Leib-owitz [Yiddish: = לייב-וביץ = "Lion-Son"]

WHO ARE WE? Our ancestors are Jews who settled along the Rhine River in Europe around the tenth century, referred to as Ashkenazi Jews. Their traditional language was Yiddish, a dialect of German written using Hebrew characters. Over succeeding centuries, these European Jews spread eastward, and some settled in Russia and Ukraine, where our earliest Leibowitz ancestors lived. 

SURNAMES Jews did not take surnames until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the authorities required them to do so. They took surnames based on their occupations, physical characteristics, geographical location, and other factors, including a "patronymic" based on their father's first name.  In Slavic languages, the endings -ovich, -evich and -ich are used to form patronymics for men.

LEIB-OWITZ Based on my research, the "owitz" in "Leibowitz" is a Yiddish variant of a Russian patronymic, and the "Leib" (pronounced "Layb") is from the Yiddish word לייב for Lion (as in the biblical Lion of the tribe of Judah). Thus, those of us descended from Dina and Isaac Leibowitz are sons [and daughters] of the Lion of Judah! 

My Grandfather, Louis Leibowitz, told me his Yiddish name was "Wolf-Layb" ("Wolf-Lion" - a fierce combination of canine and feline characteristics).

His name in Yiddish in Hebrew characters - וואָלף-לייב 

PRONUNCIATION Although "Leibowitz" is usually pronounced "LEEB-owitz", I believe "LAYB-owitz" (or even "LAYB-ovich") might be more correct. As you learned in grammar school, "I before E, except after C, or when sounded as AY as in neighbor or weigh." The "ei" in "Leibowitz" is not after C, so it should be sounded as AY! QED.

DISCUSSION In preparing this Blog posting, I considered the possibility that both parts of "Leibowitz" are from the original German roots of Yiddish. The "Leib" could be from the German word for "body", and the "wits" from the German word for "joke", so "Lieb o witz" might mean "Body or joke". Anyone like that?

Further research determined that the Google Translate result for "Leibowitz" is ליבוביץ in Yiddish, and Лейбовиц in Russian. When I reversed the languages, ליבוביץ translated to "Libubits" and Лейбовиц to "Leibowicz", which indicated, to me, that "Leibowitz" is a mixture of languages.

When I split the original translations, the Russian Лейб о виц translated to "Leib about HIV" and the Yiddish ליב ו ביץ translated to "Love u bits". Further indications of multiple languages.

To make sense of all of this, I had to add a second "yud" to the first part of the usual Yiddish spelling, changing ליב to לייב, which translates to "Lion". That explains why I'm quite sure  that "Leib-owitz"  לייב-וביץ (here with two "yuds") is a variant of a Russian patronymic, joined to the Yiddish word for Lion, namely "Lion-Son" or "Son of Lion".

Ira Glickstein