Why are some names frummer than others?

spring13

Mon, Sep 08 2014, 10:12 pm

Too much trouble to quote everyone but:

A. Cohen can be an Irish surname (there was a famous Irish-American composer named George Cohan). And trust me, there are plenty of frum Cohens.

B. Some surnames davka ARE Jewish and not anyone else's (aside from cases of marrying out). Yes, Jews have taken names from the language/culture around them, but something like Rivkin ("related to Rivka") is a really sure thing in terms of indicating Jewish ancestry.

C. Some family names are specific to a specific set of relatives. Some are not. In Austria-Hungary, authorities often divided up the Jewish quarter of a town into 4 sections and gave everyone in a particular area the name Klein, Gross, Weiss, or Schwartz. So some people with those names are related, some totally aren't. Then you add in the fact that those names are all common adjectives and could have been used in German-speaking areas for someone who was short (Klein means small) or dark haired (Schwartz means black), and that throws in another few bajilion non-relatives with the same name. Not to mention non-Jews who got those names for descriptive purposes as well.

But others are a lot less common, such as Paneth or Schwadron, and yeah, they conceivably could indicate that all bearers of that name are in some way related.

4. Typically German names don't necessarily indicate yekke ancestry: like I said, residents of the Austro-Hungarian empire often got German names, like the common 4 listed above.

5. Rosen could have come from the old country as is, or it could be that people who came over with longer names like Rosenzweig or Rosenstein shortened it to make it more pronounceable and less foreign sounding. That's part of the reason you end up with so many unrelated Rosens, and perhaps why it comes across as more "secular" to some people- because it was applied to a group of people who made an effort to assimilate in some way, and perhaps have a larger proportion of descendants who assimilated further.