origin and meaning of surname BLOOM
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In reply to:
Re: bloom name meaning and origin
ANTHONY BLOOM 8/02/04
Simply amazed that the above posting sat uncorrected for nearly five years....
BLOOM is a 12th century German surname from the region of HANOVER and is spelled BLUM in German, although it is pronounced the same in German as in English. The German surname BLUME is pronounced BLOO-meh; BLUMEN is pronounced BLOO-menn.
The German word for "flower" is BLUME and its plural is BLUMEN. As in English, a "flower" can refer in German to an iron ingot or a plant.
The origin of the name has absolutely nothing to do with Jews. BLOOM and BLUM were among those surnames naturally adopted by Jews, especially Ashkenazi Jews of German heritage, required to take secular surnames in the Polish empire after 1770 because "Bluma" was traditionally a common female given name in Yiddish--itself a mostly German language--equivalent to "Blossom" or "Flossie"--and the surnames BLOOM and BLUM paid tribute to a family's matriarch.
Another and more obscure reason why the name BLOOM was popular among Jews and received literary attentio--in, for example, the novels of James Joyce and James Jone--was because the name's alphanumeric value--the sum of the alphabetical orders of its letters--is 57, the current century (1939-2039) in the Hebrew calendar. The name is culturally therefore "a current" until 2039.