דּוּבְדְּבָן

Of all the summer fruits of the Rosaceae family, the cherry is probably the latest to come to the knowledge of the sages of Israel, and it is not clearly mentioned at all in the Mishnah or Talmud. Instead, we find in the Talmud other words that were mistakenly interpreted as referring to cherries. One is "gudgoniyot," which was mostly interpreted as coriander or a type of clover, but Rashi interpreted it in one place (Berakhot 57b) as "cerites" (cerises), the Old French word for cherries. Following this, Mendel Lefin renewed the use of the word "gudgoniyot" as a term for cherry in his book "Medicine of the People" in the 1780s, and many of the Haskalah writers followed him. The second word is "davdavaniyot," which is mentioned in the Talmud (Avodah Zarah 39b): "And the davdavaniyot, even though they drip, they do not make [food] susceptible to impurity." Its original meaning is not clear, and Rashi interpreted it as "clusters of grapes." However, in a later period, Nathan of Rome wrote in his dictionary "HaArukh" (11th century) that "duvdevaniyot" are "cirasi" (ciliegie), which is the Old Italian word for cherries. Following this, when Mendele Mocher Sforim (Shalom Yaakov Abramovitch) translated "The Book of Natural History" in 1862, he chose to call the fruit "davdavaniyot" (in singular: duvdevaniyah). This form began to push out "gudganiyot" which was common before. At the end of the 19th century, the form "duvdevan" began to appear, probably as an incorrect back-formation from the form "davdavaniyot," assuming that the suffix -iyot is a plural suffix. At the beginning of the 20th century, the form "duvdevan" and the plural form "duvdevanim" pushed out the previous forms and became accepted in modern Hebrew.