Jewish last names: how they were formed and what they mean

Most Ashkenazi Jewish last names are younger than families expect. Until the late 1700s a Jew in Central or Eastern Europe was known by his own name and his father's, such as Yaakov ben Avraham, and often by a Yiddish name or a nickname as well. Fixed family names came when the states that ruled those lands required them. This guide explains when each state did so, the kinds of name families took, what common Jewish surnames mean, and how to trace the origin of your own. Surname, last name and family name mean the same thing here.

Before surnames: a name and a father's name

In Jewish life a person has always been named with the father: Moshe ben Yitzchak, Chaya bas Mendel. That is the form used when a man is called to the Torah and the form carved on a gravestone, and in religious life it is still the name that counts. Day to day, people were also known by a trade or a town, as in Yankel the tailor or Leib from Brody. None of these passed from father to son.

A few families carried an inherited name long before any law required one. Rabbinic families such as Horowitz, Landau and Margolis kept their names for centuries. In Frankfurt, houses in the Jewish street were known by painted signs, and some families came to be called after them, as the Rothschilds were after a red shield. Sephardic Jews in Spain had family names in the Middle Ages. For most Ashkenazi families, though, the surname began with a government order.

When Jews were required to take surnames

The laws came state by state, as governments set out to tax and conscript their Jewish subjects and, in some states, to make them citizens. Each law required a fixed surname that would pass from father to children. The dates below are the ones a family historian meets most often.

Dates checked October 2026 against the texts of the 1808 and 1812 laws and the work of Johannes Czakai, Lars Menk and Alexander Beider. Most other German states passed their own laws in the years after 1808. Laws were carried out unevenly, and a family's name may have been registered a few years before or after the date of the law.

The Habsburg lands, 1787

Emperor Joseph II's patent of July 23, 1787 ordered that from January 1, 1788 every Jewish family in the Habsburg lands carry a fixed family name, and every Jew a German given name. In Galicia the names were recorded by naming commissions of officials and the community's own scribes, with the head of each household present. The historian Johannes Czakai found that officials there read an order of 1787 for German given names as an order for German surnames, which is one reason most Galician names came out German.

A well-known story holds that Galician officials sold pleasant names, such as flowers and jewels, and gave insulting ones to families who would not pay. It goes back at least to an essay of 1880 by the writer Karl Emil Franzos. Czakai, working from the Habsburg officials' own files, found that the bribes are not borne out by the records, and Beider counts insulting names as a rare category. Treat the story as a legend.

France and the German states, 1807 to 1814

Napoleon's decree of July 20, 1808, issued at Bayonne, gave the Jews of the French Empire, which then included the Rhineland west of the river, three months to declare a fixed surname and given name before the civil registrar of their commune. Names from the Hebrew Bible and the names of towns were forbidden, though families whose names had long been known and used could keep them. Among the German states, Frankfurt required fixed names in 1807 and Westphalia in March 1808. Czakai notes that most Central and Eastern European states had passed such laws by 1814.

Prussia, 1812

Prussia's edict of March 11, 1812 made the Jews of the kingdom citizens, on condition that each family declare a fixed surname within six months. Silesia had required surnames region by region from 1790, and the Polish lands Prussia then ruled, including Warsaw, in 1797. Families in the provinces the 1812 edict did not cover took surnames in 1845.

The Russian Empire, from 1804

The Statute on the Jews of 1804 required every Jew in the Russian Empire to take a hereditary family name. In many towns the communities' own officials assigned names in large series, and Beider found that they often copied the patterns Galician officials had invented. For many families the revision list of 1816, a tax census, is the first record that gives the surname.

The Kingdom of Poland, 1821

In the Kingdom of Poland, a law of 1821 required Jews to declare surnames, each recorded in a special book with a certificate for its bearer. Officials began searching for those who had not declared in 1823, and in 1824 and 1825 names were imposed on almost everyone still without one, so most Polish Jews had a surname by about 1825. Families in Warsaw and the other towns Prussia had ruled often had names from 1797.

The kinds of Jewish surname

Families took names from what was already around them. In the Russian Empire, Beider's count found names from places the largest group, about a third of all surnames, followed by artificial or ornamental names at 18 percent, occupations at 15, patronymics at 13, names from a person's features at 12 and matronymics at 7. The same name can belong to more than one kind, and unrelated families with the same surname may have reached it by different roads.

Names from a father: patronymics

The simplest step was to turn "son of" into a fixed name. In German the ending was -sohn, as in Mendelssohn and Jacobsohn, and in English -son or -s, as in Abramson and Abrams. In the Russian Empire and Poland the Slavic endings -ovich, -owicz and -ovitz did the same work, as in Abramowitz, Davidovich and Moskowitz, from Moshke, a form of Moshe. Many are built on the everyday Yiddish name: Hershkowitz on Hersh, Berkowitz on Ber, Leibowitz on Leib. Beider found patronymics most common in Lithuania, Belarus and Courland. A patronymic records the father's name at the moment the law was carried out, and nothing about the generations before him.

Names from a mother: matronymics

A smaller group comes from a woman's name, usually with the Slavic ending -in or -kin, meaning "belonging to": Mirkin from Mirke, Rivkin from Rivke, Sorkin from Sorke, a form of Sarah, and Frumkin from Frumke. Beider found them extremely common in eastern Belarus. Why a family took the mother's name is rarely recorded, so a family story about it needs a record behind it.

Names from a town

Many families took the name of a town, often one they or their ancestors had come from. Some of these names are old: Shapiro and Spira from Speyer on the Rhine, Horowitz from Hořovice in Bohemia, Landau from a town of that name. Others were formed at the time of the laws, with the German ending -er, as in Berliner and Hamburger, or the Polish and Russian -ski and -sky, as in Warshawsky and Brodsky. Beider found that around Kiev and Grodno almost every name from a town ends in -sky. A town name tells where some ancestor once lived, which may be far from where the family was living when it took the name.

Names from a trade

Occupations gave a large share of names, in German, Yiddish, Polish or Russian. Schneider and Kravitz both mean tailor, Becker baker, Kirschner furrier, Goldschmidt goldsmith, and Wexler, from Wechsler, money changer. Some name a post in the community: Schechter the ritual slaughterer, Kantor the cantor, Melamed the teacher of young children, Gabbai the synagogue's administrator and Shulman the man who looked after the shul. Rabinowitz means son of the rabbi.

Names that describe a person

Some names began as a description: Klein for small, Gross for big, Lang for tall, Kurtz for short, Schwartz for black, Weiss for white and Roth for red. They may describe hair or size, and in many cases the reason is lost. These are also ordinary German names held by many families who were never Jewish.

Ornamental names

Many of the best-known Ashkenazi surnames are ornamental: Rosenberg, Goldberg, Rosenthal, Lilienthal, Finkelstein, Mandelbaum, Rubinstein. They join a pleasant word, such as rose, gold, lily or almond, to an ending such as -berg (mountain), -thal (valley), -stein (stone) or -baum (tree). Beider found that these compound names were first made up by Christian officials in eastern Galicia and later copied elsewhere, and that they are particularly common in Bessarabia, Podolia and Volhynia. They say nothing about the family beyond the taste of whoever chose them. Some names that look ornamental are town names, since there are places called Goldberg and Grünberg.

Kohen and Levi names

Families descended from Aharon, the kohanim, and from the tribe of Levi, the levi'im, often took a surname that recorded it. Cohen, Kohn, Kahn and Kahane are forms of kohen, and Kagan is the Russian form, since Russian turned the h into a g. Kaplan, a word for a chaplain or priest, was used by kohanim in Eastern Europe. Levy, Levin, Levine and Lewin come from Levi. The name alone does not settle the status, which passes from father to son and is kept in the family's own tradition and on its gravestones.

Names from Hebrew initials

A few common surnames are Hebrew initials. Katz stands for kohen tzedek, a righteous kohen; the German word for cat is a coincidence. Segal stands for segan leviyah, an associate of the levi'im, and Schatz for sheliach tzibbur, the man who leads the prayers.

Names from Yiddish given names

Many Hebrew given names had a Yiddish partner, often an animal. Some pairs come from Yaakov's blessings of his sons in Bereishis, which compare Yehuda to a lion, Naftali to a deer and Binyamin to a wolf: hence Yehuda Leib, Naftali Hirsch and Binyamin Wolf. These Yiddish names became surnames such as Leib, Hirsch, Hersh and Wolf, alone or inside patronymics. A family named Hirsch may have had a Naftali among the first to carry the name, though only a record can say so.

What the endings mean

German, Austrian, Czech and Hungarian Jewish surnames

In the German lands the laws came state by state, so a family's name may be older or younger depending on which side of a border its town lay. Many German Jewish families took the name of a town, often with the ending -er or -heimer, as in Oppenheimer and Frankfurter. Others turned a given name into a surname, as in Hirsch or Wolf, or chose a German word. Because these are German words and places, many of the same surnames belong to families who were never Jewish, and only the town's registers show which a family was. How to write to a European archive explains where those registers are kept, and Lars Menk's A Dictionary of German-Jewish Surnames lists where each name was found.

In Bohemia and Moravia, now the Czech Republic, and in Austria, the names date from the law of 1787. Many recall places, such as Horowitz, and Pollak, which means a Pole, or a country, as Deutsch does. In Hungary the same law produced mostly German surnames, such as Schwarz, Weiss, Klein and Gross. After 1867 many Hungarian Jewish families exchanged a German surname for a Hungarian one, so a Hungarian family name may hide a German one in older records, and both have to be searched.

Common Jewish last names and what they mean

No official count of Jewish surnames is published in America or Britain. The table gives names that are common among Ashkenazi families, with the kind of name, its most likely source, and how sure that source is. "Certain" means the derivation is clear and generally agreed. "Probable" means it is the usual explanation but has rivals. "Uncertain" means more than one origin is possible.

Derivations checked October 2026 against Sarah Bunin Benor's Jewish Surnames Around the World and Alexander Beider's findings. A family may have come to its name by another road, and only the records can say which.

A question families often ask is whether a particular name, such as Miller, Green or Weiss, is a Jewish name. Most such names were held by Jewish and non-Jewish families alike, so the name alone proves little, and a family story has to be checked against the records.

Sephardic and Mizrahi surnames

Sephardic surnames are much older than Ashkenazi ones, and many Jews in Spain and Portugal carried fixed family names in the Middle Ages. The Toledanos took theirs from Toledo. After the expulsion from Spain in 1492, families carried these names to North Africa, the Ottoman lands and Italy. Many Mizrahi surnames, from the Jews of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Yemen and North Africa, are Arabic or Hebrew words: Mizrahi means from the east, and Haddad a smith.

Hebrew last names and Israeli surnames

A few surnames are Hebrew wherever they are found, among them Cohen, Levi, Katz, Segal and Margolis. Most Hebrew surnames, though, are new. Many Jews who settled in the Land of Israel replaced a European name with a Hebrew one, often keeping a sound or a meaning of the old name: David Ben-Gurion was born David Grün, and Shkolnik could become Eshkol, which keeps the sound. In 1950 the state ordered its officials, above all those who represented it abroad, to take Hebrew names, and a committee was set up to help them choose; many families did the same by choice.

Under the British Mandate, official changes of name were announced in the Palestine Gazette, and the Israel Genealogy Research Association has indexed more than 27,000 of those notices from 1921 to 1948. In figures from the Population and Immigration Authority reported in January 2014, Cohen was the most common surname in Israel and Levi the second, followed by Mizrahi, Peretz, Biton, Dahan, Avraham and Friedman. For a family researcher, a Hebraized name means two searches: one under the Hebrew name in Israel, and one under the European name in the records before the change.

How names changed in America and Britain

Many families believe their name was changed at Ellis Island. The history office of US Citizenship and Immigration Services explains why it almost never was: passenger lists were made abroad, when the ticket was bought, and inspectors in New York were told not to change a name unless the immigrant asked or the list was shown to be wrong. Immigrants did change their names, by their own choice, and tended to do so within their first five years in the country. Before 1906 a change left a record only if it went through a court. Since 1906 the naturalization papers have recorded it, so the naturalization file is often the first paper that shows both names.

In Britain it has always been possible to change a name without registering the change. Many people made it formal by deed poll, though The National Archives estimates that fewer than one in a hundred deed polls was enrolled with the courts, and from 1914 an enrolled deed poll had to be announced in the London, Edinburgh or Belfast Gazette. In 1916 enemy aliens living in Britain were forbidden to change their names, and from 1919 until 1971 the ban covered all foreigners.

How to trace the origin of your own surname

A dictionary can say what a name means and where it was found. Only the records can say how your own family came to have it. The order below works for most families:

1. Write down every spelling of the name the family has used, in every country, with the given names and Hebrew names that go with it.
2. Find the earliest American or British record that gives the name as the immigrant spelled it: a passenger list, a naturalization file, a marriage record or a gravestone.
3. Find the town. A surname is recorded town by town, and the same name in two towns may belong to two unrelated families.
4. Search the indexes of the town's registers, such as those of JRI-Poland for Poland, under each spelling, and read the original entries behind them.
5. Follow the family back through the registers to the years when the surname was first recorded.
6. Read what the surname dictionaries say about the name and where it was found, and test their explanation against the records.

The standard dictionaries are Alexander Beider's, for the Russian Empire (1993, later revised), the Kingdom of Poland (1996) and Galicia (2004), Lars Menk's for German Jewish names (2005), and Heinrich and Eva Guggenheimer's Jewish Family Names and Their Origins. JewishGen's free Family Finder lists about 140,000 surnames and 18,000 towns that other families are researching, which can lead to a cousin working on the same name.

What a surname cannot tell you

A surname is a clue, and it is easy to ask too much of it. The same name was often taken by unrelated families in different towns, so two Horowitz families need not share an ancestor. Folk etymologies, explanations that fit the sound of a name without evidence behind them, are common in this subject, and two of the best-known stories about Jewish names, the purchased names of Galicia and the names changed at Ellis Island, do not hold up against the records.

Spelling is the other trap. A name written in Hebrew letters in a letter home, in Polish or Russian in a register, in German on a ship's list and in English on a census can look like four different names, and indexes misread them. How to trace your ancestry explains why the trail by surname usually stops in the early 1800s, and why the Hebrew names have to carry it further.

The records behind a family's name

The story of a family's surname is written in the registers of its town: the year the name first appears, and the spellings it passed through on its way to America or Britain. Some of these records can be searched from home. Others are held by archives that answer only written requests, in Polish, German, Russian or Yiddish, and some files have never been indexed at all. A Zichronos commission includes that work and its archive, copy and translation fees, and ends in a finished book. Family history book examples shows what such a book holds, how the example was researched shows the method from the first papers to the printed volumes, what a family history book costs sets out what each kind of service includes, and How we work sets out the steps. More guides on names, towns and records are in finding family records.

Sources: Napoleon's decree of July 20, 1808; Prussia's edict of March 11, 1812; Johannes Czakai on family names in the German states, and his study of naming in Galicia as reviewed in sehepunkte; Alexander Beider on surnames in the regions of the Russian Empire; Sarah Bunin Benor, Jewish Surnames Around the World; the USCIS history office on immigrant name changes; The National Archives on changes of name; the Israel Genealogy Research Association's list of databases; JewishGen's Family Finder. Checked October 2026.