individuals for the purpose of taxation, so impossible to catch one in a criminal case, owing to their having no surnames, and being known as the son of Levi, or of Moses, or of Abraham, that he issued a decree requiring every Jewish family to assume a surname and to be registered under it. They at once took to themselves flowery designations, as Lilienthal, Blomberg, Rosenheim; or else assumed an heraldic cognizance. Hence come the families of Adler, Hirsch, Löwe, Strauss, Stern, Mond; or, again, Rothschild (Red shield), Silberad (Silver wheel, the arms of the city of Mainz). Or else they adopted the name of a town or village where they lived, as Oppenheim, Auerbach, Bamberger. Some modestly accepted the name of their father, whose son they claimed to be, as Mendelssohn, Levison. Others, more aspiring, adopted names of noble families that had died out.
In Bohemia the most splendid name was that of Rosenberg. The lords of Rosenberg frequently contracted marriages with the sovereign houses of Germany, and on one occasion we find the name of Rosenberg among the candidates for the Polish crown. At present the family is extinct, and its vast estates have passed with its castles and palaces to the Schwarzenbergs. Here was a chance not to be missed. Not only was this a flowery name, signifying the Mountain of Roses, but it was also a famous historic name. It was at once appropriated by a Hebrew as not only giving him a fictitious descent from Charlemagne, but also some claim to a family ghost, "The White Lady of Rosenberg." Abraham Rosenberg came to Budweis near one of the family castles on some pecuniary quest, and put up at the Glocke. Next morning he appeared with a nose of the size and colour of a much bruised peach. He asserted that he had been visited during the night by his great ancestress, the White Bertha, who had communicated family secrets to him. It was, however, shrewdly suspected that she had wrung his nose for having had the temerity to assume her patronymic of such historic dignity.
A German Jew of the name of Gottheimer came to England as a company promoter, and assumed the name of Albert Grant, Grant being the family name of the Earls of Seaforth, the heads of the Clan of Grant. He gained £100,000 as promotion-money for the Emma Silver Mine, which paid investors a shilling for
