Even French families gave their daughters the name of Judith, which belonged to the gentle Comtesse de Bonneval. The Breton form is Juzeth; and the Swiss ruthlessly turn it into Dith, but across the Alps it comes forth more gracefully as Giuditta; and the Poles make it Jitka; the Hungarians, Juczi or Jutka.
On the authority of Eusebius we venture to add a third to those who bore the name of Judah in the apostolic college, namely, him whom we know by the Aramaic and Greek epithets Thomas and Didymus, both meaning a twin. Tradition declares that his fellow-twin was a sister called Lysia. India is believed to have been the region of his labours and of his death; the Christians there were called after him; and when, in the sixteenth century, the Portuguese attained their object of reaching India by sea, they thought they discovered his tomb at Meliapore, transported the relics to Goa, and created San Tomàs or Tomè into their patron saint. Long ere this, however, in every part of Europe had Thomas been revived with other apostolic names, but its great prominence was derived from the murdered Archbishop Becket, or St. Thomas of Canterbury. His shrine at Canterbury was the English Compostella, visited by foreign as well as native pilgrims, and the greater proportion of churches so termed were under the invocation of the archbishop instead of the apostle, although it is only by charter or by wake-day that the dedication can be traced, since Henry VIII. did his utmost to de-canonize and destroy all memorials of the bold prelate whom he would most certainly have beheaded instead of assassinating. In Italy a martyr for ecclesiastical prerogatives was certain to be in high repute; carvings, glass, paintings, and even needlework still bear his history and figure, always denoted by the clean cutting off of his scalp above the tonsure, and Tomasso flourishes greatly as a Christian name, the Italians, as usual, abbreviating by the omission of the first syllable instead of the last, so that where we say Tom, they say Maso, and thence Masuccio, as we call one of their earliest great painters. Tomasso Agnello was the true name which, contracted into Masaniello, was the wonder of the day at Naples, and made the Spanish power there totter on its throne.
The feminine Thomassine, Tamzine, and Tammie, are comparatively recent inventions. They were frequent in the 17th century, and then went out of fashion.
| English. | Scotch. | French. | ||
| Thomas | Thomas | Thomas | ||
| Tom | Tam | Thumas | ||
| Fem.{ | Thomassine Tamzine | Tamlane | ||
| Spanish. | Italian. | Russian. | ||
| Tomas | Tomaso | Foma | ||
| Tome | Maso | Fem.— | Fomaida | |
| Fem.— | Tomasa | Masuccio | ||
| Masaccio | ||||
| German. | Polish. | Lower Lusatian. | ||
| Thoma | Tomasz | Domas | ||
| Fem.— | Thomasia | Domask | ||
| Lithuanian. | Hungarian. | Finland. | ||
| Tamkus | Tamas | Tuomas | ||
| Tamoszus | ||||
| Dummas | ||||
Thomas is the accepted equivalent for the Irish Tomalhaid, Tomaltach, and Toirdelvach, tall as a tower.
Section VI.—Joseph.
When, after long waiting and hoping, a son was at length granted to Rachel, she called him Joseph from a word signifying an addition, because she hoped that yet another child would be added to her family.
Joseph, beloved and honoured as he was for his own beautiful character and eventful history, has perhaps at the present day the greater number of direct namesakes among the Arabs, who still are frequently called Yussuf.
Only two Josephs occur again in the Scripture before the captivity in Babylon, but afterwards they were exceedingly numerous, and in the Gospel history two remarkable characters are so named, as well as three others whom we know by the Græcized form of the name as Joses, i. e. a fourth brother of the royal family of James, Simon, and Jude; he who was usually called by his surname of Barnabas, and he who was also called Barsabas, whose lot was cast with that of Matthias. The Latinized form we know as the name of the historian Flavius Josephus. Legend loved to narrate that Joseph of Arimathea brought the Gospel to England, and that his staff was the Christmas-flowering thorn of Glastonbury; nay, that he carried thither the Sanegreal and the holy lance, the mystic objects of the adventures of the Round Table.
Yet, in spite of the reputation of this holy man, and of the universal reverence for ‘the just man’ of Nazareth, Joseph was scarcely used as a name in Europe till in 1621 a festival day was fixed by the pope in honour of St. Joseph, the husband of the Blessed Virgin.