The Rosenbergs
A family history
My father used to insist that if you went far back enough on his side of the family tree, the name “Rosenberg” would change to “Rosenbord,” meaning “red beard.” This, he asserted, was proof that my bright red hair had been in the bloodline since time immemorial, or at least since the Holy Roman Emperor insisted that Jews in his lands adopt surnames forthwith.
That happened in the late 18th century, for Enlightenment bureaucratic reasons—Jews can’t be effectively taxed, or, more importantly, assimilated, if you don’t have them all down in a ledger by name. Other European rulers, including Napoleon, soon followed suit. By the middle of the 19th century all Ashkenazi Jews were burdened with the typical names associated with them today. (Other pockets of distant Jews, such as the Yemenites, didn’t receive surnames until almost a hundred years later.)
There is little evidence for my father’s claim. “Rosenberg” is and probably always was “Rosenberg,” which comes from the German for “rose mountain.” Not all Rosenbergs are Jews, but in America any given one you meet is quite likely to be. I don’t look that Jewish—my hair is likely to come off as Irish or Scottish to those not versed in the intricacies of the Ashkenazi phenotype—but a quick reference to my last name silences any doubters.
Rosenberg is the 1,039rd most common last name in America overall and the 49th most common in Israel. Between the two countries there are about 50,000 of us. So, not exactly Cohen for prevalence in the tribe, but far more common than Draznin, my father’s mother’s maiden name—there are only about 200 Draznins in the world and I am probably related to all of them, if only distantly.
If the original Rosenberg in my family tree did have a red beard circa 1787, that might not have been a good thing. The Jewish gene for red hair goes back further than Jewish last names and was often the cause for prejudice in Europe. In the Middle Ages the stereotype associating Jews with red hair was related to the belief that Judas had been a redhead — “the dissembling color,” as Shakespeare put it.
In 2022 a genetic study of remains recovered from a well in Norwich, England, the victims of a medieval antisemitic massacre, proved that some of the unfortunate souls had borne red hair.
Probably the most famous sentence involving a Rosenberg in literature is the opening of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (which I have not actually read, full disclosure):
“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.”
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of espionage against the United States in 1951. Julius had been passing military secrets to the Soviet Union and Ethel was accused of assisting him. Their sentence was protested by many public intellectuals around the world, including Sartre, Brecht, and Einstein, but American Jewish organizations failed to stand up for them amidst the oppressive McCarthyist atmosphere of America, and they were executed in 1953.
As far as I know I am not related to them; nor am I related to Isaac Rosenberg, a talented British poet and painter killed in the spring offensive of 1918, and whose stirring war poetry was overshadowed by those by more well-connected and gentlemanly poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and did not finding its place in the canon until many years after his death.
I’m also not related to atmospheric physicist Ted Rosenberg, who served with the US Antarctic Research Program in the 1970s and had the Rosenberg Glacier named for him, located in the Ames Mountain Range of Marie Byrd Land.
Other notable Rosenbergs I am not related to include William Rosenberg, the founder of Dunkin Donuts, and Stuart Rosenberg, the director of Cool Hand Luke and The Amityville Horror, whose shared first and last name with my father was an annoyance to him when he was alive and is an annoyance to me now, in re: Google Alerts.
There are also a handful of historical and contemporary gentile Rosenbergs I obviously have no connection to—including members of a Bohemian noble family and of an Austrian princely dynasty which is apparently still extant. (I wonder if these days they often get assumed to be Jewish.)
According to leading Jewish onomastics (name studies) scholar Alexander Beider, “the local Jewish administration (Kahal) was responsible for surnaming” in the Pale of Settlement, and choices of names were made broadly by these administrators, resulting in large numbers of Jews with shared surnames.
Beider notes, importantly, that Jewish surnames given across Europe for the most part reflect German orthography, even though many were given in what is now Russia, Lithuania, Poland, and Hungary.
“Even in parts of the Russian Empire with little (if any) German presence,” Beider explains, “many new surnames based on Yiddish, the vernacular language of local Jews, were immediately Germanized because at that time Yiddish was often seen by various persons (including its native speakers) as a kind of corrupted German.”
As far as I know, every single one of my great-grandparents came straight to America from what was then the Russian Empire, between 1900 and 1920. For hundreds of years before that in the shtetls they studied Torah, farmed, traded, laundered, fiddled on the roof, got pogrom’d, et cetera. Weiners, Lerners, Lermans, Friedmans, Kutzokowitzes, Draznins, Berliners, Kossovers, Rosenbergs.
These family names are of no great age; they can’t be traced back any further than the governmental decrees meant to make it easier to keep track of those pesky multiplying Jews. As far as I can trace with my Ancestry.com subscription I don’t have any Sephardic blood (they have last names going back to the Middle Ages), or any Kohanim or Levite in me (those names go back to the era of the Temple).
“Lerner” and “Lerman,” the former from my mother’s side and the latter from my father’s, have opposite meanings: Lerner is Yiddish for Talmudic student, and Lerman may refer to a teacher. “Weiner” is an occupational name (from the German for wheelwright) and “Kutzokowitz” is a patronymic.
But Rosenberg is specifically what Beider identifies as an “artificial” surname, created on a whim in order to fulfill an arbitrary order.
Austrian officials came up with an easy system to create an abundance of names, based on a two-part system: the first part being a color, a metal, or a food or flower—Weiss (white), Eisen (iron), Rose (rose)—and the second part a topographic term or another word related to flora, such as Berg (mountain) or Baum (tree).
This almost algorithmic approach, reminiscent of automatic username generation on Discord or Reddit, was soon adopted for convenience by other regional authorities to put thousands of Jewish surnames on the books throughout Europe. They were completely generic, and they were also “polygenetic,” given to multiple unrelated Jews at the same time.
But as you might expect from a people who didn’t ask for procedurally-generated names from their Christian overlords and certainly had no lasting attachment to them, surnames were ignored by those who bore them, on gravestones and ketubot and other Yiddish and Hebrew-language documents, with the traditional Jewish patronymic form of bat or ben + [father’s name] keeping currency. I certainly care about my last name much more than the first of my ancestors to be handed it ever did.
When the time came to either move to the big city—as some of my ancestors did, to Minsk and Odessa—or get the hell out of dodge altogether, the official surname became unavoidably more important, featuring on official documents including passenger manifests.
I have no way of knowing when exactly “Rosenberg” became integrated into my family’s identity, as that branch of the family is specifically the one I know least about. They might have come from what is now Poland. Census records can tell me that one hundred years ago they were living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, working in the schmata business. By that time they were just a handful of thousands of unrelated Rosenbergs making new lives in America.
Red hair is recessive. My mom is a redhead like me, so she passed down two copies of the gene. And my late father was clearly a carrier, as is at least one of his brothers, although all four Rosenberg sons had the darker hair of their mother and not the lighter red of their father (which my brother now bears). I don’t know whether my grandfather’s father also had red hair. I don’t know anything about him, other than that his name was Jacob Rosenberg and he was married to Sarah, and his father was Shlomo Rosenberg and his mother was Liebe.
These forenames, while not procedurally generated, might as well be for how common they are. My family trees are full of “typical” Jewish first names: Murray and Beverly, my dad’s parents, have literally the same names as the parents on The Goldbergs, meant to represent a typical 20th-century Jewish family.
On TikTok, Jewish content creators go semiviral with the “game” that Jews can play with each other, giving out a random name like “Sam Greenberg” or “Ben Zuckerman” and seeing if it’s met with an “Oh, I went to camp with him!”
My parents did a great job naming me and my brother to avoid being caught in that game—in particular, my name is pretty unique, which means that I have my Gmail and my domain name and I totally own the SEO for “Allegra Rosenberg.”
But I grew up rather disliking my generic, burdensome Jewish surname. I had a friend at camp named Caleigh Gold which I thought was just about the most beautiful name ever; Jewish but not too Jewish. She had the same hair color as me.
It felt like a waste for me to have pretty hair and a pretty first name but such an ugly last name. I thought if I ever married someone with a prettier last name than me, like Gold, I would change it. I wouldn’t listen to my mother’s dictum that I keep my maiden name, something she wished she had done. Maybe if I ever published a book, I thought, I would adopt a pen-name—something sleek and non-ethnic. “Ally Rose” or “Maddy Lynn.”
By now I’m pretty sure I’ve changed my mind about all of that. In its original Germanic, Rosenberg was actually a fairly pretty-sounding name—rose mountain—which is probably why it ended up being such a common one. And while it probably never actually translated to “red beard,” it’s not impossible that the bored goy at the clerk’s office in charge of handing out names to an endless parade of Jewish peasants took a look at the ginger fellow up next in line and picked a name which more or less reflected his coloration. That thought is one which certainly induces me to identify more closely with it.
But much more importantly, it was my father’s name. Among the many other immanent and invisible traits and quirks and interests which he passed down, and the physical tchotchkes and books and diaries and art, it is the name which I carry closest to me, as close as anything could be other than my body, and it is the name which I want to try and treasure more purposefully.
I called my father’s aunt Faigy the other week. She was born in 1930 and since her sister died in 2013 has been the only one alive who can remember growing up in Williamsburg, with her older brother Murray and her father Jacob and her grandfather Shlomo Rosenberg.
“What do you remember about your grandfather—on the Rosenberg side?” I asked her.
He was probably born around the 1870s; she remembers him very, very well. That in and of itself is miraculous to me. She told me he’s buried somewhere in Queens, where I live now.
“He was just an amazing, amazing man,” she said. “All he cared about, was just about other people, helping them with money and caring for them and taking care of them.”
I may not have much in the way of “interesting” family history—no celebrities or poets or criminals or princes, just garment workers and tradespeople and homemakers and, eventually, doctors and social workers. And I have often felt, for various reasons, distant from the side of the family that I get my name from.
Yet from the Rosenbergs, from my Rosenbergs, I have directly derived much more than a name and a hair color. My heritage includes intellect, curiosity, and compassion; and a connection to the Jewish tradition which has been a comfort to me these past few months. I am so grateful for that.
(And I’m also grateful for the hair. Obviously.)
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