and North African descent created a divide, since the Western Europeans favoured the Western culture. Sephardic and Mizrahi immigrants from countries like Morocco, Ethiopia, Iran, Iran, Spain, and Portugal were given new Hebrew names by teachers and social workers in schools, sometimes without telling the parents, but their last names to Hebrew was less common than for Ashkenazi families.
This pressure of erasing their rich Arabic and Middle Eastern heritage did not sit well with them. Today many of the Sephardic and Mizrahi Israelis, longing for their original identities, choose to reclaim their heritage. Living in the land of the forgotten, they are reaching for their lost roots.
In the destined land of freedom and equality, they are placed in poor, remote development towns, less likely to attend universities and have lower wages compared to the superior Ashkenazi citizens.
Jews have lived in Eastern Europe for over 1,000 years. Eastern Europe became the centre of global Jewish life. By the early 20th century, 80 per cent of the world’s Jewish population lived and thrived before the sudden severance of family trees and historical continuity.
The shift from names you are born with to names you choose, and cutting physical ties to the past, must be incredibly hard. In order to fit in David Grun became David Ben-Gurion and Szymon Perski became Shimon Perez, but they lose a piece of who they are. Sometimes we wonder who they are, and they must wonder too.
The irony is that the language of Yiddish spoken among Ashkenazi Jews for 1,000 years is still spoken, why not your name? The language itself is studied in universities to preserve European Jewish heritage, but not your name. They boast of a rich legacy of Yiddish literature, music, and poetry as the voice of millions of European Jews, but not your own name.
Today, Yiddish is still the native everyday language for many Israelis. It is hard to discard your identity, let alone your DNA. How can you hide from that?
For decades, Israel mandated that diplomats, military officers, and state representatives Hebraise their names. A chosen name became a mandatory “uniform” — manufacturing new names to replace old truths.
History’s wastebasket holds forgotten treasures and truths, including golden names now lost.
What’s in a name, you ask? Everything.
“Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.”
J K Rowling (1965-)
* A version of this article appears in print in the 16 July, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 16 July, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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