"Death to the Jews"...

[swl]

I read about this story a little bit, and what informed people say is that "La Mort aux Juifs" meant "The Death of the Jews" in Old French when the place was named like that. Few centuries later the language has evolved and "La Mort aux Juifs" means more "Death to the Jews" now.
"Mort aux Juifs" could be translated to "Death to the Jews" without any doubt, but the "La" makes it more complicated. "La Mort aux Juifs" does not really mean anything in modern French.

I find is surprising that some people in New York are somehow offended by the name of a place with 4 houses in the middle of nowhere in France, but if it can make them sleep better I think the name could be changed. Anyway, the local council will ultimately decide what they want, and I don't know if they really care about the sensitive feelings of these people in the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
On the other hand, if they don't change the name this year, they will probably have problems again in 20 years the next time one of the houses is for sale.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Yeah, the "la" wouldn't be in there if someone was actually calling for Jews to be killed (I know Americans like to put "le" and "la" before everything, but that's not how French actually works ). Still the name should obviously be changed.

[windjammer]

Well, there is a problem with translation.
In french, the correct wording is "La mort aux juifs", not "mort aux juifs".
There is really a big difference between the two.
"Mort aux juifs"= we want to kill the Jews.
"La mort aux juifs"= that's not an antagonist message.

If the other French could explain too.

[Oakvale]

I was thinking that myself, Windjammer, but surely someone would have noticed if the meaning was "Death of the Jews/Where Jews died".

Not that I think that matters. Who cares what some medieval hamlet is called?

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

in that case, keep the name as a memorial to those Jews who were killed in some distant past.

[Zanas]

OK, French amateur-linguist reporting.

First of all, this is a hamlet of a remote rural commune in Loiret, in the French diagonale du vide. The commune of Courtemaux has only 290 inhabitants, the hamlet has one farm and four. friggin. houses...

Its name, only written on the cadastre and seemingly on no roadsign, is "La Mort aux Juifs". Correctly translated, that's to say without hypocrisy, it means "The Death of the Jews", or "The Jews' Death", but not "Death to the Jews !!!!11!1!" by any mean.

Anyway, if you have ever heard about popular etymology, this is quite probably a case of it. Everywhere in France (and the rest of Europe) we have towns, hamlets or cities, not to mention family names, whose translations in modern language have awkward or insulting connotations. But since our proper nouns have had at least 1,500 years to evolve linguistically, that's since the end of strict latin and the progressive birth of a pre-French language, they have at times evolved very far from their original spelling, pronunciation, and therefore meaning.

It is the (hard) work of the etymologist to go back in time with rules that have many exceptions and documents often lacking and find where those names come from. Quite often, we can't tell. We have a few hypotheses, some more credible than the others, but nearly every time the simple "popular etymology" explanation is out of the way.

In this case, "la mort" is probably not la mort, and "aux Juifs" is probably not aux Juifs.
"La mort" has phonetically replaced "La mare" (the pond) in many occasions and it's quite possibly the original name.
"aux Juifs" could be what it is, therefore it could indeed be a pond where Jews were thrown in the disant past, thus easing the evolution into "la mort". Even then, commemorating it by a place name isn't advocating it to be done again.
It could also more probably be either "gallows" or "manure" both of which have been spelled, at one time or the other, "jui", "juis", or "juy". The f in "Juif", meaning "Jew", wasn't pronounced for centuries.

You have to all suck it up a little. You have to remember, and I speak mainly to the Muricans around here, that unlike you we didn't settle in a land with the near definitive form of our language. Therefore our place names sometimes have 2 or even 3 millenia behind them, and their spelling has only been fixed finally in the late 19th century. Imagine the numerous variations in a town's name that can have produced, and indeed if you look up any town name in wikipedia, you will probably find at least 4 or 5 different ways the name has been spelt throughout history.

So, no, there is absolutely nothing outrageous there, it's a severe case of DidNotDoTheResearch, and if we do it, we might as well unbaptize Grenoble to Grelibre again...