Kohnstamm page 4. Back to page 1 / Next page
The Fami1y Name
Before their emancipation, which began towards the end of the eighteenth century and received its great impetus through the French revolution, Jews in Germany did not in general have fixed surnames, but used patronymics, and occasionally matronymics, which changed from generation to generation. Our subject family lived in the village of Niederwerrn, which in 1814 was absorbed in the Kingdom of Bavaria, whose Jews were subject to the Royal Ordinance of 10 June 1813, generally known as the Jews' Ordinance (Judenedikt). It regulated their status and provided a measure of emancipation for them. The ordinance included the requirement to adopt permanent family names and the establishment of Jewish registers of birth, marriage and death. These were kept by the local Catholic priest until the newly formed German empire introduced general registration on I January 1876, which covered vital events irrespective of religion.
The earliest entries in the Niederwerrn registers of birth include those of the children of Mendel and Gella (KB.41) between 1813 and 1822. In the first entry in February 1813, before the promulgation the Jews' Ordinance already referred to, and up to 1816, the father is entered as Mendel Cohn or Kohn.From 1818 onward he is registered as Mendel or Mendel Maier Kohnstamm. The mother's name is given as Gella Kohn, which must have been her maiden name; quite likely she was a relative, but there are no records to confirm this surmise. In some early birth registers the family name is written with an initial C instead of K, a not uncommon practice in Germany until the early part of the twentieth century for the representation of the guttural sound. Since then the letter K has been standardized to represent this sound.
The family considered themselves Kohanim, i.e. members of the Jewish priestly tribe, descended from Aron, the brother of Moses, and therefore added 'Ha-Kohen' to their patronymics. Kohnstamm was thus an exact German translation of their former practice. The adoption of family names was a matter of formal registration by the heads of the families concerned. For the Kohnstamm family that record has not yet been found in the Bavarian state archives, nor is it known why the family chose that name rather than the far more common Kohn or Cohen. From the evidence in the registers of birth it would seem that the name was adopted some time between 1816 and 1818. In the case of daughters of the family, who were born and married before the time of the adoption of the new family name, their maiden name is herein shown thus: [Kohnstamm], to indicate that this would have been their maiden name, had they married later.
Over the years the name Kohnstamm has been subject to variations in spelling. The earliest was the omission of the second m at the end of the name by some of the descendants of Salomon Kohnstamm (KBA 1). This may originally have been due either to the German practice of writing m with a bar above it as a space-saving alternative to writing mm, or just an error or carelessness on the part of a registration official. As part of the process of assimilation, or merely to hide their origins, some members of the family in Anglo-Saxon countries simplified the spelling of their name to Constam or Konstam. The former was adopted by Emil Kohnstamm (KB.412.1), an American citizen by birth, but living in Switzerland. He obtained a declaration from the Court of Common Pleas for the City and County of New York, dated 15 July 1880, allowing the change of spelling. Thus originated the name borne to this day by all his descendants, most of whom live in Switzerland.
The earliest record of the latter spelling dates from 1894 when Edwin Max Kohnstamm (KB.415.5) is thus shown as one of the editors of Rydce & Konstam, an English standard legal work dealing with rating appeals. Edwin was the only son of Haimann Kohnstamm (KB.415), founder of a leather business in London, which after his death devolved on his nephews, Rudolph (KB.417.5) and Alfred (KB.417.7). The new style of the firm, R. & A. Kohnstamm, retained the original spelling, as did Haimann, Rudolph and Alfred throughout their lives, as well as Norman and Jack, Rudolph's two elder sons, who died serving as officers in the British army in World War 1. Rudolph's youngest and only surviving son, Geoffrey, adopted the Konstam spelling about 1919, when he was a medical student, and it has so continued in his family. Alfred had no sons, but Phyllis, his actress daughter, used her maiden name in its anglicized form professionally. In A Mixed Double, the joint autobiography with her husband, the tennis player Bunny Austin, she applied that spelling also to her forebears, notwithstanding the fact that they are not known to have used it. Geoffrey persuaded his cousins Peter (KB.417.63) and Werner Kohnstamm (KB.417.64), also to adopt the Konstam spelling when they came to England from Nazi Germany during the 1930s. Kenneth (KA.333.2), the internationally known bridge player adopted the same spelling which continues with his descendants.
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* This text has been identified as having been written in 2002 by C. T. (Theo) Marx of Wembley, England. Marx has created a detailed book including general history and an extensive family tree going back to Don Menachem ben Chajim HaKohen (1650-1723). With thanks to Ron Bihovsky for this information.