Goldberg
Silverstein
Diamond
Whats the straight dope with regards to jewish people and precious metal/stones in their last names? The theory posed to me was that they were named after the professions their families were historically involved in, be it the diamond trade, gold exchange etc.
What is really going on here?
Jews in Medieval and post-Medieval Europe were barred from guild membership and confined to trades that were regarded as sinful by Christians, but useful by officialdom, such as moneylending. I know that the Swiss became famous as watchmakers because the Calvinists thought that jewelry was sinful and many Swiss jewelers became watchmakers. Perhaps that left the jewelry trade to the Jews.
FWIW,
Rob
Though I have no idea of the truth of this, I’ve heard that the medieval Holy Roman Empire had a money-making scam that involved forcing Jews to pay for their surnames. If you could afford to pay a lot you got a nice name such as Goldberg (mountain of gold). If you couldn’t pay so much you got a neutral name like Cohen or Meyer. Those who couldn’t pay at all were issued insulting names, though none of those have survived to modern times since their bearers changed them as soon as possible.
Actually, note the origin of the names. GoldBerg. SilverStein. It’s German. So, many of the stereotypically “Jewish” names are actually creations of a long-dead German bureacracy.
For much of history, neither Jews no anyone else had last names. You didn’t need them. Eventually, that changed, but many Jews were a bit more conservative and insular at the time. It was easier to stay out of officialdom’s wrath, or at least, notice.
In Germany, the government eventually simply walked around and handed out names! They wanted to be able to keep track of people more easily, and the lack of last names was a bureaucratic nightmare. The government handed simple names, chosen from a fairly short list, if you hadn’t one of your own. They often jsut combiend two simple words: Gold, Silber (Silver), Berg (Mountain), Stein (Stone), Wein, etc. Some parts were later anglicized if the family entered the US of A, but not all.
I’m not sure if stereotypes held among the bureaucrats influenced their choice of words, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
I’m no expert (or Jew) but I wouldn’t put Cohen in the category of “neutral name”. It has a very specific meaning that goes back much further than any of the German origin names.
I have trouble believing that any Jewish person would see Cohen as a neutral name since it seems to have great historical status. So the whole theory seems to be a bit dodgy.
OK OK. I just used Cohen as the first Jewish name that popped into my head. Replace it with whatever name feels more “neutral” to you.
Hello? Is this thing on?
The on-line Jewish Encyclopedia from 1908 has a good article on names including a section on surnames.
This sounds like it came from a real event, although the dates and details are off. The Sephardim had been using surnames for hundreds of years (picked up from the Arabs while they were in Spain before the Arabs and Jews were both expelled). The Ashkenazim, however, had never picked up that habit and may have actually resisted it. In 1787, Joseph II of Austria, (technically,the Holy Roman Emperor, sort of) decreed that all Jews had to have surnames. He was followed in 1808, by Napoleon, and the rest of Europe culminating in Russia under Nicholas I in 1845 or 1848. The bureaucrats who recorded names in Austria did develop a practice of demanding bribes in order to use the name selected by the family, frequently assigning more insulting names if the bribe was not forthcoming or sufficiently large. I have found no evidence that there was a clear scale of cash for good names (although there might have been). Note, however, that this was a late 18th century event, not medieval or even Renaissance.
Accoreding to Dr. Gerhard Falk’s Origins of Jewish Names, the Gold- and Silver- names were actually the insulting names assigned to Jews, based on the frequent rumor that “all” Jews had fabulous wealth secreted away.
ETA: Falk’s version is plausible, but we might want to research the matter further: while his narrative parallels most of the other sources I have found, a few of his details seem a bit “off,” so I do not know how much scholarship supports his claim.
I’ll have to ask my friend Bucky Goldstein about this. He’s riding around the north 40 just at the moment, ropin’ steer and yodelin’ up a storm.
Of course, Kinky Friedman and his Texas Jewboys might figure into your suggestion.
Could you get a nonprecious metal name (Kupfer=copper, Eisen=iron, Zinn=tin) for a little less scratch than a precious or gem name?
Some of the really insulting names (Goldwasser=weewee) made it over here, but I imagine a lot of Schwarzkopfs and Weisskopfs were once Scheisskopfs.
Scheißkopf is a word that I’ve never heard in German but a surprising number of English speakers thinks it’s a typical German insult. Google indicates that it’s a character in Catch-22, perhaps that’s how it got startet.
Are Schwarzkopf and Weißkopf that frequent among Jews? I’m often surprised which names are considered typically Jewish in America. Many are used by Germans of Christian heritage, too.
I think that I’m remembering this correctly.
In or about 1975, I was at Stanford in CA., helping my then wife research an early Russian Bolshvik, and it was my job to look for German references, since I could very haltingly read German, with a dictionary.
I remember reading the London Times, and seeing a public notice, to wit: I, Harry Horschitz, petition to change my name to “Harry Horst.”
At least, that’s the gist of it.
I remember reading in a Jewish encyclopedia (sorry, not cite, it was in 1987) that some Jewish surnames incorporated surreptitious references to officially forbidden names, hence Eisen- and Ein- (as an abbreviated form of Eisen-) were code for “Isaac.”
Does Goldwasser/Goldwater actually mean ‘urine’? How is it that the name is still common in areas where changing a name is no big deal?
Goldwasser - Wikipedia . Maybe in some rarely used slang.
Think of the Jews you know named Shwartz, Weiss, Gross, or Klein. Black, White, Big, Little, all handed down by bored and impatient German Bureaucrats
Those are completely normal and relatively frequent German surnames. These are their ranks among the most common German surnames and frequencies in 2000:[ul]
[li]15 Klein (67924)[/li][li]19 Schwarz (55086)[/li][li]47 Weiß (36699)[/li][li]77 Groß (24170)[/li][/ul]
Are these names really significantly more common among Jews? In Germany the number of people bearing one of these four names is about equal to the total number of Jews and far greater than the number of Jews with German heritage (these days most are recent eastern European immigrants.) That means that even if they might be a bit more frequent among Jews, there is no shortage of non-Jews with these names.
FWIW, “any German surname = Jewish” is a meme that pops up from time to time in American media.
There was a television movie made in the late 80s about stewardess Uli Derickson, famous for helping to mitigate a real-life hijacking in the mid-80s. In this movie, there was a scene in which one of the (Arab) terrorists was looking at a list of passengers to find Jews. The plot expedient was for the list-holding terrorist to tell another that he was searching for German surnames – the implication was that all the Jews would turn up that way.
That particular scene may have rankled in Germany … but in much of the U.S. – especially ion areas where there are comparatively few folks of German descent – it made perfect sense.