November, 2018
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
he other day, as I was walking into shul, an elderly man, a guest, came over to me with an intriguing question.
“Why is it that the word for turkey in English refers both to a bird and a country of the same name?”
Sensing my curiosity at to why he would direct this question to a rav, and not perhaps to a student of William Safire, he continued.
“In Hebrew too we call this bird tarnegol hodu, which means ‘Indian bird/rooster. So why do these two languages choose to name this bird after a country?”
The truth is that he was touching upon an issue that relates directly with halacha, as we shall soon see.
But he was also mistaken, Hebrew and English are far from the only two languages that one finds this strange occurrence.
I first answered him with the following question of my own: “How does one say ‘turkey’ in Yiddish?”
“Indik!” he responded.
Of course, indik is also the Yiddish word for India!
Already in Megilas Esther we find that hodu refers to India, so indeed why did we choose this name, in Hebrew and Yiddish, for the turkey? And why does the English language also name it after a country, although a different one?
The truth is that one would have many reasons to think that Americans and Israeli’s have a lot in common when it comes to turkey. It is fascinating to note that the number one and two countries in their per capita consumption of this bird is Israel and the United states respectively! (sliced turkey by Shabbos morning’s seudah is likely what puts us at the top spot in the world)
However, as a point in fact, Hebrew, Yiddish and English are not alone in this odd linguistic phenomenon.
We find the same ‘Indian’ name for this bird in Italian, Russian and French, and many other languages. If anything, English is the outlier in that it is named after Turkey -and not India.
To make matters even more bizarre: In Turkey itself this bird is called a hindi –‘from India’! And in India (Hindi) it called… tarki-‘from Turkey’!!
Several year’s ago The Atlantic magazine (2012) dedicated much space to the issue of the Turkey/turkey English question, even zeroing in on its possible Hebrew origins:
“In the early 1990s a debate broke out in the “letter to the editor” section of The New York Times over the possible Hebrew origins of the word “turkey.” On December 13, 1992, Rabbi Harold M. Kamsler suggested (as a follow-up to a Thanksgiving-themed piece titled “One Strange Bird”) that the New World fowl received its English name from Christopher Columbus’s interpreter, Luis de Torres, a Jewish convert to Catholicism. In an October 12, 1492 letter to a friend in Spain, de Torres had referred to the American bird he encountered as a tuki, the word for “peacock” in ancient Hebrew and “parrot” in modern Hebrew.
Kamsler’s letter, however, was met with a firm rebuttal from the president of the Association for the Study of Jewish Languages, David L Gold”
[Cf. see Sota 31a, mishneh, with Rashash with regard to a Halacha relating to a ‘talking bird’ and its identification and name]
So what is going on here, and how does it relate to halacha?
While no one is one-hundred percent certain about why this particular fowl has such an odd dialectal commonality across so many cultures, the general theories that abound have a few things in common that can help us understand its peculiar naming history.
According to Mario Pei of Columbia University, an expert in linguistics and neologisms (newly formed words), in early America guinea-fowl –a completely different species of bird –were imported through Turkish merchants. Mistakenly believing that what we know today as turkeys were guinea-fowl, early settlers named the bird ‘Turkish hens’, which soon became, simply, ‘turkey’.
So, that explains the Turkey/turkey connection in America and American English; but what about the India connection in most other languages?
If one recalls, a few months back I sent to the shul an article about the West Indie esrogim being used in America in the 1850’s.
What was not mentioned is why was this southern local to the United States termed with this imprimatur.
Well, when Columbus sailed to the Americas, he thought that he arrived in the ‘West’ Indies. The East Indies, of course, was a part of India proper, and Columbus assumed he simply arrived at the other side!
Even after we realized that the Americas was in fact a new continent the name ‘West Indies’ largely remained.
With this bit of history, we can begin to unfold this bird’s naming.
When the American turkeys were shipped from the Americas back across the Atlantic in the 1500’s many named it after the ‘West Indies’, and soon ‘India fowl’, and then finally…’India’!
So, how does this all relate to halacha?
As many of you are likely aware, the issue of the kashrus of turkeys has been questioned over the years. In fact, some do not ever eat this fowl.
Their concern is not insignificant. The Rama codifies a simple rule based on Rashi—we eat only those birds for which we have a mesorah that they are kosher. Meaning birds and animals of which we have been eating for many, many generations are the only animals we consume. Should a new animal be discovered which has all the signs of being a kosher animal we would still need to refrain.
While the Shulchan Aruch agrees with the Rama, he allows for certain leniencies in regard to particular classes of birds.
Now, it would seem that turkeys – seemingly only introduced late in our history (although, truth be told, some poskim argue they have been around for longer) should then not be eaten!
The rational behind why a super majority of frum Jews still eat from this bird is beyond the scope of this brief monograph. However, it is critical to point out one of the Netziv’s rationales for our allowance of consuming this ‘new’ bird, against the ruling we follow of the Rama (Meishiv Davar 22): the mere fact that Jews had begun, even mistakenly, to eat this bird, which aside for the Rama’s strict view has no clear signs of being non-kosher –would allow us to continue to eat it.
But why, indeed, did we begin to eat this new bird before the posekim sanctioned it? To this question many have suggested the following brilliant approach:
After this new bird arrived in India and Turkey the sefardim –not bound by this Rama and thus allowed to eat new birds –began to consume them.
When then these birds were sold from these countries to Europe and Russia, it carried the name indek, which many Jews wrongly assumed was due to the fact that these birds were indigenous to India and had been eaten in that and other sefardi countries for centuries, when in truth A) The name was based ona nickname for America and B) sefardim ate it because they were not bound to refrain from new animals. In other words, the name of this new creature mistakenly convinced many that this bird had a mesorah!
What a story!
Let me end on two notes. First, nothing written above is to question the consumption of turkey. I eat turkey and rely on the Netziv and the many poskim who allow its consumption for a variety of reasons. Primarily, I rely on minhag avosei, and so should the reader.
Finally, how amazing that the turkey in Hebrew also shares its root in the word for ‘thanks’. For, regardless of our many mesorahs from rebbeim and parents regarding how to celebrate this day, we most certainly all thank Hakadosh Baruch Hu for gifting us and the world with this amazing country.
May her best days lay ahead.
Shul Chronicles 
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