I know they’re common German names. In America they’re considered Jewish. Upon hearing of a Steve Weiss, your average American would guess he was Jewish, unless s/he heard otherwise.
I have heard an Israeli historian on a radio show telling a very similar story. However, according to his version, the highest payment got you a name like Diamond or Dimastein, less would get you a Goldstein or so, then Silver or Silvering and so forth.
He than went on to tell of a meeting he had, where he could thus explain to a guy he met the origins of his name – whose translation in “sewer rat”.
German American is the largest ancestry group in the United States, so it is a bit odd that German surnames are thought to be Jewish. I would guess it is because a huge number of Germans anglicized their names at one point, so people no longer realize their surname is of German origin. Whereas Jewish immigrants would have far fewer reasons in the U.S. to anglicize their surnames.
Many persons with the last name “Smith” aren’t of English descent at all. Smith is a very common surname in America, and it is a name traditionally linked to English ancestry. However, because it was so common many immigrants of all sorts of origin might adopt it as their last name to blend in. Many families with the surname Smith started out as Schmid, Schmidt, Schmitt, or Schmitz.
Likewise, Müller being converted to Miller was common. Rickenbacker was originally Ricenbacher and Eisenhower was originally Eisenhauer.
It’s not only German surnames that have been anglicized throughout the years, of course. The surname van der Bilt eventually became Vanderbilt, and van Rosevelt became simply Roosevelt.
Lastnames like those are normal in Spanish (Moreno - dark haired, dark skinned; Blanco - white; Rubio - blonde; Grande - big) and come from nicknames being inherited through generations until they became family names. I have a friend who’s known in her father’s village as la Renca, Lame, because she’s the firstborn of the firstborn of the firstborn… of a man who lost a leg in the War of Cuba; if we hadn’t settled lastnames many hundreds of years ago, Lame would have become her family’s name by now.
Just saying that some of those may have a different origin than being handed down by some bureaucrat.
I’m taking issue with that, since Jewish immigrants would have the same reasons to change their names, and a few more, such as to assimilate or to avoid anti-Semitism. Also, many immigrants – Jewish and gentile alike – had their names changed at various points of entry to simplify them, or because of language barriers.
Now, of course, there is a good bit of intermarriage, so people with names once thought of as Jewish may not be, and people with names that couldn’t possibly be Jewish (such as my own) are. Of course, I’m Jewish, as is our son, although my husband isn’t, and we have his name.
Finally, I live in a region that is heavily German. The default assumption is that you’re German, even when you’re not. I would imagine the same is true in other areas that have high concentrations of any country-specific group. That could have some bearing on perceptions.
Robin
Which name is more common in your region: Schwartz or Black? Weiss or White?
In both cases, it’s the former.
Robin
If I may ask, what region do you live in?
I live in Central Pennsylvania, pretty much in the center of Amish country. So it seems like every other surname is German.
Robin
I don’t live that far from you. Certainly not in the middle of Amish country but German names are very common. Despite the fact that the largest part of my ethnic background is Italian, I have a very German last name. I have been mistaken for Jewish my entire life. In fact when my father first met my Italian grandmother she told my mother that he seemed nice but to not get too involved with him because mixed marriages don’t work. What religion would the children be? My mother had to laugh and then listed all the nuns, priests and one mother superior in my father’s family.
I don’t know why the conclusion “bored and impatient German bureaucrats” is necessary here. Black, White, Long, and Short are also very common English family names. Physical description is one of the basic origins of family names.
Saul Zeichner has a web page that supports the memories of Alive At Both Ends and Puzzler over the comments of Gerhard Falk, making the Gold- and Silver- names the result of better bribes rather than insults associated with anti-semitic stereotypes. I have no vested interest in the issue, but it would be interesting to see a scholarly paper on it. (Zeichner has invested a lot of effort in citing his sources, but this particular claim is asserted without citation.)
After the initial immigration of a few (typically Dutch) Sephardim in 18th and early 19th centuries, the Jewish immigration to the U.S. was overwhelmed by Ashkenazim at the end of the 19th and into the 20th century. These people universally spoke Yiddish, a language of Germanic words overlaying some other grammatical structures. So, by the 1930s, the overwhelming number of Jewish immigrants and their descendants carried German (or German sounding) names.
While German is the largest immigrant ethnic component, there are still areas in the U.S. where the German immigrants never built up a cultural presence. I have never encountered the belief that any German-sounding name indicates that the person is Jewish. I have encountered the belief that any Germanic name ending in -stein or beginning with Rosen-, Wasser-, Gold-, Silver-/Silber- and a few other affixes were Jewish. My guess would be that those beliefs arose in areas where there was not a strong German cultural tradition to provide lots of Catholic and Lutheran counter-examples.
From Rosen-, FDR was the target of claims that the old Dutch family name Roosevelt was “secretly Jewish.” Given the themes of his plays, I would guess that Alfred Uhry is Jewish, but he is certainly Southern. He wrote the scene in Driving Miss Daisy where the police ask about the ethnicity of “Werthan,” to which Daisy responds that it is “of German extraction,” only to have the cop make a snide remark about her being Jewish as Daisy and Hoke drive away.
I am not sure that there is a general trend in believing German=Jewish, but I would not be surprised to find areas of the country where unfamiliar German names are presumed to be Jewish.
It’s a real name in India but it’s pronounced Shee-ice-KOFF 
What I find funny is that there are a lot of people here who are named Schmuck (“decoration”, according to Google translator) and Putz (“finery”). Both names are slang terms for “penis” and “asshole/jackass” in Yiddish. I feel sorry for them. 
Robin
Then I guess an interesting question is why didn’t more Jews anglicize their names? Jews are a very small population in the United States (and actually in the world in general), and from my totally anecdotal experience it is rare to meet a Jew with an anglicized last name (at least if his father was also Jewish.)
I’ve known a few Jews with very anglicized names, but anecdotally it seems a larger number have Germanic names. While anecdotes can be interesting, it isn’t hard facts and I’m not even sure how you would come about hard facts on prevalence of last name trends amongst American Jews.
But this trend is certainly not true in the U.S. at large. Schmidt is nowhere near as common a surname as Smith (which the SSA can demonstrate is the most common last surname in general.) Schmidt is a very common German surname, and Germans represented the single largest ancestry group in the United States, yet Smith is hands down more prevalent than Schmidt, it just seems quite likely to me that a significant part of that has to do with family names becoming anglicized. And it was not only for purposes of avoiding discrimination (I thought I made that clear) the Rosavelts/Roosevelts and van der Bilts/Vanderbilts appear to have done it over time because they started speaking English as their first language and thus a non-English sounding surname probably was strange to them.
That explains why it seems a large percentage of our Jewish population have Germanic surnames, but I wonder why they were never anglicized. Maybe that did happen, but it just doesn’t seem to have happened to the same degree it did in the German-American population. It just seems like almost any famous German American from prior-1950 you find that their family name was anglicized at some point (usually around the years in which WWI was fought.) I can understand why Jewish immigrants in the 1930s wouldn’t have anglicized their names, as I think by and large the heavy stigma of a Germanic surname had passed by then (during World War II the government made substantial efforts to highlight high-ranking German-American members of the military and to avoid falling into the crazy anti-German hysteria we had during WWI.)
One factor might explain at least part of the difference. The most common names among German gentiles are based on trades* but those names are a lot rarer among Jews because they were barred from the guilds when those names developed. Those names are especially easy to anglicize. Often the English equivalent even sounds reasonably similar: Schmidt/Smith, Becker/Baker, Müller/Miller, Fischer/Fisher… Not all are that similar but at least usually there is a straightforward translation that is already an established surname.
(* Incidentally Klein is the most common name that is not based on any occupation)
In my experience as a Jew, though, the converse is true. I did go to Hebrew school with kids named Goldstein, but more of them had names like Carl, Spett (anglicized from something else, but I don’t know what), and more than a few named Smith. Of course, I’ve lived in some areas where Jews were a much smaller minority, so the incentive was probably there to change names to avoid being profiled, and again, the recent trend toward intermarriage, which leads to nice Jewish kids named Boyd and Donohoe.
I’m not saying you’re 100% wrong, or that I’m 100% right. I’m just saying that it depends on a lot of things.
It’s not that hard to measure trends, but it is a LOT of work. You’d basically compare names going in to Ellis Island or Castle Garden and compare them against census records, naturalization records, legal records, and the like. However, given the difficulty in finding pre-war records in Europe and the relatively underground nature of some Jewish communities, it’s a Herculean task at best and damn near impossible at worst.
Also, one more point is that there are Jews who changed their names to German names. German Jews were seen as more, ah, upper-crust than Eastern European Jews. My own family (anecdotal, I know) changed its name from something Russian to Kramer. :shrug:
Robin