Elsewhere in Europe the move to registeration and names had already taken effect. In Austria The Emperor Joseph made Jews take last names in the late 1700s, Poland in 1821 and Russia in 1844. It’s probable that some of our families had last names for no more than 175 years but the tradition of surnames for jews goes back further than this in some geographies. In France and the Anglo Saxon countries, for example, surnames went back to the 16th century. Also Sephardic Jews had surnames stretching back centuries.

But being allowed a surname wasn’t always benign. Most of the Jews from countries captured by Napoleon, Russia, Poland, and Prussia were ordered to get surnames for tax purposes.  After Napoleon’s defeat first due to the penisula war and then at Waterloo, many Jews dropped these names and returned ‘ben’ but using the vernacular language. So they returned to  to “son of” names such as: MENDELSOHN, JACOBSON, LEVINSON, etc. 

Spain was a country where jews were usually tolarated prior to Ferdinand and Isabella (who re-conquered Moorish Spain in the late fifteenth century)    Whilst thee Moorish Arabs were in control they could live, worship, and, in some cases prosper. Islam and there leaders mostly tolerated jews as ‘people of the book’, though they were classed as  ‘Dhimmīs’ and had to live with some quite demeaning restrictions. But this limited tolerance came to an end when they were expelled by Isabella in the same year that Columbus left for America. The earliest American Jews were Sephardic as were the first British Jews. The eastern Europeans only arrived in numbers in the 19th century.