Prussia allowed Jews to be citizens in 1812, in exchange for taking fixed surnames. An edict of 1833 required all Jews, not just those who were nationalized, to take surnames from a list the government chose for them, like Rubenstein and Bernstein. But soon after, in 1845, Jews were legally confined to a closed list of surnames, names they could not change, setting them up for effortless identification later by the Nazis. As historian Dietz Bering has said, “the Jews, for whom in 1812 the gates of the legal ghetto had been opened only half-heartedly and not even completely, were to be
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