According to a popular joke, in the world there is no such thing that the Chinese would not serve as food, and the Jewish name. This is partly true, since the origin of Jewish surnames has a history of more than three hundred years. The people themselves have existed much longer, but since once they were
like Gypsies and did not have a specific location, then his representatives did not need surnames. They lived scattered around the world. However, laws came out in the 18th century that obliged all Jews to acquire surnames so that they could somehow be identified.
We can say that almost all Jewish surnames are created artificially. They are derived from names, both male and female, as well as from professions, from animal names, from appearance, from geographical names, etc. The most common surnames are those that have the roots of such priests as “cohen” and “levy”, for example: Kaplan, Kogan, Katz, Kaganovich, Levinsky, Levitan, Leviticus, Levinson, Levin, etc.
If there were no priests in the family, then Jewish surnames were often invented from names to which an ending or suffix was simply added. So there were Samuels, Abrahams, Israel, Mendelssohn and others. If the surname formed on behalf of the name has the ending -zone or -son, this means that its carrier is the son of a certain person. For example: Abram's son is Abramson, Michael's son is Michaelson, Mendel's son is Mendelssohn, etc. Jewish surnames derived from female names appeared in exactly the same way, because it is known that women are very revered by the sons of Israel. For example, Rivkin, Sorinson, Tsivyan, Beilis are derivatives from the names Rivka, Sarah, Ziva and Bale, respectively. Jews who lived in
Tsarist Russia were added the suffix –evich or –ovich to the name. Thus, Abramovichi, Berkevichi, Aryevichi, Khagaevichi and others turned out.
Many Jewish surnames are derived from the name of the profession. The most popular is, of course, Rabinovich, since he came from such a religious profession as a rabbi. From here Rabin, Rabinzon, Rabiner and others with similar roots follow. If you met the name Schuster - this means that in the family of this person there were certainly shoemakers. Surnames Kramer, Gendler and Schneider are translated as “shopkeeper”, “merchant” and “tailor” respectively.
Jewish surnames, the list of which follows, come from geographical names: Gomelsky, Lemberg, Sverdlov, Klebanov, Teplitsky, Podolsky, Volynsky, Lviv, Lioznov, etc. Some surnames may sound like Russian, for example, Mudrik, Gorbonos, Zdorovyak, Belenky, etc. But do not be fooled, because they appeared due to the appearance or character traits of their owners. There are also a lot of artificially created surnames, which consist of two roots interconnected. For example, Goldenberg, Rosenbaum, Glickman, Rosenfeld, Goldman can literally be translated as “golden mountain”, “pink tree” (meaning not a color, but a flower), “happy person”, “pink field”, “golden person”, respectively.