Roosevelt=Rosenfeld; Roosevelt ancestry; history of "Jewish" names

Factual Questions
1

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.

2

Jews (and Eastern Europeans) were amongst the last Europeans to adopt last names.

As a result, those ‘typical’ names have just had less time to transmorgify to some sort of meaningless “Marcy,” “Adkinson” or “Powell.”

3

[nitpick]
‘Rosenfeld’ would for Dutch people mean either ‘field of roses’ or ‘pink field’: ‘roos’ and ‘rozen’ means 'rose and 'roses, while ‘roze’ means ‘pink’.
Properly spelled it would have to be ‘Rozenveld’ or ‘Roze-veld’, but names are often spelled in archaic manner.

‘Rosenfeld’ is actually proper German for ‘field of roses’.
[/nitpick]

That said, in The Netherlands it is regularly said that the Roosenvelt family was of Dutch origin. However, this may be patriottic bias, so I’m not sure of the veracity of that statement. Neither do I know whether they actually were Jewish-Dutch. Sorry I can’t help you more.

4

German Jews did not have surnames until they were required for tax purposes in the early 19th century. Wealthy Jews could purchase desirable names; poorer Jews often had insulting names imposed on them:

http://www.geocities.com/buddychai/Religion/Names.html

So “recognizably Jewish names” became recognizable because they came from a small pool of names acquired at about the same time, rather than evolving over centuries. This was reinforced in the U.S. because the largest and most influential pool of Jewish immigrants in the 19th century were from Germany. (Remember than Germany was not a unified country until late in the century, but we retroactively assign Germanyness to all the pieces that combined.)

Other countries had more or less similar policies at various dates. Few “recognizably Jewish names” would be from earlier than about 1750, though, except perhaps for a few like Levy or Cohen.

Both Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt have had their genealogy studied for generations. They were Roosevelts back to the dawn of time, so to speak, well before Jews acquired surnames. This page gives Roosevelts back to the 17th century.

5

so, why aren’t there more non-jewish germans or dutch with the name rosenfeld, roosenveld, roosevelt or the like? or are there and i’m just not aware of it? that is, if the Roosevelt family had this name going back to the 1600’s in Holland, which I think they did, I assume Rosenfeld/Roosevelt is not just a made-up name, created by and/or for Jews in the early 18th Century as you said.

6

I think you’re just not aware of them. Have you done any research on the subject? Looked at a German or Dutch phone book? Read any history? Gone into genealogy sites? Anything?

7

Jeez, Exapno_Mapcase, does a person have to do research before posting to General Questions? I think you’re being a little harsh.

8

Actually a quick google turns up plenty of Dutch sites refering to twentieth century Rosenfeld, Rozenveld, Rosenveld and the like. Spellings like Roosenveld or Roosenfelt tend to turn up more English sites.

This suggests that Dutch names have mostly been normalized during the last centuries, while emigrants (understandably) kept the older ortography, or even maintained a slightly misspelled variant. I’m not sure whether old Dutch allowed to leave out the ‘n’, as in Roosevelt. Older spelling was, however, not fully consistent, as far as I know.

9

And another Google turns up this site, which claims that Roosevelt’s ancestor is Claes Martensen van Rosenvelt who emigrated in 1649. My guess about the ‘n’ appears correct.

The name doesn’t suggest jewish ancestry.

10

I am fairly certain that if John Kerry (practicing Roman Catholic) were elected president, he’d be the first president with known Jewish ancestors.

Barry Goldwater’s father was Jewish, though he was an Episcopalian. The family name was originally Goldwasser.

Anyway, the Nazis (and their successors) tied all of their enemies to Jewish ancestors, as they did in this tract.

http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/ley1.htm

The “Detroit Jewish Chronicle,” a Jewish newspaper, reported in 1935 that Roosevelt was descended from the Spanish Jew Rossocampo. In 1939 Adolf Schmalix concluded in his “Are the Roosevelts Jewish?” that Roosevelt is the descendant of a Dutch family whose earliest member is the farmer Claes Martensen, who was named after his farm, called “Het Roosevelt.” On the other hand, it is clear that the Roosevelts took on Jewish blood through marriage once in the United States. Schmalix proves that as early as the second generation on American soil (from the 17th to the 18th Century), a Jewess Sarah Salomons joined the Roosevelt family. The mother of President Roosevelt was Sarah Delano, who Schmalix maintains was a descendant of the Italian or Spanish Jewish family Delano (Dillan, Delan or Dillano).

(this tract also contains a swipe at the Ku Klux Klan!)
Of course this is probably a load of bunk.

11

FDR’s Library has his Geneology online
http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/geneal98.html

12

When I was studying German, my tutor told me that many German Jewish names had an identifiable ring to them, as has been discussed on this board. They sounded mildly artificial, either to nice or too ugly: e.g., Goldberg (gold mountain), Totenberg (death mountain)

I heard one anecdote, that in one Austrian county, the Jews who could not afford to buy nice sounding surnames once ordered to do so, were given one of the following names:

White, Black, Big, Small

Weiss, Schwartz, Gross, Klein.

13

first, thanks to the person who defended me above. I didn’t do any research, but based my opinion that not many non-Jewish Dutch and Germans have (to my, 41 yo, American sunbelt-raised ears) “Jewish” names, on my life experience. Without going into detail, I am satisfied that my opinion is well-founded. That’s not to say I might not be wrong, but I have a pretty good degree of confidence. And, what research could I have done? Granted, if there are thousands, tens of thousands Finkelsteins and Rosenwassers etc. in the Frankfurt phone book, and assuming the numbers of Jews in Germany are still very very low, that would suggest that many non-Jewish Germans have what to my ears are Jewish names. But I don’t think that’s measurably more scientific than my opinion based on a lifetime of meeting and reading the names of gazillions of Jews, Germans, and Dutch, and coming away with the firm impression that there are “Jewish” names.

Next, I appreciate the response anyway, and note that in one of my respones I misquoted, he said 19th century, not 18th.

However, I have to say I’m a little skeptical. Could it be true such a substantial portion of the population didn’t have surnames until the early 1800’s? Granted until the unification of Germany late in the 1800’s it was a bunch of principalities and the like, with presumably less of the trappings of modern governmental administration, but that still seems awfully late.

And did I understand correctly that Jews got surnames later than the rest of the population? If so, when did Germans in general (again, recognizing we’re talking about many jurisdctions here) start taking family names? And, so long as we’re at it, what about English and French? I’ve always generally guessed that it was somewhere between 1200 and 1600, but I’ve never put the time in to figure it out. Does anyone know the history of this?

14

If you live in a village of, say, 500 people, and all your interaction is with other people in that village, you don’t really need a surname. There aren’t going to be that many people named Isaac, and if somebody needs to specify, he’s going to call you “Isaac the butcher”, or “big Isaac”, or “I ran into Avram’s son Isaac the other day…” Everbody in the village already knows who’s related to who, and they don’t need last names to tell them. Last names are for nobles and big city people.

Jews in Germany were less likely than gentiles to have last names just because the Jewish communities were smaller and more isolated, there was less travel between them, and Jews were less likely to become prominent in the outside world.

15

Why so skeptical? A substantial proportion of the world’s people today don’t have family names.

Nit: Note the use of the term “family name.” “Surname” correctly applies to an “added name,” such as in William the Conqueror.

16

I’ll back senchousan up here. I spent a year in Germany and encountered virtually nobody with typically Jewish sounding names. Of course, the actuall Jewish population was decimated by the Holocaust. As for the possibility of non-Jewish people with Jewish sounding names, and their absence, I suppose some of them got overwhelmed by the Holocaust because of those names, when they were unable to establish their non-Jewishness; and others probably changed their names as soon as they saw which way the wind was blowing.

I don’t think descriptive or occupational names like Schwartz (black), Klein (little), Gross (big), Schneider, and so on, are specifically Jewish, on the other hand. Lots of Germans have names of that type.

17

Not really. If your four grandparents were non-Jewish you were treated as non-Jewish for purposes of the worst persecution, and that should have been easy to establish. (there were some exemptions, e.g. to own a farm you had to prove 200 years of non-Jewish ancestry). So the name itself would not have been a sentence of death.

There does seem to be some difference in perception in the US vs. Germany. I have frequently encountered situtations in US fiction where someone’s surname was Baum, Zimmerman or similar and the acting persons assumed from that that they were Jewish. I’d have thought ‘German-language origin, impossible to say if Jewish’.

18

The use of surname to mean “family name” has been around pretty much as long as “added name” has. The “family name” is certainly the more common one now.

19

Well, yes, this usage has been around in general speech, but when the subject of interest is names, the trend among people who talk about names is to rely on more precise terminology, especially when speaking in an international context. The American terms “first name” and “last name” (they’re not always in that order) and the British terms “Christian name” (implying conference in a Christian ceremony) and “surname” all carry with them significant ambiguities. I was just trying to suggest the usage of the more precise “family name” (which goes along with “given name”), which is the practise of genealogists and those who study names.