In America, certain names (those ending in ‘stein’ or ‘berg’, among others) are usually associated with Jewish people.
But in Germany, this isn’t the case; gentiles commonly hold these names (e.g: Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, for whom Bach wrote the Goldberg Variations).
Why is this?
I know this doesn’t answer your question, but Alfred Rosenberg was said to be incensed that his good German name was stolen by die Juden.
This doesn’t answer your question, either, but it does serve as an anecdotal support point.
One of my college roommates had such a Germanic surname (only his ended in “baum”). He and his family were Catholic; as far as he knew, he had no Jewish ancestry.
But, when he was a freshman (at the University of Wisconsin), he kept getting letters in his dorm mailbox from Hillel (the campus Jewish center). He had no interest in, say, going to a Rosh Hashanah gathering at Hillel, so he finally called the center. They told him that, every year, they got a copy of the list of freshmen students from the university, and would put the ones with typically Jewish-sounding surnames on their mailing list.
Most German Jews lacked last names until 1787 when the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II issued a decree called Das Patent über die Judennamen. It took a further 50 years before the process completed. This is long after the Goldberg variations.
The Jewish migration from Europe to America began with German Jews in the mid 19th century. As the vast majority of Jews in America until the end of the century, German Jews received a great deal of attention. That led to an association of certain names with Jews even when they had earlier been common among German Christians.
Today and for the last 70 years, of course, there are so few Jews left in Germany that it’s unlikely any last names would stand out.
My family history is all Eastern European Jews from an area that has been Poland and Russia at various times. There were 8 brothers who came over and essentially half took the first half of our long original last name, and half taking the last half.
Except for one brother who wanted an American sounding name. Which is why I have second cousins who are Goldbergs. For a long time I thought this might be family urban legend but I recently connected with them via ancestory.com.
Thank you for this, very enlightening.
I’m still not fully understanding something.
I guess, then, my question is really why there aren’t more German *gentiles *bearing names like Rosenberg and Weinstein. There are many German American gentiles, but they don’t usually have those names (unlike in Germany)
I have a longtime friend named Weinheimer whose ancestors were German gentiles. I’m just wondering why that’s not more common.
Thanks!
I suspect this may not even hold true if one equates “America” with “the USA”. The expulsion of the Jews from “Spain” didn’t apply to her colonies; quite a few went to these.
Is your question why aren’t there more of those lastnames among German-American gentiles, or among German gentiles?
Thanks for catching this.
I mean the former: why aren’t there more of those names among German American gentiles.
According to Wikipedia, the top 10 names in Germany are Müller, Schmidt, Schneider, Fischer, Weber, Meyer, Wagner, Becker, Schulz, Hoffmann (and it goes on like that). It’s possible that names like Weinheimer and Rosenberg are not that common in the first place, neither in Germany nor in America. Rosenberg is ranked 1360 in Germany, Weinheimer 11154th most common.
My family is heavy on color surnames. I’ve also known some people with cryptic Hebrew surnames (e.g., “Eisenstein” surreptitiously holding the forbidden Jewish name “Isaac”).
I was speaking specifically about German Jews and the U.S., as per the OP.
Isaac a forbidden Jewish name? Wouldn’t that surprise all the Jews named Isaac?
I don’t understand what you mean here.
But this doesn’t explain the discrepancy in how, in America, those rare names were more often taken by Jews than gentiles. I personally or professionally know three people named Rosenberg, and all are Jewish. I’ve never met a gentile by that name.
Confirmation bias?
Not forbidden by Jews - read it as Jewish names forbidden by some other group.
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How do you get Isaac (= “laughs”) from Eisenstein?
Re. surnames of Jews, we need frequency statistics of names of Jews in Germany, as well as in America, and then we can compare them to those for the population at large. Does anybody have a link to that data?
Right. Eisenstein is iron+stone.
German: topographic name for someone who lived by a place where iron ore was extracted, or perhaps a habitational name from a place named for its iron workings. Jewish (Ashkenazic): ornamental compound of German Eisen ‘iron’ + Stein ‘stone’.
Anybody named Isaac Eisenstein wouldn’t be cryptically or surreptitiously Jewish.
Cryptic naming was a way for Jews to include Jewish names forbidden by the state, such as Isaac, “hidden” in seemingly innocuous and licit names, such as Eisenstein. I agree that Isaac and Eisenstein don’t sound similar to my ears, but I’m Susan and was named for Shmuel. It’s a loose naming tradition.
Can you provide some cites that Isaac itself was specifically forbidden? I did a quick, obviously non-exhaustive, search and found nothing to substantiate that.
The one reference that was relevant actually contradicts the assertion. It’s in A Different Light: The Hanukkah Book of Celebration by Barbara Spectre in a section “What’s in a [German-Jewish] name?” by Jerry Muller. [result 9 of 9]
Isaac could have been banned later, and some areas applied the laws erratically, but I’d still be interested in the background.