same neighborhood adopted Tatar names, one of them being known as Toktamish; but elsewhere Karaite names are mostly Arabic and Persian. The custom of calling one of the sons, generally the eldest, after the paternal (sometimes the maternal) grandfather, of which only nine instances are known during the Talmudic period, became more popular, especially in European states. Maimonides' grandfather was Joseph ben Isaac ben Joseph ben Obadiah ben Solomon ben Obadiah, for instance, and certain families seem to have similarly confined themselves to a few chosen names. Thus, in the Kalonymus family there occurs Meshullam b. Moses b. Ithiel b. Moses b. Kalonymus b. Meshullam b. Kalonymus b. Moses b. Kalonymus b. Jekuthiel b. Moses b. Meshullam b. Ithiel b. Meshullam—only five names among fourteen persons throughout three centuries. As a consequence certain names became characteristic of certain districts: Japheth and Caleb in Greece, and hence among the Karaites; Kalonymus in south Italy; Sheshet and Joab in Rome; Sinai and Pesaḥ in Germany. Some of the older names were revived—Meïr, for example, of which only two previous instances before, had been known, the tanna Meïr and the Meïr mentioned by Josephus. Samson was never used by Jews before the 11th century. Kinnuyim The most striking tendency of the post-Talmudic period is the general choice of local names by the Jews for their civic relations. This led to the adoption of two names, one for civic purposes, known as the kinnuy (probably from the Arabic kunyah), the other (shem ha-ḳodesh) for use in the synagogue and in all Hebrew documents. The latter, the "sacred" name, was as far as possible associated with the former, and was often a translation of a civic one, e.g., Asael for Diofatto, Manoah for Tranquillo, Ḥayyim for Vita; at times the civic name was merely a contraction of the sacred one, e.g., Leser for Eliezer, Sender for Alexander. In other cases mere similarity in sound was sufficient to determine the sacred name, as Mann for Menahem, Kalman for Kalonymus, and the like. Especially noteworthy was the use made of Jacob's blessing to transfer a personal name from the civic to the sacred sphere. Judah being compared to a lion's whelp in Jacob's blessing, Judah became Leo, or Löwe, in lay relationship, and Ephraim became Fischlin. Later on these name-equations became so usual that they formed doublets, which were almost invariably found together, as Dov Bär, Naphtali