Ashkenazi Jews

Origins

"Ashkenaz" was the medieval Hebrew name for Germany, and the term "Ashkenazim" came to denote the Jews of Germany, northern France, and their descendants.¹ Their first compact area of settlement lay on the banks of the Rhine—the ShUM cities of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz—where a distinctive Jewish culture had formed by the 10th century.¹ Rashi and the Tosafists made nearby Champagne a center of Talmudic learning.³ Persecution during the First Crusade of 1096⁴ and, above all, the Black Death massacres of 1348–1349 drove a large migration eastward into Poland and Lithuania, which became the community's demographic heartland.⁵

Religious life

Around 1000 CE, Rabbeinu Gershom of Mainz convened a council whose takkanot—prohibiting polygamy and forbidding divorce without a wife's consent—became binding across Ashkenaz.⁶ Rashi's comprehensive commentaries on the Talmud and Hebrew Bible, elaborated by the Tosafists, made Talmud study the core of Ashkenazi learning.⁷ Distinct Ashkenazi custom (minhag) was recorded in Moses Isserles' Mapah, his glosses on Joseph Karo's Shulchan Arukh, embedded in every printed edition since 1578.⁸ In the 18th century Ashkenazi Jewry split between the Hasidic movement founded by the Baal Shem Tov⁹ and its Mitnagdic opponents, led by the Vilna Gaon.¹⁰

Language & culture

The Ashkenazi vernacular was Yiddish, based on High German and fused with elements of Hebrew, Aramaic, Romance, and Slavic languages, and written in the Hebrew alphabet.¹¹ It emerged in the Rhineland by about the 10th century and later shifted its center to Eastern Europe.¹ Before World War II Yiddish still counted 11–13 million speakers, overwhelmingly Ashkenazi Jews.¹² Alongside its religious writings, Yiddish carried a rich secular literature from the 19th century, exemplified by the author Sholem Aleichem.¹³

Relations with neighbours

In the medieval West, Ashkenazi status was precarious: communities depended on the protection of bishops and kings and suffered massacres in 1096,⁴ expulsion from England in 1290,¹⁴ and the Black Death pogroms.⁵ In Poland-Lithuania, by contrast, rulers issued protective charters: the Statute of Kalisz of 1264, granted by Bolesław the Pious and later confirmed by Casimir the Great, gave Jews legal autonomy and their own courts.¹⁵ Communal self-government reached its height in the Council of Four Lands, the central body of Jewish autonomy in Poland from the late 16th century until 1764.¹⁶

Decline & dispersal

The Khmelnytsky uprising of 1648 unleashed Cossack pogroms that killed thousands of Jews across Ukraine and Poland.¹⁷ The partitions of Poland placed most Ashkenazim under Russian rule, confined after 1791 to the Pale of Settlement, which at its height held over five million Jews.² Pogroms from 1881 and the repressive May Laws of 1882 drove some two million Jews to emigrate, chiefly to the United States, between 1880 and 1920.¹⁸ Finally, the Holocaust of 1941–1945 murdered about six million Jews¹⁹—some 85% of them Yiddish speakers—destroying the Eastern European heartland of Ashkenazi life.¹²

Notable figures

• Rabbeinu Gershom (Gershom ben Judah) (960–1028) — Early Ashkenazi Talmudic authority. Sage of Mainz called "Me'or ha-Golah"; around 1000 CE his takkanot banned polygamy and barred divorcing a wife without her consent.⁶
• Rashi (Shlomo Yitzchaki) (1040–1105) — Talmudic and biblical commentator. Rabbi of Troyes in northern France whose commentaries on the Talmud and Hebrew Bible became foundational for all later Ashkenazi study.⁷
• Baal Shem Tov (Israel ben Eliezer) (1698–1760) — Founder of Hasidic Judaism. Podolian mystic and healer regarded as the founder of Hasidism, the movement that reshaped popular religious life across Eastern Europe.⁹
• Vilna Gaon (Elijah ben Solomon Zalman) (1720–1797) — Talmudist and leader of the Mitnagdim. Preeminent Lithuanian Talmudist and kabbalist of Vilna, foremost leader of the Mitnagdim who resisted the spread of Hasidism.¹⁰
• Sholem Aleichem (Solomon Rabinovich) (1859–1916) — Yiddish author and playwright. Leading Yiddish author of the Russian Empire; his Tevye stories later inspired the musical Fiddler on the Roof.¹³

Key events

• 1096 Rhineland massacres. During the First Crusade, mobs led by Count Emicho destroyed the Jewish communities of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz—the ShUM cities—killing roughly 2,000 Jews.⁴
• 1264 Statute of Kalisz. Bolesław the Pious granted Poland's Jews a general charter of protection and legal autonomy, giving Jewish courts jurisdiction over Jewish affairs.¹⁵
• 1290 Expulsion of Jews from England. Edward I's Edict of Expulsion banished all Jews from England; they were not readmitted until 1656, under Oliver Cromwell.¹⁴
• 1349 Black Death massacres. Falsely accused of poisoning wells, Rhineland Jewish communities were massacred—about 2,000 burned at Strasbourg in 1349—accelerating migration eastward to Poland.⁵
• 1648 Khmelnytsky massacres. Cossacks under Bohdan Khmelnytsky slaughtered Jewish communities across Ukraine; modern estimates of the 1648 dead range from several thousand to about 20,000.¹⁷
• 1791 Creation of the Pale of Settlement. Catherine the Great confined Jewish residence to a western Pale carved from the Polish partitions; at its height it held over five million Jews.²
• 1881 Pogroms and mass emigration. After Alexander II's assassination, anti-Jewish riots swept the Russian Empire and the 1882 May Laws followed; some two million Jews emigrated by 1920.¹⁸
• 1941 The Holocaust. From 1941 to 1945 Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered about six million Jews—two-thirds of European Jewry—annihilating Ashkenazi communities across Eastern Europe.¹⁹

Where they lived

• Amsterdam · 1590
• Austria (Vienna) · 900
• Bohemia & Moravia (Prague) · 900
• England · 1070
• Hamburg & Altona · 1600
• Hungary · 1000
• Lithuania (Vilna) · 1320
• Northern France (Champagne & Île-de-France) · 800–1394 CE
• The Pale of Settlement (Ukraine, Belarus) · 1500
• Poland (Crown lands) · 1100
• Rhineland (Ashkenaz — the ShUM cities) · 900