The Name Ahuvah

[John Smith]

Has anybody studied the origins of the (Ashkenazi?) feminine given name Ahuvah/אהובה? I seemed to remember reading in Beider's dictionary that that name is actually a recent Hebrew calque of the Yiddish Leeba, but when I looked at his entry on that name earlier today and didn't see this point. 

Also, using https://orderpsychedelicsonline.com/ I found that there is a bullae found in Jerusalem that bears the name נאהבת, which essentially means the same thing as אהובה, except that one is the in the פעול form and the other is in the נפעל form. See https://www.academia.edu/19515093/Hebrew_and_Non_Indicative_Bullae_from_The_Summit_of_the_City_of_David page 336. I wonder would, if anything, would be the difference between אהובה and נאהבת. Truth is, I'm not convinced that נאהבת in that bullae has to be proper name, it could have been a description or simply common noun. Any thoughts on that?

[Alexandre Beider]

The name Ahuva does not appear in my book because I never met it in any source dealing with the corpus of traditional Ashkenazic names. Moreover, it does not appear even in my current database of traditional names used by various groups of Ashkenazic Jews (Sephardic, southern French, Italian, Middle Eastern, Maghrebi, Romaniote). If my memory is good, I suggested the genesis of Ahuva as a calque of Yiddish Libe in a personal communication (answering a request by someone). If you run a search in Yad Vashem name database

https://yvng.yadvashem.org/index.html?language=en&s_id=&s_lastName=&s_firstName=Ahuva&s_place=&s_dateOfBirth=&cluster=true

you'll find that almost all references correspond to Poland and Lithuania and very often the person (usually born already during the 20th century) is called Liba Ahuva or Ahuva Liba. Curiously, the list includes Ahuva Alboher from Monastir (now Bitola, N. Macedonia). Maybe, in this case we deal with a calque from the Judeo-Spanish given name Amada. JewishGen database refers to a very few persons with the given name Ahuva and always in the inter-war Poland only (Wilno / Vilnius and its area).

By the way, נאהבת does not appear in the four volumes-"Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity" by Tal Ilan.

Le samedi 27 janvier 2024 à 16:39:06 UTC+1, John Smith <johnsmith...@gmail.com> a écrit :

Has anybody studied the origins of the (Ashkenazi?) feminine given name Ahuvah/אהובה? I seemed to remember reading in Beider's dictionary that that name is actually a recent Hebrew calque of the Yiddish Leeba, but when I looked at his entry on that name earlier today and didn't see this point. 

Also, using https://orderpsychedelicsonline.com/ I found that there is a bullae found in Jerusalem that bears the name נאהבת, which essentially means the same thing as אהובה, except that one is the in the פעול form and the other is in the נפעל form. See https://www.academia.edu/19515093/Hebrew_and_Non_Indicative_Bullae_from_The_Summit_of_the_City_of_David page 336. I wonder would, if anything, would be the difference between אהובה and נאהבת. Truth is, I'm not convinced that נאהבת in that bullae has to be proper name, it could have been a description or simply common noun. Any thoughts on that?

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