Jewish Surname Changes (Sampling of Prague Birth Registries 1867–1918)

0584588 - ÚJČ 2024 RIV CH eng J - Journal Article
Dvořáková, Žaneta
Jewish Surname Changes (Sampling of Prague Birth Registries 1867–1918).
Genealogy. Roč. 7, č. 4 (2023), č. článku 77. ISSN 2313-5778
Institutional support: RVO:68378092
Keywords : onomastics * surnames * Jews * Bohemia and Moravia
OECD category: Linguistics
Method of publishing: Open access
https://www.mdpi.com/2313-5778/7/4/77

The study focuses on changes of surnames of Czech and Moravian Jews. The changes are tracked until the start of the German occupation in 1939. The source material is comprised of Jewish birth registers from 1867 to 1918 from Prague, as this was the most populous Jewish community of the region. These records are part of fund No. 167 stored in the Czech National Archive. More than 17,000 Jewish children were born in Prague during this period and only 350 of them changed their surname. Surnames were mostly changed by young men under the age of 30. A large wave of renaming occurred mainly at the beginning of the 1920s shortly after the formation of Czechoslovakia (1918). Renaming was part of the assimilation process but was not connected to conversion to Christianity. The main goal was the effort to remove names perceived as ethnically stereotypical, which could stigmatize their bearers (e.g., Kohn, Löwy, Abeles, Taussig, Goldstein etc.). Characteristic of the new surnames was the effort to preserve the same initial letter from the original surname. The phenomenon is compared with the situation in neighboring countries (Germany, Hungary and Poland).
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0352507