Wiesenthal, Ringelblum, Freud, or Rubinstein – innumerable Jewish family names emerged at the end of the 18th century. The surnames of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, for example, as well as actress Barbra Streisand stem from this period. The astonishing thing is that many of these names were simply made up by officials in the former Austrian province of Galicia, which is today part of Poland and Ukraine. In his award-winning and easy-to-read doctoral thesis entitled “Nochem’s New Names,” Czakai, who completed his doctorate at Freie Universität’s Institute for East European Studies, examined the unusual origin of these family names. With his basic research he was able to reassess old and often misleading legends on the topic and put them on scientific ground for the first time. His research took him to archives in Vienna, Lviv in Ukraine, and Kraków in Poland. He pored over dusty, partly charred documents, visited Jewish cemeteries, and met people whose family history he was able to trace.

At first the origin of many Jewish names may seem strange and somewhat banal. Czakai, who is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, points out, “The assignment of new names to Jews in Eastern Europe was primarily an administrative act.” He goes on to say, “This act shows us the complex relationship between the Jewish population and the Habsburg state. The introduction of fixed surnames was part of a push toward modernization, an upheaval that changed Jewish life in Eastern Europe very slowly but profoundly.”

“Even if some family names disappear, their story lives on”

It started with a change in power: in the 1770s and 1780s, the Austrian central government sent officials to its eastern provinces, which shortly before had become part of the Habsburg Empire through the partition of Poland. The state representatives worked to set up an efficient administration in the new province of Galicia. Above all, that meant collecting taxes. In particular, this affected Jews, who had to pay high additional taxes. The Austrian officials set up a bookkeeping system and began to register the new subjects.

Up to that time Jewish communities had been quite independent: their members maintained old traditions and spoke their own language – Yiddish. They had traditional first names, variable sobriquets, and often nicknames. The convention of having a fixed first and last name was not widespread among the Jewish population in Eastern Europe at the time. It quickly became clear to the Austrian state representatives that efficient taxation could only succeed with fixed and individual first and last names. So the Jewish taxpayers needed new names. Officials began summarily renaming tens of thousands of people. This process abolished the autonomy of the municipalities and strengthened state control. Such a procedure was unprecedented. The naming laws would later serve as a model in other parts of Europe.

Inspiration from Characters in Plays or Names from Their Home Villages

Officially, Jews were allowed to decide for themselves on their names in the official registers. However, the German sound of many names seems to indicate that they were primarily selected by the Austrian officials. Some names seem a bit arbitrary, for example “Mausefalle” or “Streusand,” the original version of Barbra Streisand’s family name. Sometimes officials were inspired by characters in plays or used names from their own home village, as Czakai found out through his historical detective work. A few names distinctly testify to the antisemitism of the respective officials: Geizhals (miser) or Krumnas (crooked nose) became Jewish family names. But Czakai could find very few letters of complaint in the archives.

The renaming had little significance in everyday Jewish life, at least in the first generation. As Czakai says, “The new names can perhaps be compared with today’s tax identification numbers. In this way, Jews were administratively incorporated into the Habsburg empire.” Initially, this did not involve any adaptation to German culture – no acculturation. In other parts of Europe, on the other hand, for example in Berlin around 1800, many Jews aspired to become a respected part of the majority culture.

At first the Jewish communities in Galicia remained culturally independent even under Austrian rule, but they faced major changes. Rapid population growth in the 19th century, impoverishment, antisemitism, and pogroms forced many to leave their Eastern European homeland. They emigrated and took their names with them to many countries and regions, for example, to Germany, Austria, North and South America, or Great Britain.

Many of the new Jewish surnames were lost in the course of history or were wiped out, mainly during the Holocaust. Some descendants of Eastern European Jews, such as Mark Zuckerberg or Barbra Streisand, still bear these historic family names today, often in a modified form. As Czakai points out, “These surnames tell us stories and are immaterial testimonies to Jewish life in Europe. They indicate a sense of belonging and give their wearers an identity. Even if some surnames disappear, their history lives on.”

---

This article originally appeared in German on November 26, 2022, in the Tagesspiegel newspaper supplement published by Freie Universität Berlin.