What's in a name?
If your family name is written in Arabic as above then no matter if you spell your name Soudah, Sudah, Souda or Sodah using Latin characters or if you belong to a Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant denomination, you are a descendant of one (or more) of nine men who were born in Rafidia (Palestine) at different points in time before the middle of the nineteenth century.
Why do we spell it Soudah?
Around 1850 only France
and Britain had means to prove their presence in the area. So the
Catholic institutions in the Holy Land received mainly French financing.
France was quite rich and had a clear will to colonise whatever could be
colonised at that time so there must have been some sort of official
support too behind the catholic institutions. Thus we can imagine that
the first Soudah boy to go to school was taught French and had his name
written as Soudah which is a specifically French spelling. Could that
boy be As’ad (Felix) Soudah (52), born in 1851 and who was ordained
priest on September 22nd 1877. This probably explains why
most of the Soudahs, until this day, spell their name as they do. The
“Sudah” spelling would have been more appropriate in any other Western
language.
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