Before asking the question, I want to clarify that I am not a right-wing anti-semite conspiracy nut, although I suspect the answer to my question may feed into their paranoid theories. In fact I’m a bit of a lefty who believes the Roosevelts were two of the 4 or 5 greatest US presidents. But really, my interest here is linguistic and historical.
I’ve been to the Netherlands a few times in the last few years, and have picked up a few words of the language, and now recognize that Roosevelt is clearly the Dutch rendering of what I am sure all would agree is a recognizably Jewish name: Rosenfeld (meaning, “pink field”). I am also aware that Nazis and the like used this to accuse Franklin Roosevelt of being a closet Jew in the 30’s. So, this has piqued my curiosity. Did the Roosevelt family have some Dutch Jewish origins? In my Internet research, which not surprisingly pulled up some pretty repulsive stuff, I also came upon references to far-right attacks from the time that alleged that his mother’s family, the Delanos, was also Jewish, deriving from a Spanish/Italian Jewish family, although I’m not as interested in this. I’m more interested in the Roosevelt name itself.
This leads to me second question, which is how did recognizably Jewish names come to be so? I am interested in names in general, and my general understanding is that in Europe some time ago(700 - 1000 years ago?), most people didn’t have family names, and that the taking of family names starting with the nobility and worked it’s way down. My understanding is that the first family names started with geographical designations (John, the Duke of Gloucester became John Gloucester, for example). Later, as the custom of taking or assigning family names worked its way down the social ladder, occupation names became common-Bishop, Cooper (barrel hoop maker), Fletcher (arrow maker), Smith (metal worker), Skipper (shipper or boat captain), Parker (guy who oversaw hunting parks), etc etc etc. In English we also have names deriving from the Nordic system of patrinomials: Johnson (John’s son, son of John), Wilson (william’s son), Swenson (sven’s son), etc etc etc.
One can look at German names and see much the same, especially with occupation names (schmidt=Smith), (Zimmerman=Carpenter), (Kaufman=merchant) etc.
So, what about Rosenfeld (Pink Field), Greenberg (Green Mountain), Rosenthal (Pink valley?), etc? They seem to be based on geographical/topographical features, but why so often the same elements (stein, berg, thal, and colors: green, gold, rose)? And what’s a “Finkel” in German? And is my impression that few non-Jewish Germans have these names correct?
Now, the the common Jewish-name ending vitch, wicz, witch, witz, and variants I realize come from slavic patrinomials-(e.g. Yevegenivitch-son Yevgeny (Eugene), Petrovitch=son of Petro (Peter)), so I am not so interested in that. But what about the german ones?
Anyway, I think this gives you more than anough to chew on.