# Certain German names and Jewish Americans **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 18, 2019, 10:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/certain-german-names-and-jewish-americans/841972 "2019-10-18T22:17:31Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Charlie\_Tan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/charlie_tan/32/12582_2.png) [@Charlie\_Tan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Charlie_Tan)\ **Post date:** [October 22, 2019, 11:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/certain-german-names-and-jewish-americans/841972/41 "2019-10-22T11:38:29Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > And that would be true even if they had German names. They don’t. If you had bothered to read your cite, you would have noticed that 85% of the Jews in Germany today emigrated after the fall of the Communist countries and are native-Russian speakers. > [@ftg](#): > > I was curious what these numbers mean in terms of % of population. > > 1933: 500k of 67M or .75% > Now: 200k of 83.2M or .24% > > So not a big percentage to begin with and even smaller now. > [@Shmendrik](#): > > There aren’t really 200,000 Jews “left” in Germany, in the sense that the large majority of them are relatively recent Russian immigrants rather than descendants of the prewar community. In the context of this thread, that means they are likely to have Russian family names rather than German/Yiddish ones. I did read the cite I provided. My only issue was the claim that there were so few Jews left. They were not a significant part of the population before 1933, and are not today. Of course, not many are left, as in remained in Germany and survived the holocaust _and_ live today. However, they are almost all Ashkenazim, meaning that even those migrating from the former U.S.S.R. have their roots in Germany. So even discounting the fact that they are not descendants of 20th century German Jews, they are in fact descendants of Jews living in Germany earlier, and speaking Yiddish. [Checking the Wiki list of famous Jews from Russia and Soviet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jews_born_in_the_Russian_Empire_and_the_Soviet_Union) reveals a lot of Slavic sounding names (e.g. _-ski_ or _-sky_, _-ich_) but also a significant amount of Germanic sounding names. I can’t say which group is more likely, if any, to migrate to Germany. Can you guys? ---
**Author:** ![Brayne\_Ded](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e9bcb4/32.png) [@Brayne\_Ded](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Brayne_Ded)\ **Post date:** [October 23, 2019, 9:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/certain-german-names-and-jewish-americans/841972/42 "2019-10-23T09:40:45Z")
> [@DPRK](#): > > 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. The first eight names are professions. (A Meyer or Mayer or Maier is a farmer.) Many Jewish people took place names as surnames. However, many Germans had also done so, and of course many aristocrats took a name based on their place of residence. And then the -berg - and -stein names. Many German aristocrats had such names, too, because the word usually means "rock"and castles were often built prominent rocks or hills. However, the Jews were often allocated unflattering names: so Harvey Weinstein is actually Harvey Tartar (the stuff that collects in bottles of very old wine). Names with gold or silver or jewelry were often an indicator, hence Goldstein and (Helena) Rubinstein (ruby). Names of fruit or nut trees were also used: Mandelbaum, Nussbaum, Kirschbaum. And food: the best one there is Knoblauch (garlic), which in at least one case got morphed into Knoblick. And some names were just plain nasty, such as “verdigris”, or Grünspan. That was anglicized to Greenspan - remember him? ---
**Author:** ![Brayne\_Ded](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e9bcb4/32.png) [@Brayne\_Ded](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Brayne_Ded)\ **Post date:** [October 23, 2019, 9:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/certain-german-names-and-jewish-americans/841972/43 "2019-10-23T09:48:36Z")
> [@Charlie\_Tan](#): > > I did read the cite I provided. My only issue was the claim that there were so few Jews left. They were not a significant part of the population before 1933, and are not today. > > Of course, not many are left, as in remained in Germany and survived the holocaust _and_ live today. However, they are almost all Ashkenazim, meaning that even those migrating from the former U.S.S.R. have their roots in Germany. So even discounting the fact that they are not descendants of 20th century German Jews, they are in fact descendants of Jews living in Germany earlier, and speaking Yiddish. > > [Checking the Wiki list of famous Jews from Russia and Soviet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jews_born_in_the_Russian_Empire_and_the_Soviet_Union) reveals a lot of Slavic sounding names (e.g. _-ski_ or _-sky_, _-ich_) but also a significant amount of Germanic sounding names. I can’t say which group is more likely, if any, to migrate to Germany. Can you guys? The biggest migration of Jewish people into the USA was from Russia, the Ukraine and Poland, especially Galicia, a notoriously overpopulated and poverty-stricken area in the east around Lvov/Lviv. Germany was relatively more affluent, so fewer of them emigrated, and when Hitler came around they were refused entry into most countries when they tried to flee. Many Jews took place names,in one of three ways: the name of the place (Posen), the adjective (Poznanski) or the German style (Tarnow -\> Tarnower or Tarnauer). Russian and Polish use -ski/sky for masculine adjectival endings. Jews in Poland and Czechoslovakia often lived in German-speaking areas, and many place names there are both Germanic and Slavonic. ---
**Author:** ![Brayne\_Ded](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e9bcb4/32.png) [@Brayne\_Ded](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Brayne_Ded)\ **Post date:** [October 23, 2019, 9:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/certain-german-names-and-jewish-americans/841972/44 "2019-10-23T09:53:54Z")
> [@EinsteinsHund](#): > > I have restrained from this thread until now, because my contribution would have been solely anecdotal and I didn’t have a cite, but your post confirms my memory. I remember being told by (I think) a schoolteacher that at one time in German history, the Jews had to choose surnames, but couldn’t take just anyone. They could choose pleasing sounding names like Goldberg, Rosenthal etc, but they had to pay for a nice name. Maybe that explains why some, obviously the poorer folks, ended up with “ugly” names like Knobloch. That’s still just one of my memories from school and a little conjecture, but it’d fit with the info in your post. In some cases they had no choice at all. The lovable Austrians would often just go to a village and assign names at random, or create groups that would be named after colors (rot/roth, gruen, braun. scwarz, weiss). The novelist Philip Roth as the older spelling of red,as does a well-known banking dynasty (red shield). That said, these were also normal German names, so Eva Braun was not Jewish! Some names were really nasty, such as Galgenstrick (noose). But what other ways are there to create surnames? Many Celtic and Scandinavian names are patronymics, so you have Ronald Son of Donald and John Johnson (Johansson). [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/certain-german-names-and-jewish-americans/841972.md?page=2)