So I was looking up “resident” in my Yiddish dictionary of Jew words (don’t ask me why; I don’t know). The word that I found was “toyshev”. This result is slightly interesting, because, like Hebrew words and many Yiddish words, toyshev contains no real vowels. It is made up of a t character, a character marking either an “oy” or an “o”, a character which could be read as either “sh” or “s”, and a v character. If one were to read it incorrectly (say, I, since I don’t know Hebrew or enough Yiddish to be able to recognize the word), it might come out as “tosev”.
I’m willing to bet this actually has weight, as Harry Turtledove (or as I like to call him: David Shapiro Turtledaub), is obviously well versed in Jewish tradition and language.
Why else would one of the main characters of his book be just some Jewish guy?