Izrael is a variant of Israel, from Hebrew, meaning one who wrestles with God.
Izrael is a variant spelling of Israel, one of the most theologically and historically freighted names in the world. Its Hebrew source, *Yisra'el*, is traditionally interpreted as 'one who wrestles with God' or 'God contends,' derived from the verb *sarah* (to struggle, to persist) and *El* (God). The name originates in the Book of Genesis, where the patriarch Jacob receives it after his nocturnal wrestling match with a divine being at the ford of the Jabbok — a renaming that marks his transformation into the father of the twelve tribes.
For millennia Israel was primarily a name carried within Jewish communities, where it bore immense religious and ancestral significance. Prominent bearers include Israel Baal Shem Tov, the eighteenth-century Ukrainian mystic who founded Hasidic Judaism, and Israel Zangwill, the British writer whose 1908 play *The Melting Pot* coined that famous metaphor for American immigration. The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 gave the name an additional geopolitical dimension that made it simultaneously more visible and, for some communities, more loaded in secular contexts.
The Izrael spelling, with its z replacing the s, appears particularly in Eastern European Jewish traditions and their diaspora descendants, reflecting the phonetic patterns of Yiddish and Polish. It is a spelling that carries the specific weight of Ashkenazi heritage. Today parents who choose Izrael are often honoring ancestry and faith while selecting a form that feels slightly more individual than the standard Israel — the z lending a visual distinctiveness to a name whose meaning has always been about transformation through struggle.