Why did some Jewish people take Polish and Russian surnames while others took German-influenced Yiddish surnames...

Why did some Jewish people take Polish and Russian surnames while others took German-influenced Yiddish surnames? Were Yiddish surnames taken in Slavic-speaking countries, or only Austria-Hungary?

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Jewish surnames in the Russian Empire were roughly 50/50 Slavic/Yiddish in origin with a small percentage derived from Hebrew.

In the Russian Pale of Settlement, numerous surnames are drawn from two Yiddish dialects, Northeastern (peculiar to Lithuania, Latvia, Belorussia and northern Ukraine) and Southeastern (characteristic of southern Ukraine and Bessarabia). The differences between these dialects mainly concern the pronunciation of vowels, as illustrated in the following samples:
Northeastern Yiddish: Treger, Margolis, Nodelman, Borekh, Gorfunkel, Beim, Likht
Southeastern Yiddish: Treiger, Margulis, Nudelman, Burikh, Gurfinkel, Boim, Lekht
The regions in which the Yiddish names were particularly common were Bessarabia, Podolia and Volhynia.

Surnames derived from German words and/or with German suffixes were common in two areas a good distance apart:
A continuous region in the southwestern part of the Empire comprising Bessarabia, Podolia and Volhynia. In this area, almost all surnames based on the German language belong to the category of artificial surnames—surnames that had nothing to do with either the origin or personal characteristics of their first bearers. Often them represent compound names, with two roots appended to each other: Apfelbaum, Kirschenbaum, Prinzenthal, Rosenzweig, Rotblatt and Weissberg. Certain names came to this area of the Empire from neighboring Galicia; others, even more numerous, were constructed locally, immediately after enactment of the law of 1804 that forced all Jews of the Empire to acquire hereditary family names.
Courland, a guberniya outside the Pale of Settlement with a large Jewish population authorized to continue residence there after Russia’s annexation of the area in 1795. In this guberniya, the German language was the source of the creation of a large majority of surnames.

Ashkenazi Jews took surnames based on the language of the country they lived in and the profession allotted to them. Just like everyone else.

It's called conversion. Ashkenazi Jews are LARPing as Jews.

It's not larping if they follow the religion.

Good question, my guess is that non-Yiddish names came later? Many poor Jews did not have last names in the modern sense until the 18th and early 19to century. A Jew named Joseph ben Elezier in rural Poland or Russia would have just adopted the name of a nearby town or just made his patronymic name more Slavic.

As far as I know, most Jewish Slavic names are place names or patronyms.

Not much evidence of this and it doesn't hold up genetically. While certainly a lot of Germans and Poles converted for various reasons over the years, Ashkenazi populations developed in the Roman Era as Jewish men migrated to Italy and France and married local women.

Trying to blend in so they wouldn't be discriminated against.

Ashkenazi Jews are descendant from converted Iranians and Greeks before they even arrived in Germany and Poland. It is known.

>90 percent of Ashkenazi Jews descend from the Greeks, Iranians and others who colonised northern Anatolia (now northern Turkey) more than 2,000 years ago before converting to Judaism.

middleeasteye.net/news/most-jews-descended-ancient-turkey-new-study-2107639949

Hahahaha

Medieval and early modern Jews lived in segregated villages and ghettos and often wore, or were made to wear, specific articles of clothing identifying them as Jewish