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2015, Avotaynu Online
Surname DNA Journal
The History, Adoption, and Regulation of Jewish Surnames in the Russian Empire – A Review2014 •
Introduction 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. Background 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 surname remains a mystery for most. This lack of knowledge regarding their ancestral surnames has led to many stories and legends among Jewish families about how their ancestors’ surnames were shortened or changed as they passed through Ellis Island, although the facts do not bear this out. Immigrant inspectors took the surnames directly as they were recorded in the ships’ manifests, and never altered them unless persuaded that a mistake had been made in spelling or rendering the name. However, Jewish immigrants frequently changed or “Americanized” their own surnames, often during the period between immigration and naturalization, the thought being that in America, it was more advantageous to have an American-sounding surname. There are similar misperceptions regarding the adoption and use of Jewish surnames in the Russian Empire. Jewish families often have oral histories which involve a grandfather or great-grandfather being adopted by another family, and his surname being changed to avoid conscription into the Russian army. In reality, however, adoption was not an option for most Jews living in the Pale of Settlement, and a series of czarist edicts, laws, and regulations made changing surnames very difficult for Jews in the Russian Empire throughout most of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The history of the adoption, regulation, and use of Jewish surnames in the Russian Empire is quite complex. There were a myriad number of ways by which Jewish surnames were created, assigned, or adopted, while tight restrictions were placed on changing or altering surnames. One principal mandate was that members of different households had to adopt unique surnames. In response to these mandates, Jews adopted surnames based upon the places they were from, the occupation they had, their nickname, their spouses’ surname, their parents’ given name, the decisions of the Kahal (Jewish community council), or the whims of the local Russian authorities. As a result of these Russian laws and mandates, many non-related Jewish individuals acquired the same surname, while many related people acquired different surnames. This situation has created many challenges for genealogists who try to trace the ancestry or locate descendants of a particular Jewish lineage, many of whom have different surnames, as well as for interpreting the different results of DNA tests for Jewish descendants, who are assumed to be related because they share a common surname. The purpose of this review article is to explain the various laws and mandates pertaining to Jewish surnames in the Russian Empire, so that those who are interested in Jewish genealogy will better understand the complexities of Jewish surname adoption and use. The first section of the article presents a concise history and overview of these laws and mandates. The second section of this article examines the effect that these Russian laws and mandates had on the adoption and use of surnames by Jews living in the Pale of Settlement. For each of these laws and mandates, we provide actual examples of original censuses or other genealogical documents which demonstrate the effect that the specific law or mandate had on the adoption and use of Jewish surnames.
Chapters 2 & 3 of: Beider, Alexander. 2008. A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire (revised edition). Bergenfield (2008), NJ: Avotaynu.
Typology and Linguistic Aspects of surnames of Jews in the Russian Empire2008 •
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)
Appendices for: Beider, Alexander. 2008. A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire (revised edition). Bergenfield (2008), NJ: Avotaynu.
Dictionary of Jewish surnames from the Russian Empire : appendices2008 •
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
Chapter 6 of: Beider, Alexander. 2008. A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire (revised edition). Bergenfield (2008), NJ: Avotaynu.
Scientific approach to the etymology of Jewish surnames in the Russian Empire2008 •
This chapter explains methodological principles allowing to obtain scientifically reliable etymologies
Journal of Jewish Languages
The Notion of ‘Jewish Surnames’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.
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.
1996 •
These introductory chapters cover the following topics: (1) History of Jewish names in Poland (before the partitions, mass surname adoption in 1787-1821, surname changes); (2) linguistic analysis (languages, suffixes), (3) types of surnames; (4) surnames used by both Jews and Christians; (5) spelling of Polish Jewish surnames; (6) most common surnames in various provinces of the Kingdom of Poland
2021 •
Names: A Journal of Onomastics
Review of Historical Implications of Jewish Surnames in the Old Kingdom of Romania by Alexander Avram2022 •
Review of Historical Implications of Jewish Surnames in the Old Kingdom of Romania. By Alexander Avram. Studies in Jewish Onomastics: The Project for the Study of Jewish Names. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2021. Pp. 296 + xi. $115.00 (hard back), ISBN 9780271091426.
Conclusion about marginal role Sephardic Jews played in the development of the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe should not be oversimplified to consider that no Sephardim ever joined Ashkenazi communities. The article address five surnames used in Ashkenazic families: (1) two from Eastern Europe others than those discussed in previous publications, for which the odds are high that they indeed reveal the Sephardic origin of the family progenitors; (3) three from Prague whose usual consideration as Sephardic is firmly confirmed for one, is wrong for another, and appears to be rather questionable for the third one.
Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters
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Network Neuroscience
The ascending arousal system promotes optimal performance through mesoscale network integration in a visuospatial attentional task2021 •
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El ingreso de China a la Organización Mundial de Comercio y el papel de APEC2001 •
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2010 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Fast image alignment in the Fourier domain2010 •
Annales Francaises D Anesthesie Et De Reanimation
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Journal of Chemical Physics
Crystal structure and low-temperature methyl-group dynamics of cobalt and nickel acetates1998 •