H eadlines
How Did American Jewish Names Come to Be?
L OCA L
JESSE BERNSTEIN | JE STAFF
THERE IS A STORY typically
told about the manner in
which Jewish names and
naming practices developed
in the United States, especially
regarding surnames.

Unscrupulous Ellis Island
immigration agents, the
conventional wisdom goes,
saw a jumbled mass of unpro-
nounceable Jewish surnames
and, with the stroke of a pen,
made sure that the names
never made the journey
with their bearers. Names
that ended in -wicz became
-witz, -ski became -sky, Meir
became Meyer. Ethnic speci-
ficity, wiped out in the name of
enforced assimilation.

According to Kirsten
Fermaglich, one of the few
scholars in the world to devote
serious study to American
Jewish naming practices, the
real yarn is quite a bit knottier,
and quite a bit longer. Just for
starters, she challenges the
timeline of that commonly
told story.

“It’s important to me not to
see name changing as completely
a product of the immigration
process,” Fermaglich told the
Exponent. “Because actually,
for a lot of Jews, it happens as
a product of American anti-
Semitism, rather than as a
product of natural immigration
and whatever people think of as
Americanization.” Even her own name,
Fermaglich recently told The
Jewish Standard, is a rebuke
to the Ellis Island story —
“Fermaglich” represents a
relative’s own adjustment to
an even more unwieldy Polish
Jewish name.

Fermaglich is a historian of
Jewish studies at Michigan State
University, where she’s taught
since 2001. In 2018, Fermaglich
published “A Rosenberg by
Any Other Name: A History
of Jewish Name Changing in
America,” seeking to compli-
cate the typical conception
of American Jewish naming
practices. For starters, Fermaglich
noted, the surnames that
Jews changed as they came to
America from Europe were
often fairly new — most Jews
didn’t start using last names
until the 19th century, when
the development of modern
states began to require the
practice. And though some
countries were fairly permis-
sive in allowing Jews to choose
their own surnames, restric-
tions were quickly applied in
order to mark certain names
as Jewish. So the precious
surnames of the Ellis Island
story may not have been held
so preciously or for so long.

Some of those names, like
Cohen and Levy, predate the
widespread use of surnames,
as they served a religious
function, but your Feinsteins,
Goldbergs and Horowitzs, for
example, are likely to be of a
much more recent vintage.

What Fermaglich found in
her research was that it was
frequently Jews themselves
who, uncoerced, chose to adopt
surnames that sanded down
the sharper, more obviously
Jewish edges into softer
American nubs.

Entry into the marketplace
and higher education could be
made easier for Jewish men
and women without a name
so obviously Semitic. And
entering into the social circles
of non-Jewish Americans could
be a much smoother exercise,
many Jewish immigrants and
their descendants found, by
adopting their names. In this
way, name changes became a
route to middle-class respect-
ability for Jews who desperately
sought it.

One doesn’t need to be a
scholar of American Jewry to
conclude that this practice was
not without controversy among
American Jews, who argued
bitterly about how much
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4 JANUARY 21, 2021
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