Talk:Jewish surname

Jewish surnames category deleted again; see discussion
Please see Deletion_review/Log/2009_July_6. Badagnani (talk) 22:20, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

It's been a century...
...since the Jewish Encyclopedia published its article on "names," from which this text is taken with few changes. References to modern works have been added, but there's little or no evidence that whoever did that made any use of the fine works listed in the bibliography, notably those of Beider and Menk.

This won't do. I'm going to remove a lot and then ask for others to add more references or give examples that have them.

Once a convenient myth gets started, it's hard to beat it down. Folks: there is *no* evidence for the claims that the novelist Karl Emil Franzos made regarding the imposition of "Ekelnamen," i.e., ugly surnames. Some points:

• He provided no sources. Many of the surnames listed here are otherwise not known to have existed.

• There were no "commissions." Local officials were empowered to do this.

• Some of the surnames in the list were used by Gentiles too. Hunger, for instance, has almost 2,000 listings in the German White Pages; Durst has over 800. There are 250 Lumpes and even 20 Fressers!

• Rindskopf was a house-sign in Frankfurt, among other things.

• Some of the surnames, e.g., Haase, Schwarz were chosen voluntarily by Jews elsewhere and/or have no pejorative connotations.

• If Gold and Edelstein are nice names, then how could Smaragd (emerald) be nasty? (Someone removed Diamant from the original text, I see.)

• Bering (1995) states that there is exactly one known example of the phenomenon: from western Galicia in 1905.

To be sure, it's inconceivable that the corrupt Hapsburg bureaucracy would *not* have found a way to make money off the process, but the evidence is very thin.

Other errors:

• "As has been seen" is hardly the way to begin an article. A section of an article in a 100-year-old encyclopedia, perhaps.

• Prussia in no way restricted the choice of surnames in 1791, 1794 or 1812; in 1845 they excluded the names of prominent Christian families. See Menk, pp. 3-4.

• Austria, too, put few restrictions on surname choice: the only forbidden ones were toponyms (place-name-based names) not already being used and names derived from Hebrew given names.

• Löwe is not derived from Levi in most cases. Indeed, most people with the name derived it from Loeb (lion), which itself comes from the Hebrew Aryeh (lion), an attribute of Judah. So if it's referring to Judah's tribe, it means "not Levi."

• Kaufmann usually has its source in the given name Kaufmann--a hypocoristic form of Yakov.

• The last paragraph of the "history" section is irrelevant to the topic and appeared in the J.E. as part of the more general discussion of names. For that matter, other parts of the "Names" article that deal with surnames don't seem to have been included.

• Local names: Hollander (along with Schweitzer) is often an occupational name--dairyman.

• German local names: some of the most famous are Shapiro (from Speyer), Mintz (Mainz), Halperin (Heilbronn). They need to be mentioned, unlike most of the others. (Bingen?)

• Russian empire: "arbitrary surnames, derived from place of residence, occupation, or even arbitrarily" needs work and also a reference better than that Russian web page. Mind you, that's still better than the vast majority of assertions in this article, which have no source and often contradict the fine works listed in the bibliography.

• Whoever added Birnbaum to the history section was probably right to do so, but note that in the "local names" section it's claimed as a toponym. (I doubt all the Rosenbergs are from any of the towns by that name, ditto Gruenbergs etc.)

Time to get to work.RogerLustig (talk) 21:15, 11 June 2011 (UTC)

surname list
what has happened to that long list of Jewish surnames, which was still immature, but at least gave a quite pleasing overview and even some etymological information?--Der Spion (talk) 17:45, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

insulting names
Why does the article say nothing about German and Austrian civil servants' relatively common habit of giving Jewish people insulting names, such as "Hundgeburt" (birth of a dog), "Schweinefleisch" (pig meat/pork) and so on. Probably, the same thing happened in other countries too. [unsigned]

Why?? See section 1 of the discussion. It's a myth. German and Austrian civil servants at no time had the authority or even the mechanism to assign surnames. The evidence for claims to the contrary is vanishingly small.RogerLustig (talk) 14:54, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Dan Rottenberg's 'Finding our Fathers' describes that the naming followed different procedures in different provinces of what is now Germany and Austria. Germany was only in existence since 1871. People had to pay for names and insulting names were apparently given to those who couldn't pay, or pay enough.

I question the Strauss referring to ostrich. Were ostriches known in those times in those provinces? I don't quite think so. The word Strauss has a second usage, i.e. Blumenstrauss = bunch of flowers. In shorter speak the word Strauss alone is often used. There are many names with Blum...., or Bloom.... in English and that looks a more likely explanation to this German speaker.144.136.179.50 (talk) 06:34, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

Can Dan Rottenberg give any concrete examples--not just names, but dates and places? I doubt it--nobody else can. Almost all references to this canard trace back to Franzos' article from 1880. If he does have some evidence, I'd like to see it.

Ostriches were indeed known, as they had been since antiquity. Most people never saw one, but then, there were house signs that featured dragons, griffins, unicorns, elephants and lions too. The ostrich had mythic qualities, and ostrich feathers were used in hats and elsewhere--check out the heraldic badge of the Prince of Wales. Now, if you'd like to tell me that there were no houses in the ghettos of Frankfurt/M and Erfurt that had ostriches as their house signs, or that the Jews who lived in them later named themselves after a bunch of flowers, be my guest: but provide a little evidence, please.

The German Empire may not have existed until 1871, but that has nothing to do with the matter. By 1871 all Jews in Europe had surnames--the last area of what is now Germany to mandate them did so in 1852. Now: in which provinces did the procedures even restrict the choice of names, and what were those restrictions? See Menk (cited in the article) for the answer. And where were these ugly names reported or recorded at the time? Nowhere that I've seen.

Again: almost all references to the "Ekelnamen" myth can be traced directly to Franzos and no further. Unless you or Dan Rottenberg or anyone else can provide a real source for the notion that more than a handful of Jews ever had such names, the myth will remain a myth.RogerLustig (talk) 15:44, 26 October 2011 (UTC)


 * other things are A. that a name that may seem negative today might not have been negative in the past - and B. that names got sometimes  mistaken for something that sounded similar (schlachter (slaughterer) might have been misunderstood as the similar sounding Schlechter (worse)) espesscially with people speaking different dialects different dialects 78.43.149.68 (talk) 16:05, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

Colour names and prefixes
I wonder that Germanic names derived from colours or with certain prefixes are seen as Jewish. Does anybody know about this? Tinynanorobots (talk) 19:09, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
 * depends on your definition of jewish name - is it a name that jews have or is it a name that is a name that (basicly) only jews have 46.223.176.176 (talk) 23:04, 6 December 2013 (UTC)
 * german language colour based surnames are not specificly jewish - you will find them by jews and non-jews 78.43.149.68 (talk) 16:00, 8 January 2014 (UTC)


 * The thing is, it appears that people discriminated against people because they have Jewish names, but most of these names seem simply German. I don't know how they did it. Tinynanorobots (talk) 18:13, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

Title
Shouldn't this article's title be Jewish surnames? Mcljlm (talk) 23:15, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

Hyatt
The "Occupational Names and Nicknames" section claims, without evidence, a link between "Hyatt" and the Hebrew word "חייט" (tailor). More egregiously, it links to the article for the hotel chain, which is named for its founder, a Gentile whose given name was Hyatt. Yitz711 (talk) 19:30, 7 November 2022 (UTC)