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Some names followed from the father’s occupation, as in Rabinowitz, which means the son of the rabbi. Take my father’s name – I did. His original name, Felbrodt, was probably functionally a derivation of “fel” (Yiddish for an animal skin, or pelt) and “Brodt,” referring to Brody, a substantial town in Galicia in the Ukraine that had a significant Jewish population dating back to the 15th century.6b:{"position":14,"content":"$6c"} 6d:{"position":15,"content":"One of my father’s forebears would probably have been the skinner or the furrier from Brody."} 6e:{"position":16,"content":"In dumping Felbrodt for Felton, I wonder whether he realized he was merging himself and his heirs with the Feltons of Worcester, minor English gentry with roots going back to the 12th century."} 6f:{"position":17,"content":"That family’s greatest luminaries were one 16th-century Felton executed for nailing the Papal Bull of excommunication of Elizabeth I to the gates of Lincoln’s Inn, and another Felton hanged, drawn and quartered in the 17th century for assassinating the Duke of Buckingham."} 70:{"position":18,"content":"But then, what’s really in a name? Winsomely, Shakespeare advises, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Yet over the millennia so very many of us (including Lev Bronstein and David Gruen) have understood that it is not only ourselves, but the worlds in which we

What’s in a name?

How the Jewish surname came to be.