Many recent immigrants to Israel have changed their names to Hebrew ones, in a process called hebraization, to erase remnants of Diaspora history still present in family names from other languages. This is especially common among Ashkenazi Jews, because most of their European names do not go back far in history; surnames were imposed by the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires in the 18th century (explaining why many Ashkenazi Jews have German or European-sounding names). The newly assumed Hebrew names were sometimes based on phonetic similarity with their former European surname, for example, Golda Meyersohn became Golda Meir.