Introductory chapters to: Beider, Alexander. 2004. A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Galicia. Bergenfield, NJ: Avotaynu. (original) (raw)
Related papers
History of Jewish Names in Eastern Europe and Surnames in the Russian Empire
Chapters 1, 4, 5 of Beider, Alexander. 2008. A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire (revised edition). Bergenfield (2008), NJ: Avotaynu. , 2008
These three chapters cover the historical aspects of names: Chapter 1: History of Jewish Names in Eastern Europe, with sections (a) Names in Hebrew Sources before the End of the 18th Century (b) Names in Slavic Sources before the End of the 18th Century (c) General Aspects of the Surname Adoption by Jews of the Russian Empire (d) Surname Changes in Russia and USSR Chapter 4: Adoption of surnames in various regions (Courland, Lithuania, Belorussia, Ukraine, Bessarabia) Chapter 5: Jewish surnames and Gentile surnames in Eastern Europe, with sections about surnames specific to Jews, shared by Jews and Slavic or German Christians, surnames borrowed by Jews from Christians
Typology and Linguistic Aspects of surnames of Jews in the Russian Empire
Chapters 2 & 3 of: Beider, Alexander. 2008. A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire (revised edition). Bergenfield (2008), NJ: Avotaynu., 2008
These chapters cover the following topics: (1) Types of surnames (rabbinical and other migrated from other areas, patronymic, metronymic, toponymic, occupational, nickname-based, Cohen/Levite origin, artificial); (2) Morphology of surnames: suffixes used, acronymic surnames; (3) Languages used and their peculiarities (Yiddish, Hebrew, Slavic, German; (4) Distortions of surnames; (5) normalization (Russification, Slavonization, Yiddishizing, Germanizing)
Names of People: Surnames in Pre-Modern Europe
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF HEBREW LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS, vol. 2, pp. 791-795, 2013
The paper discusses the Jewish surnames based on Hebrew that were created mainly in Ashkenazic communities of Eastern and Central Europe before mid-19th century. The large group was created in the Russian Empire. A few examples are also provided of Hebrew names used by Sephardic Jews.
Names of Jews in Medieval Navarre (13th–14th centuries)
in: Ahrens, Wolfgang / Embleton, Sheila / Lapierre, André (eds.), Names in a Multi-Lingual, Multi-Cultural and Multi-Ethnic World. Proceedings of the 23d International Congress of Onomastic Sciences (August 17-22, 2008, York University, Toronto), CD-ROM, Toronto: York University, 140-157, 2009
This paper analyses names of Jews in the rich diplomatic collection "Navarra Judaica. Documentos para la Historia de los judíos del reino de Navarra" (
Dictionary of Jewish surnames from the Russian Empire : appendices
Appendices for: Beider, Alexander. 2008. A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire (revised edition). Bergenfield (2008), NJ: Avotaynu. , 2008
The following appendices are included here: (1) Hyphenated surnames (2) Most common Jewish surnames in the Russian Empire & USSR (3) Spelling changes (4) Suffixes found in Jewish surnames from the Russian Empire (5) Stress position in surnames (6) Main migrations of Jews internal to the Russian Empire
The Notion of ‘Jewish Surnames’
Journal of Jewish Languages, 2018
This article discusses the notion of ‘Jewish surnames,’ considering it to be synonymous to the expression ‘surnames borne by Jews.’ This can be particularly helpful if we want the definition to add real value for the search of etymologies. The article describes most important peculiarities of Jewish surnames, categories of names that are exclusively Jewish, and various cases when a surname is shared by both Jews and non-Jews. It shows that certain alternative definitions of the notion of ‘Jewish surnames’ (such as surnames found in all Jewish communities, surnames used by Jews only, surnames based on specifically Jewish linguistic elements) either have internal inconsistencies or are useless and sometimes misleading for the scientific analysis of the etymologies of these surnames.
History, Adoption, and Regulation of Jewish Surnames in the Russian Empire
Surname DNA Journal, 2014
Analysis of the formation of surnames by the Jewish population of the 19th century Russian Empire. Description of the cultural and legal context of Ashkenazi Jewish surnames in Russia with examples taken from census records. Provides insight to genealogists on the legally mandated creation of different surnames within individual families followed by a period of relative surname stability into the 20th century. Surname derivation from toponyms with the "sky" suffix were most common followed by patronymics with the "vich" suffix and then derivation from occupations or nicknames. Between 1880 and 1924, over two million Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jews immigrated to America from the Russian Empire, where repeated pogroms made life untenable. They came from Jewish diaspora communities in the Russian Pale of Settlement (the territory where Jews were permitted to live in the Russian Empire, encompassing modern Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova), the vast majority of them entering America through the Port of New York, at Ellis Island. Many of these Jewish immigrants had strange, foreign-sounding surnames, very different from the surnames of their American-born children and grandchildren. How did these immigrants originally obtain their Russian or Eastern European surnames? Where did they get them from, and how long did they have them? When, where, and why were they changed? That is the topic of this review article, and some of the questions that it is intended to address. There has always been a certain mystique associated with Jewish surnames. Part of this mystique is due to the fact that many Ashkenazi Jews, whose ancestors immigrated to America, do not know how or where their surname originated, or even what they mean. They may be vaguely aware that their American surname was changed from a different ancestral surname in the old country, but the origin and history of their ancestral
Genealogy, 2023
This paper outlines a study of surnames used by various Jewish groups in the Land of Israel for Ashkenazic Jews, prior to the First Aliyah (1881), and for Sephardic and Oriental Jews up to the end of the 1930s. For the 16th–18th centuries, the surnames of Jews who lived in Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and Hebron can be mainly extracted from the rabbinic literature. For the 19th century, by far the richest collection is provided by the materials of the censuses organized by Moses Montefiore (1839–1875). For the turn of the 20th century, data for several additional censuses are available, while for the 1930s, we have access to the voter registration lists of Sephardic and Oriental Jews of Jerusalem, Safed, and Haifa. All these major sources were used in this paper to address the following questions: the use or non-use of hereditary family names in various Jewish groups, the geographic roots of Jews that composed the Yishuv, as well as the existence of families continuously present in the Land of Israel for many generations.
Family Names of Zagreb Jews From the Beginning of the 19th Century Until World War II
Jagiellonian University Press eBooks, 2023
The continuous stay of Jews in Zagreb can be traced back to the end of the 18th century. Following the anthroponymy of Zagreb Jews from the first censuses which we have at our disposal to the beginning of World War Two (in which the Zagreb Jewish community was decimated), this paper analyses the family names of Zagreb Jews based on three sources: the book History of the Zagreb Jewish Community from Its Foundation to the 1850s by Gavro Schwarz (1939), Jewish birth registers from 1849 until 1898, and data collected from the Israelite (Jewish) section of the Old Cemetery at Mirogoj. The data analysed include: the statistical analysis of family names and their frequency; the languages in which the family names originated, the official changes of family names, the diachronic frequency of those changes and motivations for change; as well as an examination of family names recorded in the Hebrew script. This is the first such analysis of Jewish names in Zagreb and can be used as a foundation on which to build further research on the Jews of Zagreb, but also on the names of Jews in other communities in Croatia.