There is an erroneous impression abroad regarding the importance of proper names and surnames and their true relation to their bearers. A name is a name, say many--a mere label. You may modify it, change it, discard it as one discards his outworn raiment, without impairment of any constituent part of your composite nature. If you are a Jew neither the Jew nor the man in you suffers in the least through such a change.

This is a mistake; or to be more exact--this is only partially true. For changing one's name without any compelling motive is not in itself moral sickness but rather a symptom, indicating, as it does, some inward laxity of either the man or the Jew or both, as the case may be.

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True, there is no inward relation between the name and the nature of the individual. There was a time when Jewish surnames did at least indicate the profession, trade, occupation, or the nativity of Jews. Or they would betray the wickedness and whimsicalities of many a brutal, barbaric official of the eighteenth century, who used to force and foist on their Jewish subjects such flattering names as Eselkopf, Gottlos, Stinker, Geldschrank, Groberklotz, and others of a similar nature. But as time went on and surnames were changed or became stereotypical, even that much meaning disappeared from them. Names today are mere labels, in so far as their meaning is concerned. And yet, your name and your nature, you label and the laws of your soul, in their old, long association with each other, have been too closely attached to, or rather identified with, each other to permit of separation, unless it be that some moral or religious or national or Jewish strain in you has become obtuse. To determine what part in you has become dulled, it is necessary to consider the manner and the motive, the right and the reason, as well as the degree and nature of your change. Nor does every change of name 3indicate inward obtuseness. Mere modification may sometimes mean necessary adaptation and be quite commendable.

We have to distinguish from the standpoint of Jewish nomenclature in the United States between three types of Jews:

1) The Spanish-Portugese Jews, who are persistent in retaining their old time-honored labels without any modification or change. They still have the very same names of their ancestors who were driven out of Spain and Portugal some four hundred years ago. In spite of their many migrations from land to land--from Spain to Holland or the Orient, from Holland to Germany and England, from the latter countries to South America, North America, Canada, and the West Indies--they have retained, by and large, their Spanish names without any modification. We can well account for such conservativeness in the case of the Spanish Jew living in Morocco or the Near East, by reason of their superior culture to that of their environment. But we are the more puzzled in the case 4of the West European and American Sephardim; for a higher and superior culture should have led them long since to the adoption of names in consonance with their environment. A good example therefore are the Spanish-Portugese Jews of Hamburg. It is well known what a leveling effect German life has always exercised on groups of other nationalities within the German empire. As regards the Jews of Germany, they are all, orthodox no less than heterodox, full Germans in every regard, by their names no less than in nature. An exception hereto are the Hamburg Sephardim who, though in every other respect truly and fully Germans, still cling to their old Spanish-Portugese names.

2) The German Jews. The latter are all and all conservative on this score: the more progressive their reforms in religion the more conservative and stubborn do we find them in defending their German names. Yet there are already so many exceptions to this rule that we can fitly speak of a tendency among certain classes of German Jews toward modification, adaption, 5and translation of names. One thinks of Bloomingdale for the German Blumenthal, of Greenewald for the old Gruenwald, and of Belmont for the original Schoenberg, and a good many more.

Austrian, Bohemian, and Hungarian Jews seem to cling to the names of their ancestry with about the same degree of tenacity as their German coreligionists.

3) The Eastern European and, in especial, the Russian-Polish Jews. Here it would be a great understatement to talk of a tendency toward change; the word "mania" would be quite fitting and adequate. The changing and modifying of one's name is with the Eastern European Jews not even a sign of Americanization; it is very often done in the perfectly "green" state, when Yiddish still takes the place of the vernacular and all other true signs of Americanization are still totally absent. The writer of these lines knows two brothers who changed their family name Stein to Stone on the same day when they doffed their European clothes and donned American ones. (This was naturally done at 6the instance of some American relative).

For the process of change and modification there are various kinds of devices, as seen from the following:

a. (Dropping of Suffix.) The Slavic ending "itz" and "witz" as well as the frequent ending "sky" is dropped altogether or replaced by a corresponding English suffix for the reason of its telltale nature. Meyer as the shortened form of Meyerowitz does not betray Russian-Polish nationality; but the full form does it too well. The same applies also to the German ending "sohn" which is either dropped or replaced by English "son".

An old friend of mine, known on the other side as Malshinsohn, shortened his name in this country to Malshin. His business name is Lane Bryant--a name well known in certain business circles all over the United States.

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b. (Assimilation.) Those with a strong assimilative tendency, who would not satisfy themselves with a mere clipping, submit their old names to a process of adaptation the result of which seems and sounds genuinely Anglo-Saxon or Irish. Etymology or no etymology, their chief aim is a full and true American name with a secret reminder of the old one. I know a highly refined and respectable teacher whose name, Mearson, goes back evolutionally to his Polish grandfather's name, Meyerovitz. Here at least the philologist gets some linguistic satisfaction. But Robinson (the son of a Robin) changed from Rabinovitz, (which actually means the son of Rabbi) arouses his scientific ire. The story of the immigrant "Yankele" without a surname from the Old Country, who split his name and made of it John Kelly, may be, and really is, a characteristic joke. But here are a few facts culled at random: McClosky, an orthodox Jew of Staten Island, answered formerly to the name of Magelnitzky. A certain Margolies changed his name to McGill. Simpler but none the less radical is the orthographical change of Olshinsky from Ashinsky. Others are Mitchel from Michalovsky, Hilquit for Hilcovitz, Livingston for Levy, and 8Foster, Tavan, Fergusson, Delson, Kane from Hvastow, Taviansky, Fahrgutstein, Yudelsohn, and Kohn, respectively.

c. (Translation.) He who was known in his native land by the name of Schwartz is called Black in his land of adoption. The historical continuity of the name in this case and similar ones is not one of sound but rather of sense or meaning.

d. (Radical change.) The bearer of the new name has discarded his old label without retaining in the former any vestige of the latter, either of sense or of sound. There is a captain in the United States Army by the good American name Mock, whose old patronymic was Lebensohn. Pat Logan, a former resident of Chicago and now dead from the present epidemic, was originally Motte Rosenberg.

e. Some people with a practical turn of mind find it expedient to have two 9names, according to what they consider the exigencies of time and place and environment. Mr. Magilnitzky has still his old nominative identity within his old circle of friends and in the Yiddish-speaking world; elsewhere he will only answer to the name of Magil. The following is called from the Chicago Israelite, September 6, 1919: "Dr. Irving, formerly Dr. Isacovitz, has returned from a thirteen months' oversea service with the United States Army and has resumed his practice at ____ Roosevelt Road." It is to be presumed that Dr. Irving, having a very practical turn of mind, still practices under his old name. The change from Isacovitz to Irving while entering the United States Army was naturally dictated by most obvious reasons. Since we all know them, why state them? But I wish I could state the number of the Jewish gentlemen who, like Dr. Isacovitz, entered Uncle Sam's army under new-fangled names. It would have proved a much-wanted item for the Jewish statistician who at present has very meager data on this score.

f. (Change of accent.) Insignificant as the change of accent of a name may seem, it makes a world of difference to the ear. Friedel, with the accent 10on the first syllable, sounds very Yiddish; but pronounce the same name (spelled the same identical way), with the accent on the second syllable--and you have a most refined, French-sounding patronymic. The writer knows a Dr. Friedel of Greater New York, who once voiced his complaint to the former that many of his Jewish patients and acquaintances had an inveterate habit of mispronouncing his name (that is, in the old Jewish way), a thing which seemed to mortify him very much.

That modification of one's name in this country should not be limited to Jews only is altogether natural. One thinks of the following two very great names in modern American history: Lansing and Pershing. Pershing's family, of old Alsatian descent, spelled originally its name in (horribile dictu) true German fashion "Pferschin". The change was gradual: first Perschin or Pershin (to simplify the pronunciation), and later in Americanized form, Pershing. Lansing traces his name back to a Dutch-sounding and Dutch-seeming Lansinck--a seemingly slight modification, yet one that changed a thorough Dutch name into an English one.

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By the by, the Brooklyn judge who some time ago refused to change a typically Jewish name into a similar-sounding but more American one, for the reason, as he argued, that he who would hide his original nationality had not the stuff of good citizenship, did not seem to know that he was actually reflecting with his peculiar way of reasoning on such great citizens as Lansing and Pershing.

The difference we noticed above in the attitude of various Jewries toward their old names is easily explainable. Centuries of leadership and scholarship, of deepest Jewish consciousness coupled with a poetic and philosophic spirit such as made the history of the Spanish Jews famous, instilled into the latter such deep love for and pride of their great medieval past as to last long after the expulsion of their ancestors from the Iberian peninsula, and to manifest itself in the tenacious clinging to their old, unmodified names. To some extent, the same holds good of the Russian-Polish Jews in their relation to their former German past, and to a still greater extent of 12the German Jews in this country in their relation toward their recent German past. As for the Russian Polish Jew in this country, he sees very little in his Eastern European past to be proud of. Neither the word Russian-Polish nor the combination Russian-Jewish or Polish-Jewish connotes anything flattering--to put it very mildly. Hence his readiness, or rather eagerness, to wipe all trace of his former nationality off his old label as surely and speedily as possible.

That the Jew should have a greater tendency toward changing his name under new conditions of life is natural from the peculiar and singular nature of his history. Being no nation in the proper sense of the word, the Jews of each country, under free, untrammeled social and economic conditions, have always showed an assimilative inclination in names and language. Such was the case with the Arabic and Spanish Jews of the Early Middle Ages, and in later centuries we see the same process repeated in other countries. But while there has always been something distinctive, something to mark off the Jew from 13the Gentile, even about the secular names of the latter class of Jews; and while the half-assimilated Jews of all ages and all countries have always had and frequently made use of additional Hebrew or religious names--the Jews of this country show a strong tendency to obliterate all distinctiveness from their secular names and to give up their religious or sacred names altogether. Just as in the case of the Hebrew language: While the Jews of the Diaspora have never--or to be exact, but seldom--used Hebrew as their mother tongue, but instead the vernaculars of their respective countries of adoption or some new ghetto product, and yet have always studied and known Hebrew enough to keep the Jewish flame aburning, our modern American Jews--reform or so-called orthodox--know of and care about knowing the Hebrew language as much as the average American knows, or cares to know, Chinese.

Well do the sages explain the redemption of our ancient fathers from Egypt by the fact that "they did not change their old Hebrew names and language". Clinging to racial or national essentials, they made themselves deserved of national 14redemption and revival. We, however, in giving up all distinctiveness in our patronymics and forsaking and forgetting our old Hebrew names and language, condemn ourselves to extinction as a race--aye, extinction.

Thou greatest of all lies and contradictions--American Judaism.