So Lord Hamlyn, the publicity-shy £2m Labour donor, was once Mr Hamburger. He changed his name at 18. "It was really tough for a kid being called Hamburger," he said. I wonder whether his lifelong endeavour to avoid the spotlight is in part a result of a childhood spent having slices of cheese placed on his head, or whatever mean tricks his schoolmates played on him.

In transforming himself into Hamlyn, of course, Mr Hamburger joined a long tradition of Jews giving themselves innocuous, breezy western surnames. My own original family name was not unintentionally funny. We were not Hamburgers nor Goldfish (as Samuel Goldwyn once was). My great grandfather was simply a Ronson with two additional As. What made those As manifestly Jewish was their immediate proximity to one other, and their positioning right at the forefront of the surname. There they were: impossible to ignore, as conspicuous as the nose on my face, huddled together like Jewish refugees keeping warm on the boat to the New World. He was Israel Aaronson. Aaronson: son of Aaron. And as soon as he set foot on British soil, the As got the chop.

There are two theories as to why this happened, passed down in Ronson folklore. A hundred years ago, when the pogroms came, everyone set off from my ancestors' village in Lithuania to America and freedom. But Israel Aaronson never made it. He stopped off en route in Cardiff and stayed. It reminded him of Lithuania, he is reputed to have said, only with less snow.

Back then, Cardiff was a mini-Ellis Island, a city built on immigration, burgeoning with boatloads of Irish refugees from the potato famine, Italians escaping whatever it was they were escaping, and eastern European Jews fleeing the pogroms. Such was the length of the queues and the mountains of paperwork, the understaffed immigration officers used to routinely take it upon themselves to swipe off superfluous vowels and outlandish, alien clusters such as "vitch" and "stein". So this is how it may have happened: young Israel Aaronson may have got to the front of the queue, pronounced his name in a thick and nervous Lithuanian accent, the immigration officer may have thought: "Sod this," and declared: "I shall call you Ronson."

I like this story best, because it has my great grandfather as the victim, the two As cruelly snatched away from him by some boorish Welsh bureaucrat, thus forsaking the traditions and culture of the old country that he loved so deeply.

I can't help thinking, however, that this isn't how it happened at all. The fact is, those two As must have felt like inauspicious appendages to him. All he wanted to do was fit in, become a success in business without appearing to his associates like an exotic creature from overseas. How would I have felt, had those two As remained? Like a freak with two As at the beginning of my name? I would, of course, have been first in every list, my name called out right at the beginning of every school assembly: a burden for the tardy young Ronson who didn't like to stand out in a crowd.

I would have felt like Israel must have felt: foreign. I like being a Ronson. I like its sort-of Jewishness. I can be a Jew like Gerald and a beautiful aryan glam-rock star like Mick. I like the way the R slips in unnoticed somewhere in the last third of the alphabet. It is a very Jewish place to be in the alphabet.

My favourite quote about 20th century Jewish assimilation is some thing Philip Roth once said about Irving Berlin, the composer of Easter Parade and White Christmas.

"After Moses," Roth said, "the next great Jewish genius was Irving Berlin. He took Easter, took the blood out of it, and made it about fashion. He took Christmas, took Christ out of it, and made it about the weather." Irving Berlin, by the way, was born Israel Baline. I have a childhood memory of my parents taking me to our local cinema in Cardiff to spot the Jews amongs the movie stars. Some were easy, of course. Mel Brookes. Woody Allen. The Marx Brothers, possibly: Groucho and Harpo, no question. Chico was presumably Roman Catholic. But the movie star Jews I really admired were those such as Lauren Bacall (born Betty Persky), Kirk Douglas (Issur Daniclovitch Demsky) and Tony Curtis (Bernard Schwartz). These were credits to our religion: romantic leads and nobody knew.

Unfortunately, in our sunshiney attempts at mingling with the gentiles we have unintentionally helped to create the myth of a shadowy cabal: we Jews who camouflage ourselves. The camouflage is mistaken for scheming by anti-semites, as if we're concealing something sinister, when in fact we are just hopelessly in love with the camouflage.

Of course the real names always come to light in the end. The tradition seems to be that some young Jew with ambitions to become a star will unshackle himself from the burden of his strange name, become a star, and subsequently come up with a funny anecdote to sugar-coat the selling of his birthname down the river. Take Frankie Vaughn. Born Frank Abelson into a family of poor Russian Jews, he has explained in many interviews that the change of name came about when he announced to his Russian grandmother his ambitions to become a singer.

"Vell," she reputedly said, "then you vill be the best von there ever vas." Others are more direct in their explanations. Lawrence Harvey Zeiger was "too Jewish", so he became Larry King. Garik Weinstein didn't want to be attacked by anti-semites, so he became Garry Kasparov.

And, in the end, as it invariably does with us Jews, guilt takes over. Warren Mitchell now says he wishes he'd stuck with Warren Misell. For years, Robert Maxwell vigorously denied his Jewish roots, pretended that he'd never been born Jan Ludvik Hoch. And then, shortly before his death, something happened. He started lavishing money (unfortunately other peoples' money) on Jewish causes: Holocaust conferences, state of Israel bonds. In the days before his drowning, a TV crew filmed him sobbing quietly next to Jerusalem's Wailing Wall. You can take away the strange letters, the Vs and the Ks and two As. But you can never take away the Jewishness.