The curious case of the fast-shrinking Cohens

Here was me thinking, in Anglo-Jewish terms at least, that Cohen was as common as chips, only to discover that we’re about to become as rare as Chips.

Talk about the end of history.

We Cohanim hark back 3,500 years to the anointing of Aaron, the elder brother of Moses, as the first high priest, or kohen gadol, after the Exodus from Egypt. Thus began the ultimate Jewish guy thing, the particular name passing from father to son ever since.

Throughout the subsequent millennia there have been many takers. And many more if one factors in the various English transliterations (Cohn, Coen, Kagan, Kahn, and all the rest) of the Hebrew. Not least in Aaron’s old stomping ground, where around one in 50 Israelis today still share the name.

Apparently no longer. Measured against data from the first census of last century, Ancestry advises, we’ve apparently declined a bracing 42 per cent in England and Wales, placing us among the fastest-shrinking surnames in the nation. In 1901, there were approximately 12,780 of us in the UK, the highest concentration being in the capital. Today, roughly 7,413 remain.

So farewell, then, Cohen. We are on the way out.

Or are we?

In my case, alas, I’m already long gone. Although I am a dual British citizen, I picked up shticks as a kid and moved to the other side of the world, where I remain, and which may or may not have some bearing on the surname’s wider vanishment from the local records.

For several generations, though, my family namesakes were much in evidence in the old country, replenishing the green and pleasant land at a conjugally brisk rate from the late 19th century on.

My great grandfather, Lewis Cohen, arrived in Cardiff from Lithuania in the 1880s, setting up shop in the Welsh capital and producing five kids. Two of his brothers followed suit, each of them also being fruitful and multiplying the Cohen ranks within a wider Jewish community that continued to grow apace over the next 70 years, peaking at around 400,000 in the 1960s, by which time members of my family crew were evident not only in Wales but in London and parts of the South East.

Others were also hard at it. As the journalist Michael Coren reminds me, the “incredibly evident” surname has long felt ubiquitous in most aspects of the national culture as well.

Take sport. England has won the World Cup in football just the once, in 1966, and once again in rugby, in 2003. On both occasions, Coren marvels with the enthusiasm of a true fan, there happened to be a Cohen on the team – George and Ben respectively – the only surname to appear on both lists.

During the golden age of British amateur boxing early last century, a ridiculous number of Cohens were trading leather inside the squared circle, a wonderful case of “pile them high, sell them cheap”, as the founder of the supermarket chain Tesco, Sir Jack Cohen, famously described his all-British business philosophy.

In politics, too, there was an embarrassment of Cohens to choose from. Labour has had figures like Harry Cohen and Stanley Cohen. The Tories had Major Sir Benn Jack Brunel Cohen, along with peers such as Janet Cohen, Baroness Cohen.

And who can possibly forget Lionel Harris Cohen twice contesting Manor Park in the 1970s as a candidate for the Liberals? (Actually, virtually nobody remembers that last one, because the hapless Cohen was thoroughly trounced at the polls. But hey, he was my late father.)

That way too went the Cohens in the media life, where “one of the most recognisable Jewish surnames in Britain”, as Ancestry now sorrowfully puts it, was one of the most familiar Jewish bylines.

When I used to contribute articles to The Guardian in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there were a half-dozen Cohens, at least three of them David Cohens, noch, on the payroll of that one masthead alone – something I know for a fact after receiving remittances in error more than once for their published work.

You didn’t need to look far to find others, at least a few of whom are still in front of us. Closer to this parish remains the ardent Substacker and JC columnist Nick Cohen, whose best political book, What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way, still gets my nod for the David Cohen Prize for Literature.

What’s left of the Cohens indeed? Nick’s own parents weren’t cultural or religious Jews, he tells me in an early-morning exchange, but they decided not to change their name when they married in the 1950s because they thought that, surely, after Hitler antisemitism was over. “They later accepted that they may have got that one wrong,” Cohen notes balefully.

“When I worked for the New Statesman at the start of my career,” Michael Coren recalls, “there was a guy there as foreign editor called Barry Cohen.” He chuckles ruefully. “I’d like to see someone called Cohen applying for a position on a liberal publication today.”

At the very least, Coren believes, an interrogation on the Middle East would nowadays be guaranteed for a young Barry – “in a way that it wouldn’t if your name was Smith”.

Ah, yes, there’s that, too. But still. Names don’t ebb and flow in popularity according to the whims of whiskery editors conducting due ideological diligence.

And even if they did, how would that explain the supposed decline of Cohen as a surname at a time when society has also recorded the lamentable surge of Cohen as a first name.

Somebody – I think it was me – recently likened this sudden appearance of first-name Cohens to a particularly ill-fitting jacket that every other parent appeared to have brought the same week without telling anyone else and thinking they alone were in on the secret.

The fad, if that’s what it can be called, seems to be part of a more general enthusiasm for turning surnames into forenames, which seems to have really taken off after parents with a hankering for this sort of thing started running low on fresh but generally pointless American city names for their newborns.

Cohen also seemed to fit something of a similar bill as one of those ever-so-slightly American handles, recognisable but not overused, and even a bit edgy. The same kind of impulse that might spur one to give a child the name Parker, or Taylor, or Starmer. In Britain, Cohen slipped into a similar groove, peaking in the late 2010s before a chorus of Jewish complaints forced a bit of a rethink.

This backlash ought to have come as little surprise. In Israel, even the most serious, devout couples looking to change a child’s surname to Cohen (or Levy) from another family name are booked for a rough time. Authorisation for such a decision resides solely with a rabbi. Most rabbis – in Israel at least; look it up, it’s googleable – are incredibly tetchy about messing with the Cohens, even when such inflexibility has led to Solomonic deliberations. As, for example, in documented situations where the father in a Cohen family is sterile and the mother becomes pregnant by way of IVF, but nevertheless wants the child to have the family’s patrilineal name.

Another problem. Unlike given names, surnames rarely “fall” in popularity on their own accord. And if anecdotal observation suggests, as it clearly does, that the surname Cohen remained consistently recognisable in Britain throughout much of the 20th century, why should it suddenly be as uncommon as a red heifer?

Are immigration trends to blame? Intermarriage? Declining fertility rates? Search me. I’m not Sacha Baron Cohen, or as he briefly had it, Borat Margaret Sagdiyev.

David Cohen (Photo: Marti Friedlander)[Missing Credit]

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Hoping for answers rather than more questions, I approached the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, the only independent organisation in the UK where experts (none of whom happen to currently be called Cohen) look at such issues.

According to one of the institute’s main demographers, Dr Daniel Staetsky, the number of people in Britain willing to identify as Jewish is a little more robust than what Ancestry might imply. Currently, he tells me by way of context, it stands at around 312,000 when also factoring in ethnic identity as well as religion.

The figure rises further if “Law of Return Jews” – taken to mean those with sufficient Jewish ancestry to be eligible to live in Israel – are included. And as Staetsky notes, much of the core growth has been concentrated in the strictly Orthodox community, where traditional surnames such as Cohen are likely to be more prevalent.

The longer-term picture, however, tells a slightly different story. Asked about the Anglo-Jews of my father’s generation and those on the scene until around the late 1990s, Staetsky places their experience within a broader European context. Between the end of the Second World War and the mid-1990s, he explains, Jewish communities across the region, including Britain, did indeed experience a period of marked decline, more so than most other comparable communities.

Large numbers emigrated, most commonly to Israel. Fertility rates fell sharply, even more than they did with most other groups. They remained low for a long time. “As a result, the population declined,” he says. “Assimilation and intermarriage played a role, yes, but they were not the primary drivers.”

Indeed, assimilation, in particular, doesn’t shed much light at all for him on the Cohen quandary. “To assimilate,” Staetsky notes matter-of-factly, “people have to be born Jewish in the first place.” And men generally stick with their family names.

Demographic forces might therefore better explain an apparent decline. But here he strikes a cautionary note about the official record: reliable long-term data is limited, for there have been no census records specifically identifying Jews as such over the past century.

Population estimates therefore have been derived from synagogue memberships, with all the caveats that would suggest, although the frequently cited number of 270,000 resident British Jews in the late 1990s strikes him as “about right”. Yet against that backdrop, Staetsky points out, any common Jewish surname – Goldman, say – would be expected to show a similar contraction.

Nor has deliberate name-changing played any part he can see in the supposed trend. As Staetsky says, the recent rise in Jewish numbers has been driven by a strictly Orthodox community in which traditional names are more common. Also, one assumes, the Charedim would be far less likely to contemplate changing them for any reason, not even a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to occupy the foreign editor’s chair at the New Statesman.

As for Cohen, Staetsky suggests, the jury remains out until all the evidence is in – and maybe, he suggests, that day might never come. Which makes my heart race with newfound cheer.

Oh well. What seems sure in the meantime, though, is that whenever two Jews in Britain discuss the matter there will be at least three or more opinions on the subject. Of course, whether either of them will still be named Cohen remains to be seen.

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David Cohen is a New Zealand-based journalist and author whose books include ‘Book of Cohen: David Cohen on Leonard Cohen’