Why do so many Jewish surnames end with stein?

Answer 1

Stein means 'stone" in German, many Jews are of German extraction like many Scandinavian names end in 'son" eg: anderson, Peterson, Emmerson, etc. -stein isn't a Jewish name, it's a German name (the same is true of -berg and -mann). By the time last names became common ("Thomas Miller" as opposed to "Thomas the Miller"), there were many Jews living in Europe. They took names in the language spoken in the region they lived in. Some of them lived in Germany, so they got German-sounding names. Starting about 80 years back, there was some unpleasantness in Germany (actually, it had been going on at least to some degree for hundreds of years all over Europe, but Germany in the late 1930s was a particularly bad time and place to be Jewish). Many German Jews got out while they could, bringing their Germanic names with them. Since German Jews were under more pressure to emigrate than non-Jewish Germans (at least at first, when they were still being allowed to emigrate), in many countries where German is not the primary language a Germanic name often goes along with being of Jewish descent.

Answer 2

Many surnames used by Jewish families from central and eastern Europe are based on German or Yiddish and were created artificially at the beginning of the 19th century, when many European governments required those Jews to take and use permanent surnames. A common means of creating a lot of names was to combine two words, like "black" and "mountain." The word Stein is Yiddish and German for "Stone," so "Perlstein" for example is for pearls, and so are the other names after precious stones or marbles, as well as rocks and mountain stones.