This was no accident, but rather in line with the spirit of the famous Edict of Tolerance signed by Joseph II in , inspired by the ideas of the European Enlightenment.
These Germanic last names reflected in part the desire to Germanize the Jewish population of the empire. The myth of a list with a last name and a corresponding price could have taken place only in a situation where one particular clerk was in charge of the entire population.
But it is impossible that different clerks could invent the same categories independently of each other. Moreover, it is certainly unlikely that an exchange of ideas between clerks took place concerning their illegal bribes. This clearly contradicts the legend: Jews rich enough to pay important bribes could not represent the largest group of Jewish population in the country. But the legend of the last names and their prices can also be refuted by the attitudes of Jews from Eastern Europe toward their newly acquired surnames.
Specifically, they ignored them, making the idea that they would pay for a good one illogical. Outside the sphere of official documents, Jews continued to use their traditional names. Well into the 19th century, Jewish surnames on tombstones appeared only among families of the bourgeoisie in big cities. Furthermore, in the Jewish literature of the second half of the 19th century, surnames are rare: characters are mainly called by given names, and sometimes by nicknames.
Immigrants from Eastern Europe were forced to deal with their official surnames only when obtaining a foreign passport for emigration. This kind of information also refutes the idea of the last name price list.
The Galician Jews had absolutely no incentive to pay for their surnames. These new hereditary names introduced as a result of the Christian legislation remained totally outside the framework of the local Jewish tradition and were thus utterly marginal.
One cannot dismiss these claims on a formal basis. Yet the names in question are clearly polygenetic, meaning they are names that were given to numerous independent families. If the above interpretations can indeed be valid for one particular branch, it is totally implausible that they could be true for other, unrelated branches.
A large majority of such names were clearly invented and artificially assigned by Austrian clerks, almost on a random basis. In other parts of Eastern Europe, the patterns originally created in the Habsburg Empire were reused.
Next to series of surnames starting in Gold-, we have a series in Silber-, with the same second half. As a result, generally speaking, in surnames, the first parts Gold- and Rosen- are also unrelated to female given names.
In fact, in this context, we find a not fortuitous coincidence: Yiddish female names and the first parts of artificial surnames invented by Austrian officials are associated with beauty. For given names of Jewish women, such meanings are typical from the Middle Ages and are commonly found also in non-Ashkenazic communities of Spain, North Africa, Italy and the Ottoman Empire.
For surnames that first appeared in countries where the administration was German speaking such as Austrian and Prussian empires , these meanings are related directly to the general spirit of the period of Romanticism that inspired Christian clerks in charge of the creation of multiple surnames to be assigned to Jews.
Alexander Beider is a linguist and the author of reference books about Jewish names and the history of Yiddish. He lives in Paris. Most German states followed this example by publishing similar decrees in the next years Prussia in , for example. While modern naming laws in most Central European states led to the creation of thousands of family names for Jews for the first time, decades later Hamburg still remained "basically singled out" p. The reason for this may have been the size of the community , which, numbering more than 6, members around , was one of the largest Jewish communities in Germany.
In other major cities such as Frankfurt am Main and Prague , too, Jews took family names early on. Even before the age of emancipation , the Jewish elites in particular tended to adjust their customs and outward appearance to that of their Christian peers, and as an international trade hub, Hamburg represented an ideal environment for this trend.
The Jews stemming from Portugal and Spain Sephardim had also begun assuming hereditary family names long before settling in Hamburg in the 17th century. After their escape and public return to Judaism, they retained their Portuguese and Spanish family names in their new home countries and passed them on to their children Belmonte and Fonseca, for example. While the Sephardic Jews did not belong to the German-Israelite Congregation , the influence of their customs was felt also among Ashkenazi Jews.
This fact is not discussed by the authors, however, who assume that it is common knowledge. In doing so, they point to the different levels of acculturation The adoption of elements from another culture by an individual or a group; process of cultural modification , but also to different political camps within the very heterogeneous triple congregation Dreigemeinde of Altona - Hamburg - Wandsbek AHU.
Altona belonged to the Kingdom of Denmark , which passed a naming law on March 29, that ended debates on the subject. To what extent conflicts within the Jewish community played a part in the prevention of a naming law is unclear. This assessment, quite likely correct, points to a complicated historical constellation: when Hamburg came under French rule in , the city was initially considered under occupation in legal terms; the French naming law of July 20, therefore did not apply.
Why this law was not applied in Hamburg remains unknown. It is likely that the events of the year , which was shaped by changing rule and a lengthy occupation of the city made the implementation of the naming law seem a marginal matter.
Shortly after the end of French rule, the senate launched another attempt at regulating naming and reordering civic circumstances among the Jews. Until this renewed attempt made 35 years later by two Jewish Congregation employees, the old order and the "provisional solution" p. Since a senate commission had been working to improve the Jews' civil rights situation. He argued that in all states lacking such a law this gap was exploited for all sorts of violations, quoting the common stereotype that Jews used their different names to swindle.
Hamburg resident Gabriel Riesser , delegate to the German National Assembly since May , had argued for years that Jews would have to fight for their rights themselves. The argument for the necessity of a naming law given by Haarbleicher and May is both interesting and telling.
Just like a trade name, a permanent family name should be more than just an accessory, they write. It should be a permanent part of one's identity that one could not change deliberately; it should be an emblem representing its bearer's reputation to the outside world.
Therefore the fight for the adjustment of the naming system was an expression of a politically self-confident and economically successful Jewish middle and upper class aiming for its integration into the bourgeoisie. It also served to set oneself apart from the poor and traditional strata of Jewish society, whom the authors did not yet consider ready for participation in the political process. Before it could be implemented, however, action was taken by a different entity: in December , the Frankfurt National Assembly had proclaimed the basic rights of the German people, whose section 16 included the emancipation of the Jews.
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