INVENTED ‘FANCY SHMANCY’ NAMES.... (interesting & endearing information,we name ourselves often after what's most beautiful or fine in nature,one could even call it pagan, certainly ancient as language itself, common to all peoples & tribes)
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When Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire were required to assume last names, some chose the nicest ones they could think of and may have been charged a registration fee by the authorities. According to the YIVO Encyclopedia, "The resulting names often are associated with nature and beauty. It is very plausible that the choices were influenced by the general romantic tendencies of German culture at that time." These names include: Applebaum — apple tree; Birnbaum — pear tree; Buchsbaum — box tree; Kestenbaum — chestnut tree; Kirschenbaum — cherry tree; Mandelbaum — almond tree; Nussbaum — nut tree; Tannenbaum — fir tree; Teitelbaum — palm tree.
Other names, chosen or purchased, were combinations with these roots: Blumen (flower), Fein (fine), Gold, Green, Lowen (lion), Rosen (rose), Schoen/Schein (pretty) — combined with berg (hill or mountain), thal (valley), bloom (flower), zweig (wreath), blatt (leaf), vald or wald (woods), feld (field).
Miscellaneous other names included Diamond; Glick/Gluck — luck; Hoffman — hopeful; Fried/Friedman — happiness; Lieber/Lieberman — lover.
Jewish family names from non-Jewish languages included: Sender/Saunders — from Alexander; Kagan — descended from the Khazars, a Turkic-speaking people from Central Asia; Kelman/Kalman — from the Greek name Kalonymous, the Greek translation of the Hebrew shem tov (good name), popular among Jews in medieval France and Italy; Marcus/Marx — from Latin, referring to the pagan god Mars.
Finally, there may have been Jewish names changed or shortened by immigration inspectors (though this is disputed) or by immigrants themselves (or their descendants) to sound more American, which is why "Sean Ferguson" was a Jew.
Let us close with a ditty:
And this is good old Boston;
The home of the bean and the cod.
Where the Lodges & Lowells speak only to the Cabots;
And the Cabots speak Yiddish, by God!
Top Comment
But this is essentially how almost all last names came to be -- it's not unique to Jews. More...
-Tesstarosa
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