“€œ[Lobe] look(ed) as Jewish as his name sounds.”

For quite some time now I am wondering, why the hoax of a Jewish name is still around. As a German I can’t help but connect this to German Nazi propaganda (based on a longer 19century attempt to make “Jews” recognizable by their names, but which caused problems to civil servants, since on the average Jewish names weren’t much different from German ones).

Ditto Jewish looks.

My mother’s family had both the “suspicious name” and the cartoonesque supposedly “Jewish features” but they were gentile. Admittedly the last Aryan step in her family history is missing. Her father was never, checked if he was kosher according to German laws. I haven’t looked closer into this matter, but admittedly I wonder why this myth is still around.

The best example to prove the name story as mythical is the arch enemy of Goebbels in Berlin Bernhard Weiss, the Jewish German vice president of the Berlin police. For his propaganda Goebbels had to tag an additional name on him. He called him: Isidor. If I remember well.

Maybe I should check if this vicious fight already showed in his diaries. But I subsume he only started to record later.

A preview feature would be nice, I don’t know if I have to use html for links: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=271281011984711

Bering wrote another book about the Bernhard Weiss case.