I have twenty minutes before Game 4 starts and I need to address something.
Since I wrote my piece on the Canadiens and Jewish Montreal last month, Jewlicious has been getting a steady stream of people searching for one very specific thing: Is Jakub Dobeš Jewish? Not “is Martin St. Louis Jewish.” Not “tell me about Cecil Hart.” Jakub Dobeš, specifically, the 24-year-old goalie from the Czech Republic who has been standing on his head for Montreal all playoffs. People want to know.
The reason is the name. I can tell you with some confidence that not a single person asking this question has looked up his Wikipedia page. They heard “Jakub” and something went off in their head. If you grew up anywhere with a Jewish community of any size — New York, Montreal, Toronto, Chicago — you have almost certainly known a Jakub. Or a Yaakov. Or an Akiva who goes by Jake at work. The name pattern-matches against something very specific in the Jewish cultural memory and the brain fires before the conscious mind can intervene.
It is not a wrong instinct. Jakub is the Czech and Slovak form of Jacob, which traces directly back to the Hebrew Ya’akov, the patriarch who was Isaac and Rebecca’s son and the father of the twelve tribes of Israel. The name means “he who supplants,” from the story of Jacob grabbing his twin brother Esau’s heel at birth. It traveled from Hebrew into Greek and Latin and then spread through European languages in different forms — James in English, Jacques in French, Diego in Spanish, and Jakub in Czech, Polish, and Slovak. Same name, twenty different passports. At least one naming database classifies it as both a Jewish Ashkenazic name and a Czech and Slovak name, which is accurate, because that is exactly what happened historically: the same Biblical name did two things at once in two different communities across Europe.
So yes, Jakub is about as Hebrew an etymology as you can get. It just does not follow that everyone named Jakub is Jewish, any more than everyone named James or Jacques is. And Dobeš was born on May 27, 2001, in Ostrava, an industrial city in Moravia with a predominantly Catholic heritage. Its Jewish community, once significant, was largely destroyed in the Holocaust, and what remains is small. He left home at 16 to play junior hockey in the United States, settling in St. Louis, then playing for the Topeka Pilots and the Omaha Lancers before going to Ohio State. Nothing in his background suggests any Jewish connection. He is almost certainly Czech Catholic, which is simply the dominant religious background of the region where he was raised. He is not Jewish. He is just named after someone who was.
Today, incidentally, is his 25th birthday. He has faced 491 shots in these playoffs and stopped 447 of them across 17 appearances, which is a birthday present nobody asked him to give and he gave anyway.
Carolina comes into Bell Centre tonight with a 2-1 series lead and a chance to push the Canadiens to the brink of elimination. If Montreal loses, they go back to Raleigh facing elimination. So no pressure, birthday boy.
I have to go. The game is starting.
UPDATE: Canadiens lost 4-0. No birthday luck today.
Photo credit: Jenn G
