The Schwartz surname means “black” in German, and it began as a plain physical nickname for a man with dark hair or a dark complexion. It belongs to German-speaking Central Europe, and it is carried today by two histories that are not always the same family at all.
What Does the Surname Schwartz Mean?
Schwartz means “black”. It comes from Middle High German swarz, modern German schwarz and Yiddish shvarts, all meaning black or dark, and it was originally a descriptive nickname rather than a job, a place or a father’s name.
That puts Schwartz in the oldest and simplest category of European surnames. Before names were fixed, a village with three men called Hans needed a way to tell them apart. One was the miller, one lived by the bridge, and one had black hair. The third became Hans Schwartz, and in time his children were Schwartz too, whatever colour their hair happened to be.
What the nickname described is less certain than what it meant. Most reference works give dark hair or complexion as the primary sense, though some also allow a man who worked in soot and smoke. Those readings are plausible rather than proven.
Where the Schwartz Name Comes From
Schwartz comes from German-speaking Central Europe. Its heartland runs from the Rhineland and Bavaria across Austria and Bohemia into Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and the Habsburg province of Galicia, and it arose independently in many of those places rather than descending from one founding family.
This is the most important thing to understand about the name. A descriptive nickname needs no common ancestor. Any community with dark-haired men could produce a Schwartz, and hundreds of them did.
The German thread
In its modern German spelling, Schwarz is one of the twenty most common surnames in Germany, in the same tier as Müller, Schmidt and Schneider. It is recorded across the German lands from the late medieval period onwards, with no regional cradle to point at, because dark hair is not a regional trait.
The Rhineland deserves a mention all the same, because it is where the German and Jewish histories of this name overlap. Speyer, Worms and Mainz were the founding centres of Ashkenazi Jewry, and Ashkenaz is simply the Hebrew word that came to mean Germany. Jewish families there spoke the German dialect that became Yiddish.
The Ashkenazi Jewish thread
Schwartz is one of the most common Ashkenazi Jewish surnames in the world, and this is the part the census figures do not tell you. Jewish families in Central and Eastern Europe generally used a patronymic, son of so-and-so, rather than a fixed hereditary surname, until the state made hereditary names compulsory.
That happened in stages. Joseph II of Austria decreed in 1787 that Jews across the Habsburg lands must adopt fixed German surnames, with Galicia already going through the process from 1785. Prussia followed in 1812 and the Russian Empire legislated over the following decades. Families chose, or were assigned, ordinary German words, and colour names proved the most popular of all. Schwartz, Weiss, Roth, Grün and Braun spread in a single administrative generation.
The result is a name that is genuinely two things at once. There were German Christian families called Schwarz for centuries before 1787, and there are Jewish families called Schwartz whose surname is barely two hundred years old. Neither is the “real” Schwartz. Both are.
Hungary and the Habsburg east
Hungary carried enormous numbers of Schwartzes, usually spelled Schwarcz or Svarc to fit Hungarian orthography. Scholarly work on Jewish name change lists Schwarcz among the most frequent original surnames of families who Magyarised in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, alongside Kohn, Weisz, Klein and Deutsch. Many became Fekete, the Hungarian for black.
In interwar Poland the name in its various spellings was borne by roughly thirty thousand people, almost all of them Jewish. Very few of those families are still in Poland. The name went to America, to Israel and, for a great many, nowhere at all.
Spelling Variants and Related Names
The variant list is unusually rich, because the name passed through half a dozen writing systems and every clerk spelled it as it sounded to him. The two German forms are Schwarz, standard in Germany and Austria, and Schwartz, the older orthography that dominates in the United States. They are the same name, and families often switched between them across a single generation of paperwork.
Anglicised and Americanised forms include Swartz, Swarts, Swart, Schwarts and Shwartz. Swartz in particular is heavily Pennsylvania German, the mark of families who arrived in the eighteenth century and lost the “ch” early. Some translated outright and became Black.
The Yiddish form is שװארץ, transliterated Shvarts or Shwartz, and in Hebrew script the name is written שוורץ.
The Slavic and Magyar adaptations follow local spelling rules. Polish gives Szwarc, writing the German “schw” as “szw”. Hungarian gives Schwarcz and Svarc, Czech and Slovak give Švarc with the Czech feminine Schwarzová, and Russian and Ukrainian records show Шварц.
Then there are the meaning-cousins, unrelated by descent but saying the same thing in another language: Dutch Zwart, French Lenoir, Italian Del Negro, Hungarian Fekete and English Black. Compound names such as Schwarzkopf and Schwarzenberg are separate surnames sharing the same first element.
The Schwartzes in America
Schwartzes reached America in three distinct waves, and they were mostly different people each time.
The first was colonial and German Protestant. Palatine and Swiss German families came to Pennsylvania through Philadelphia from the 1710s onwards, and their descendants are the Swartz and Schwartz families of the Pennsylvania German counties, many of them Mennonite or Amish. The nineteenth-century wave was far larger, filling the Midwest and the German settlements of Texas, the world of towns like New Braunfels, Texas.
The second wave was Jewish and East European, and it is why Schwartz sits so high in the American rankings. Between roughly 1880 and 1924, more than two million Jews left the Russian Empire, Galicia, Hungary and Romania, landing at Castle Garden and then Ellis Island. They settled first on the Lower East Side, then pushed out across Brooklyn and Queens into neighbourhoods that still carry the name, from Midwood in Brooklyn to Kew Gardens Hills in Queens.
The third wave was the refugees: Central European Jews fleeing Nazi Germany and Austria in the 1930s, and the survivors who came after 1945. Many were Hungarian. Many were the only member of their family left.
Beyond New York the name spread with the community. Chicago’s West Rogers Park became a great Ashkenazi neighbourhood of the Midwest. Detroit’s Jewish families moved out along Woodward Avenue into Oak Park, Michigan, and St Louis’s into University City, Missouri. Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill has stayed Jewish for more than a century.
Notable People Named Schwartz
Laurent Schwartz (1915 to 2002) was a French mathematician who won the Fields Medal in 1950 for his theory of distributions. He came from a French Jewish family and spent the war in hiding under a false name.
Anna Jacobson Schwartz (1915 to 2012) was an American economist and co-author, with Milton Friedman, of A Monetary History of the United States, 1867 to 1960 in 1963. Its argument that the Federal Reserve turned a recession into the Great Depression reshaped central banking.
Melvin Schwartz (1932 to 2006) was an American physicist who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics with Leon Lederman and Jack Steinberger for the neutrino beam method and the 1962 discovery of the muon neutrino.
Maurice Schwartz (1890 to 1960) was born in Ukraine and became the towering figure of the American Yiddish stage, founding the Yiddish Art Theatre in New York in 1918 and running it for decades.
Delmore Schwartz (1913 to 1966) was an American poet and short story writer, the son of Romanian Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, whose story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” made him famous at twenty-five.
Stephen Schwartz (born 1948) is an American composer and lyricist from New York, the writer of Godspell, Pippin and Wicked.
How Common Is Schwartz Today?
Schwartz is the 345th most common surname in the United States, carried by 90,071 Americans at the 2010 census. Counted with its variants it is far more common still, and in Israel it ranks among the twenty most common surnames.
| US rank (2010 Census) | #345 |
|---|---|
| Americans with the name | 90,071 |
| Origin | German and Jewish (Ashkenazi) |
| Meaning | “Black”, a nickname for someone with dark hair or complexion |
The variant spellings matter here. Add Schwarz, Swartz, Swarts and Szwarc and the true population of the name in America is considerably larger. Outside the United States the largest concentrations are in Israel, Germany, France and Canada.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does the surname Schwartz mean?
Schwartz means “black”, from Middle High German swarz and modern German schwarz. It started as a descriptive nickname for a person with black hair or a dark complexion, and became hereditary in the ordinary way once surnames were fixed.
Is Schwartz Jewish or German?
It is genuinely both, and the surname alone cannot tell you which. German Christian families have borne Schwarz since the medieval period, while Ashkenazi Jewish families largely took it after 1787, when Habsburg law required Jews to adopt fixed German surnames. Only documents can settle an individual family’s case.
Where does the Schwartz family come from?
There is no single Schwartz family. The name arose independently across German-speaking Central Europe, from the Rhineland and Bavaria to Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, Poland and Galicia. Most American Schwartzes trace either to German migration or to the Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe after 1880.
How common is the surname Schwartz?
Schwartz ranked 345th in the United States at the 2010 census, with 90,071 bearers. In its German spelling Schwarz it is among the twenty most common surnames in Germany, and it is one of the most common surnames in Israel.
Is there a Schwartz family crest or coat of arms?
No. In every European heraldic tradition, arms are granted to a specific individual and pass to that person’s direct descendants, never to everyone who happens to share a surname. There is no such thing as a “Schwartz family crest”. Sites selling one on a plaque or a mug are selling a decoration, not a lineage.
Why did so many Jewish families end up with the name Schwartz?
When the Habsburg, Prussian and Russian authorities compelled Jews to take hereditary surnames between the 1780s and the mid nineteenth century, families chose or were assigned ordinary German words, and colour names were the easiest of all. Schwartz, Weiss, Roth and Grün spread for the same reason, which is why so many unrelated Jewish families share them.
If your family carries the Schwartz name, its route from Central Europe to America is traceable. Atlas of Home can follow it from the Rhine towns, the Hungarian plain or a Galician shtetl to wherever your family landed, and to wherever you are now.
Further reading: the Wikipedia entry on the Schwarz surname, and the background on Ashkenazi Jewish surname adoption.