The Meaning and History of a Sephardi-Ashkenazi Name: Yosef Ya‘ish Mavdali Goldman

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My full name is Yosef Ya‘ish Mavdali Goldman, and the Mavdali is for my mother’s maiden name, her Yemenite father’s family. And the name Yosef and Ya‘ish both come from my grandfather. So it is traditional in Sephardic families to name after the living. And my grandfather, Ya‘ish Mavdali, was from a Yemenite family. He was born in Alexandria, grew up in Jerusalem, and eventually moved to, to the United States, first to the Lower East Side and then to Brooklyn. When he came to the States, Ya‘ish, being an Arabic name that was—is common among Jews. And I’ll tell you more about that name in a second. But that name became anglicized to Joe. I don’t know who first started calling him Joe, but that was that was the name that he eventually went by, especially as a—as a New York City cabdriver. He was Joe. And when my parents chose to name me after him, the anglicized Joe became Yosef. Not because we have Yosefs in the family, but kind of reclaiming that Joe, but also retaining Ya‘ish as my middle name. The word Ya‘ish means chiyut, life, aliveness. Find it in the—in the writings of Maimonides, for example. It’s the male version of the name that is common among Muslims of Aisha, and it was given to my grandfather after his mother had a series of lost pregnancies and children dying at a very young age. And so it was a name invoking blessing, invoking protection for—for life after so much loss. It’s just, I’ll add. It’s interesting. I have an identical twin brother and I come from a mixed-heritage family. My mother’s parents are Yemenite father and Syrian mother, and my father’s from an Ashkenazi-Russian-Polish background. And so my brother was—was named according to Ashkenazi minhag for my father’s father, Benjamin, who had died when my father was just—had just passed his bar mitzvah. So between the two of us, we have in our names kind of this celebration of the two heritages that are in our family.