Like “-berg” and “-stein.”
Simple answer is that a great number of the northern Jews lived in Germany.
Also, the Yiddish language and German language are in the same language family.
Just for emphasis: The Germanic language family also includes Swedish and English, but Yiddish is much more closely related to German than they are.
I’m a vegetarian once removed. I only eat meat from animals that are vegetarians.
I don’t know if this is true or not, but I heard that 'waaaay back when, many Russian Jews were forced to take “foreign” names, to make them less Russian and deny them more citizenship rights.
My mother’s maternal line came from Odessa, but their name was “Soifer” (oddly, German for “sucker,” and they were anything but!). Maybe the originally came from Germany in the middle ages? Or was the name Soifer forced on them?
I don’t know anything about whether Russian Jews were forced to take different names, but there were a lot of ethnic Germans in Russia at one point, especially in the Volga River region. IIRC, many of them settled there between 1400-1700 (also the same general time frame when Germans settled in various parts of the Balkans).
And the Jews of old Spain had Spanish names and spoke Ladino.
Peter Marshall: “In the fairy tale “Rumplestiltskin,” what did the king want to change into gold?”
George Gobel: “His name – Goldstein.”
– Thanx and a tip of the hat to the HOLLYWOOD SQUARES
Because they come from Germany or the surrounding areas.
(As an aside, Ashkenazi Jews are so called because they come from that reigon. Ashkenaz is the traditional biblical name for Germany.)
I think it has a lot more to do with the fact that they spoke Yiddish than where they lived. Many Jews lived in Germany but a whole lot more lived in eastern Europe. That’s why you also see many jewish names ending with typical slavic suffixes like -wicz (-vitz) or -ski (-sky).
After the partitions of Poland, Jews living in the territories under the German occupation were discouraged from Germanizing their names while Jews under Russian occupation were encouraged to Russify theirs. That makes it even more likely that the names came from Yiddish. (It would be hard to change your name from Zlotowicz to Goldmann but not vice versa.)
Just to clarify: Säufer (as it is spelled in standard German), which is pronounced “Soifer” does not mean “sucker” but rather “(heavy) drinker”, certainly by no means flattering. Unflattering German names were forced on Jewish families particularly often by the officials of the Austrian Empire. In fact, those who could afford (or wished to bother) paying higher fees were allowed to “purchase” better-sounding names. Indeed, it was often a form of blackmailing the Jewish population into paying higher fees for nicer names.
If you are interested to read more about this, try Benzion C. Kaganoff’s “A Dictionary of Jewish Names and Their History”, which is less a dictionary than historical anecdotes with an incomplete glossary of some Jewish names.
Just to clarify: Säufer (as it is spelled in standard German), which is pronounced “Soifer” does not mean “sucker” but rather “(heavy) drinker”, certainly by no means flattering. Unflattering German names were forced on Jewish families particularly often by the officials of the Austrian Empire. In fact, those who could afford (or wished to bother) paying higher fees were allowed to “purchase” better-sounding names. Indeed, it was often a form of blackmailing the Jewish population into paying higher fees for nicer names.
If you are interested to read more about this, try Benzion C. Kaganoff’s “A Dictionary of Jewish Names and Their History”, which is less of a dictionary than historical anecdotes with an incomplete glossary of some Jewish names.
Just to clarify: Säufer (as it is spelled in standard German), which is pronounced “Soifer” does not mean “sucker” but rather “(heavy) drinker”, certainly by no means flattering. Unflattering German names were forced on Jewish families particularly often by the officials of the Austrian Empire. In fact, those who could afford (or wished to bother) paying higher fees were allowed to “purchase” better-sounding names. Indeed, it was often a form of blackmailing the Jewish population into paying higher fees for nicer names.
If you are interested to read more about this, try Benzion C. Kaganoff’s “A Dictionary of Jewish Names and Their History”, which is less of a dictionary than historical anecdotes with an incomplete glossary of some Jewish names.
Sorry about that. Something went wrong, obviously. I hope someone cleans this up!
Wasn’t Germany the last country in Europe to require Jews to have “last” names? And didn’t the Jews there adopt poetic or artistic names like Goldstein (gold stone), Rosenwald (red forest), or Weiskopf (white head) only when the civil authorities required that they have last names?
(I know a Jewish family named Geriminsky; that and Horowitz seem to be Slavic names–the family is from Russia–but I won’t jump to any conclusions about names taken by Jews in Slavic-speaking countries.)
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My mother’s maternal line came from Odessa, but their name was “Soifer” (oddly, German for “sucker,” and they were anything but!). Maybe the originally came from Germany in the middle ages? Or was the name Soifer forced on them?
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I don’t know much Yiddish, Eve, but “Soifer” sounds to me like the Ashkenazi pronunciation of the Hebrew word “sofer”, which means “writer.” Anyway, it could be the same thing in Yiddish, but I really have no idea.
~Harborina
“This is my sandbox. I’m not allowed to go in the deep end. That’s where I saw the leprechauns.”
Konrad:
But Yiddish is only a German dialect influenced by Hebrew, right? So they only spoke Yiddish because they lived amongst Germans, whether in Germany or elsewhere in Eastern Europe, right?
My dictionary says, for ‘Yiddish’:
“A High German language with many words borrowed from Hebrew and Slavic that is written in Hebrew characters and spoken cheifly as a vernacular in eastern European Jewish communicties and by emigrants from these communities throughout the world.”
Ray
Nanobyte: Jews didn’t have to live among Germans to speak Yiddish. Many Jews living in Russia took German-sounding names because they spoke Yiddish at home instead of Russian.
Okay, Konrad: WHY did they speak Yiddish when in Russia?
Indeed, “soifer” could be an Ashkenazic/Yiddish version of the Hebrew word “Sofer”, but usually the Germanic “shraiber (Schreiber)” or Hebrew “mekhaber” is used to mean an author. But I suppose both explanations are valid.
As far as why eastern European Jews spoke (or speak!) a Germanic language, this has a lot to do with their history. Throughout the high and late middle ages, Jews were repeatedly thrown out of the various German states, and most left for Poland whose leaders encouraged their immigration at the time. Since they had been living in Germany for centuries, the Ashkenazic Jews spoke German dialects with a few Hebrew words thrown in (although probably not very many.) When they arrived in Slavic speaking countries, they not only often learned the languages of their new homes, but this also influenced their own German language. The result of these many centuries of language contact is what is known today as (Modern Eastern) Yiddish.
This type of linguistic development is indeed not uncommon, and if we look at the varied roots of the English language, we can see many parallels, although the history is of course quite different.
The term “Yiddish”, btw, is only about 100 years old, and was originally coined in the United States to describe the language spoken by the new immigrants. “Yiddish” is in fact the Yiddish word for “Jewish” and is what most immigrants said when asked what language they speak. The language has also been referred to as Judeo-German, or by other less flattering terms. Even many speakers of the language looked down on their own everyday speech as being a sort of corrupted “Jargon”, since only Hebrew was seen to be a proper Jewish language. Only in the past 100 years have efforts been made to give Yiddish the respect it deserves as a literary yet still down-to-earth and often charming language in its own right.