Sam Sherman of Voorhees, N.J., writes:
“Many Jewish family names are those of cities in Europe, often with a suffix that means ‘a resident of.’ For example: Berlin-er, Frankfurt-er, Minsk-y, Pinsk-y, Slutsk-y, Posnan-ski, Smolensk-y, etc. But surely these families weren’t known by the names of their cities while they were living there: They must have acquired them when they moved elsewhere, just as El Greco was known by that name not in his native Greece but after he moved to Spain. So when and why did so many Jews leave their former place of residence, taking its name with them, and where did they go?”
Mr. Sherman is, I think, only partly correct in his intuitively sensible conclusion that a 21st-century American Jew named, say, Roger Berliner must hail from a family that derives its name from an ancestor who once lived in Berlin and left it for elsewhere. There are several reasons why this is so.
When talking about Jewish family names, or at least, about the names of the Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern and Central Europe from which the great majority of American Jews descend, it is important to keep one fact in mind: Until the late 18th or early 19th century, very few Jews had such names at all. Every Jew, that is, had a Jewish “last name,” but it was a personal one that was not passed on to children, since it was the name of one’s father that was used on ritual occasions. If your name was Boruch and your father’s name was Simcha, you were called up to the Torah as Boruch ben-Simcha; if your name was Rokhl and your father’s name was Dovid, you were mentioned in a ketubah or marriage contract as Rokhl bas-Dovid. But your son Aryeh was called to the Torah as Aryeh ben-Boruch, and your daughter Rivka was written in the ketubah as Rivka-bas-Eliahu (if that was the name of Rokhl’s husband). Such “last names” were one-generational.
The introduction of permanent last names into European Jewish life came with the decision of European governments to make their Jewish populations, which had previously been granted a large measure of communal autonomy, fully subject to the same state regulations and bureaucratic record-keeping as were other citizens. In the Austrian Empire, which ruled much of southern and eastern Poland, Jews were ordered to take such names in the 1780s and ’90s; in Germany, in 1797; in tsarist Russia, in 1804.
How did a Jew choose a last name? There were various methods. Some Jews stuck with tradition and put a German or Russian suffix on their father’s name, as in Jacobsohn or Chaimovitch. Some, in Yiddish-speaking areas where children were distinguished from other, similarly named children by their mother (e.g., Leib Sorehs, “Sarah’s Leib,” or Velvel Chayes, “Chaye’s Velvel”), took their mother’s names. Some, who were priests or Levites, called themselves Cohen, Levi or one of the many variations of these. Some took the names of their professions, by which they may already have been known locally: Thus, Itzik der shekhter, Itzik the slaughterer, became Itzik Schechter, and Yosl der shuster, Yosl the shoemaker, became Yosl Schuster. Some arbitrarily took names that appealed to them: Rosenblum, “rose blossom,” for instance, or Goldstein, “gold stone.” And some named themselves for places.
Now, it would stand to reason, as Mr. Sherman writes, that if you were named Leybl and had moved from Pinsk to Minsk, where there were quite a few other Leybls, you might have become known in Minsk as Leybl der pinsker, and so taken the name Leybl Pinsker. This probably happened fairly often — Jews, after all, were extremely mobile compared to other Eastern-European populations and often moved for reasons of marriage or work — and certainly must account for many names such as those Mr. Sherman mentions. And if you were Leybl der pinsker and wanted your official name to sound more Russian, you might prefer to become Leybl Pinsky.
But there were other ways, too, in which you might have gotten such a name. Perhaps you continued to live in Pinsk but worked (as many Jews did) as an itinerant peddler, going from village to village with your wares; in that event, you might also have been known in the villages you frequented as Leybl der pinsker and chosen Pinsker or Pinsky. Or it may have been that you were proud of living in Pinsk, or simply couldn’t think of a better alternative, and registered yourself with the Russian authorities as Pinsker or Pinsky not because you had left Pinsk, but because you hadn’t. There must have been cases of that happening as well.
And finally, there were, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, renowned rabbis — generally, Hasidic ones — who were also known by the places they lived in, so that Rabbi Aron of Karlin, for example, was called der karliner rebbe or der karliner, and Rabbi Yakov Yitzchak, the “Seer of Lublin,” der lubliner. Could not some of the Karliners and Lubliners in the world today be their descendants? Had El Greco been famous in Toledo, he might still have been El Greco even if he had never gone anywhere.
Questions for Philologos can be sent to philologos@forward.com.
Jews did not always have a choice of surnames. In Galicia, a list of acceptable surnames was given to the clerks of the Hapsburg Empire, who were in charge of recording the Jews' surnames. I recommend Alexander Beider's trilogy of surname dictionaries (Russian Empire, Kingdom of Poland, Galicia) for the definitive study of this subject.
Also, if a Jew was working for someone he would use, for example: Daniel working the land of Baron Von Klein and Daniel would be known as Daniel of Klein and eventually become Daniel Klein
My name is Rachel Zinober Forman. I was once told that "forman" was a Yiddish word that could be loosely translated as "teamster," or "the guy who drove the horse and cart." Also: Zinober. It is an unusual name, but there are others. I was told by my mother that it means "red" (in what language?) and that the first Zinober in our line either had red hair or was a communist. Is this a bubba meisah? How does one know? Our Zinobers came from a place called Resegna in Riga Gebernia. This is not a letter to the editor but a question for the article's author.
This article give a false impresssion that people changed from the Biblical name format to the use of family names. This may be true before the nineteenth centurey and the Napleonic Wars when Governments becan to force the populations to adopt family names and sometimes had officials travel to the villages allocating such names.
Today, in Orthodox Ashkenazi weddings, the family names of both bride and groom are included in the Ketubah, the marraige contract, and are read aloud. I checked my mother's first ketubah, from 1935, and the family names were include in a standard ketubah that the rabbi must have bought in a Jewish bookstore. So in less than two centuries the names became SOP. As a matter of fact, I read where at the wedding of one of the children of the Satmar Rabbi (not Joel Teitelbaum, but his nephew) every woman guest got a gift with a palm tree on it indicating the origin (Teitelbaum means palm tree) of the family. Since the Satmar pride themselves on maintaining the strongest link to the past with all the rejection of anything new that this implies, it seems strange that they would use the palm tree as a symbol.
My father used to tell me that names were often sold by the king so that if you had more money you could be a Goldman or Silverman. My father left the Pogroms in 1906 when he was 3 months old. The family got as far as Vienna before they ran out of money. My last name is Burger and my oe regret is I never asked what our family name was in Odessa.
On the question of Ashkenazi family names, specifically those within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which also, of course, included Polish Galicia after 1795, Philologos might be interested in the short article by Edgar Samuel, "The Great Surname Handout", first published in the 1993 Annual Report of the Jewish Museum in London and reprinted in the same writer's At the End of the Earth, London 2004.
@Rachel Forman: Zinober rot, is a shade of red, its German.
Re: brothers having different surnames: In Tsarist Russia an only son was not subject to conscription. Thus, many Jews bribed local officials and each son was given a different last name at birth.
I'm not Jewish but my mother, God rest her soul, often wondered why the folks in the Bible didn't have last names. Speaking of Bible, I just learned, and I'm 54 yrs old, that Moses married a Cu[word deleted]e, an Ethopian, a black woman. (Numbers 12) Imagine how proud I would have been, a nappy-headed little girl growing up in the Jim-Crow south, finding out that God's main man married a beautiful black woman. Just some thoughts. Peace.
In German, Zinober is a brownish red color, and the English equivalent is cinnabar, a brownish red mineral ore of mercury. It's an unusual Askenazi "color name", far less common than, say, Roth ("red"), Gelb ("yellow"), Blau ("blue"), Schwartz ("black") or Weiss ("white"). I don't know if there's a connection, but in Arabic "sanawbar" [sounds just like Zinober] means "pine nuts", which have cinnabar-colored hulls.
Re: Teitelbaum -- Since date palms aren't a common sight in Satmar and environs, perhaps the name derives from a not-unheard-of "matronymic", in this case, Tamar or Tamarkin.
My husband's father's name was Fuhrmann or very close. They became Forman. At this site: http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_txt Fuhrmann is translated at wagoner so I guess a Forman is a wagon driver which we call a teamster. As for Zinobar it sounds awfully like cinnabar. If you google cinnabar and click on the images button you will see many photos of this red mineral. Google will also give you lots of articles about cinnabar... Whether red haired or dealing in items that were made of cinnabar, I can't guess. Enjoy!
So why did Murray Rothstein change his name to Sumner Redstone?
One of the myths of the Holocaust is that the Nazis were able to identify Jews by their last names -- many German and other European names sound Jewish. A "systematic" Jewish holocaust was impossible because the Nazis had no objective and reliable ways of identifying Jews and non-Jews.
"A "systematic" Jewish holocaust was impossible because the Nazis had no objective and reliable ways of identifying Jews and non-Jews." Larry has been spouting this continually on his heavily censored blog. All explanations of how Jews could be identified are blocked. It seems odd that the son of Jewish parents would be a holocaust denier.
My grandfather, Abraham Forman (b. about 1875?) was from Pinsk. Supposedly, he left in the early 1900's to escape the draft into the Russian army. He immigrated to the US via London. His brothers, Sam, Max, Hymie (Harry),Murray, Willi also immigrated to US along with sister, Goldie and their mother (name unknown). I have been unable to find any records about their arrival in US. My question is: Was their last name Forman in Pinsk? Are there any records about the family. And to Rachel Forman (above), have you found any more information about the family? thanks to all. If any of the names are familiar, please let me know. Ruth Forman Gardner
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