Posted on Sunday 5 November 2006 to unknown

Welsh Walloon is the name given to the French speaking people of Belgium. Welsh is the English word for the original Celtic inhabitants of Britain. Both words have a common origin in the Germanic word walah which simply means foreigner and was bestowed upon these Romanised Celtic peoples by invading Germanic tribes (i.e. Saxons, Angles, Dutch etc)¹.

A similar Slavic word wallach has been used to refer to the descendents of the Latin-speakers of Rumania but as the following text demonstrates, the same word has been used in its various forms for centuries to label the Other in many places right across Europe.

vlach, bloch, wallach, et al

A few years ago, while visiting Israel, I took the opportunity to visit the /Dorot'/ (`generations') computerized genealogical database at /Beth ha-T(e)futsoth/, the (impressive!) Museum of the Diaspora, located on the campus of Tel Aviv University; I sus- pected that our patronymic might be of Jewish derivation. There I discovered that Bloch (as well as Wallach, /etc./) is derived from the Slavic /vlach/, meaning not only `foreigner', but specifically "an alien speaking a Latin- related language"; it seems to be cognate to the Greek /blhxh/, meaning `the bleating of sheep' (obviously designating a meaningless and despised sound), as is the Germanic /Welsch/ for `foreigner (specifically Celtic, Welsh or Italian)'. The Old High German /Walah/ also meant `speaker of a Romance language'; late Gk. /blaxos/ referred to a Wallachian; Anglo-Saxon /wealh/ seems to mean `Celtic, foreign or strange'; and even Latin /Volcae/ referred to a Celtic tribe.

For example, in Bohemia the term /vlach/ was applied to the Italian silver- and gold-smiths whom Emperor Charles imported when those ores were mined in the Crown Lands, for the purpose of establishing coin-minting operations.

A Bulgarian post-doc in my department told me that till today a tribe (?) of Romanian-speaking folk along the border between those countries (Wallachia) is referred to as /vlachii/.

Currently the family name Vlach is used by families of Slavic extraction, apparently with no hint of Jewish lineage; there was also once a letter to the editor of TIME Magazine signed Vlachopoulos. Bloch, on the other hand, seems to be used exclusively by families which were at one time Jewish; this usage implies an attribution by Slavic residents to immigrants into Central Europe from further west (and south), presumably speaking Italian, French and/or Spanish, and conceivably at the time of the Spanish Inquisition and Expulsion of the Jews, commencing in 1492 (although that linkage will probably never be traced in full detail). Bloch families are found in Poland, Latvia, Russia and Germany as well as the Czech Republic; some even seem to have bounced back westward, after having acquired the label, and settled in France and Holland.