Can someone tell me about the meaning of Jewish surnames, like -berg, -man, -feld. etc. are these Hebrew words or something? Also what was the deal with Adolf Eichmann? his last name sounds Jewish but surely it was not.
The name endings you mention are Germanic, not specifically Jewish as such. A large proportion of US Jewry (I’m guessing you are from the US) came from German-speaking areas of central Europe.
Berg means mountain, burg means town, feld means field, and mann means man.
A lot of traditionally Ashkenazic Jewish surnames are German-derived, hence the elements like -berg (mountain), -feld (field), and -man (er, man). So Rosenberg means ‘mountain of roses’. Eichmann means ‘man of the oak forest’, I believe. Yiddish is derived from German, too, not from Hebrew.
What I want to know is what the hell Finkelstein means.
-stein means “stone” and finkel means gem.
An interesting page on Jewish surnames (meaning, basically, Ashkenazic (Northern and Northeastern European) Jewish surnames.
Max Weinberg used to be named Shecky Feinblat. He changed it 'cause he thought it sounded too Jewish.
[/old ‘Conan’ joke]
My grandfather’s name was Mansbacher- his family chose the name of the nearest town. My great-grandmother was Sephardi, I have no idea what her last name was.
My friend’s original family name was Rotnager, which means rusty nail- their theory is that their ancestor was too cheap to buy a better name, later the family changed their name to Mandel (almond).
Her family were Austria, mine were German, so these names would have been chosen in the 1700s.
Something I’ve always wondered: Why do so many people pronounce their surnames ending in -stein, ‘-steen’?
My guess is they don’t want to be associated with kooky ancestors who used to perform questionable experiments on the reanimation of dead tissue.
Given that 15% of the population of the U.S. refer to themselves as being of German ancestry and only 2% refer to themselves as being of Jewish ancestry, it’s likely that many (perhaps most) of the people whose last names are what you think of as “Jewish names” are actually of non-Jewish German ancestry.
I am no kind of expert on eponymy, but I can in fact answer this one: “-ei-” as the same vowel as in the pronoun “I” is a High German usage, now a part of standard German. Yiddish, on the other hand, is a separate language, significantly different from standard German, and among the differences is the rendering of that sound, at least sometimes, as an “eee” sound.
The origin of the various Germanic dialects and languages is a Grimm subject. 
Aha! I dd not know that - I always thought it was people being stupid and wrong. :smack: More ignorance fought. 
What I’ve always wondered about was, if these names are your garden variety German names (which they seem to be–there’s nothing Jewish about a field or a mountain or a stone or a leaf, is there?) and most of the random Germanic-derived people you encounter are likely to be Christian rather than Jewish, why is it that most people whose last names end in -feld or -berg or -stein or-blatt are Jewish?
I believe that a lot of non-Jewish Germans who found themselves sharing surnames with Jewish families, changed their names to something else so they wouldn’t be mistaken for Jews. Thus, there’s a body of Germanic surnames that are generally thought of as being Jewish.
Also, a lot of the Germanic Jewish surnames were “made up,” thus so many compoundings with -berg and -stein etc, and also, so many surnames that are also cities. Jewish families often took the name of their city (my ancestors did that, hooray). Gentile Germans had a mostly different pool of surnames.
Nobody needs to lecture me on all surnames being ultimately made up, okay?
In the United States you often find stereotypically Jewish Germanic surnames on people with no known Jewish ancestry but plenty of known German ancestry. This is due to a combination of “hiding” Jewish ancestors (again, my ancestors), and to the fact that gentile families with German names didn’t ever change the names to sound less Jewish.
Solid triple on a pitch thrown over the fat part of the plate. Nice job!
Surnames can be broken into a few big classes – city/town of origin (Berliner, Frankfurter), profession (Schechter, Shumacher, Finkel), Jewish patrilineal descent (Katz, Levy, Cohen, Segal), or regular patrilineal (Abramowitz) and other – mostly derogatory names and descriptive names that were sometimes assigned or picked as described above. There are many nice descriptions of these last “artificial names” on the web – here is a link to a PDF that has a big categorization of the names. They usually are two-part, consisting of metal/plant/natural feature/adjective/color/etc.
My surname is a place name. Since my family originated in Lithuania, it ended in -ski which was dropped when my family left. From the other side, my great-grandfather picked an artificial name when he emigrated. Same thing happened with my grandmother, who had an unpronounceable Polish last name (I think it was Kapelushnikas), shortened to Rosenbloom upon emigration. My wife’s name is a very typical artificial name.
Is that true for Yiddish in general or just for American Yiddish? I’ve never heard it that way in a non-American context, only /ai/ or sometimes /ei/.
I don’t have any statistics, but it seems that there are differences in the frequencies of certain kinds of names. For example by far the largest group of German surnames are derived from professions. At the time when christian surnames were developed in Germany, jews were prohibited from most ordinary professions, so those are underrepresented. Names derived from objects exist as German christian surnames but they are not as frequent as they seem to be among jewish names. Sometimes however I am a bit surprised which names count as “typically jewish” in other countries.
Standard German names came from a different pool. These “Jewish” names were all chosen in the 1700 when it became mandatory for everyone to have last names. If you paid a bribe to the clerk you’d be able to choose your own name and so we have these grandiose Rosenbaums (Rose-Tree) and Goldbergs (Gold-Mountain) and Himmelfarbs (Heaven-Color). Or you could get a neutral name, like Kaufmann (Shop-man/Merchant). Or the clerk didn’t like you, you could be assigned a silly name, like the previously mentioned Rotnager (Red(rusty)-Nail).
But standard German names mostly were assigned before this. And because Jews were kept out of professions and denied the right to own land, you don’t see many jewish Schmidts (Smith) because there weren’t many jewish blacksmiths in the 1700s, or many jewish Schultzes (village headman).
Like the incredibly sexy Jon Stuart Leibowitz becoming Jon Stewart - he claims he dropped the Leibowitz because it was “too Hollywood”.
I can’t vouch for the veracity of this, but I was once told that there was a time when those in charge in Germany decreed that all Jews had to take as a last name a non-living thing. Thus all the -steins.