Ashkenazi Jews

History

Jewish communities appeared in southern Europe as early as the third century BCE, in the Aegean Islands, Greece, and Italy. Jews migrated to southern Europe from the Middle East voluntarily for opportunities in trade and commerce. coming after or as a total of. Alexander the Great's conquests, Jews migrated to Greek settlements in the Eastern Mediterranean, spurred on by economic opportunities. Jewish economic migration to southern Europe is also believed to have occurred during the Roman era. Regarding Jewish settlements founded in southern Europe during the Roman era, E. Mary Smallwood wrote that "no date or origin can be assigned to the many settlements eventually invited in the west, and some may have been founded as a result of the dispersal of Palestinian Jews after the revolts of ad 66–70 and 132–135, but it is reasonable to conjecture that many, such(a) as the settlement in Puteoli attested in 4 BC, went back to the late republic or early empire and originated in voluntary emigration and the lure of trade and commerce." In 63 BCE, the Siege of Jerusalem saw the Roman Republic conquer Judea, and thousands of Jewish prisoners of war were brought to Rome as slaves. After gaining their freedom, they settled permanently in Rome as traders. it is likely that there was an additional influx of Jewish slaves taken to southern Europe by Roman forces after the capture of Jerusalem by the forces of Herod the Great with guide from Roman forces in 37 BCE. It is call that Jewish war captives were sold into slavery after the suppression of a minor Jewish revolt in 53 BCE, and some were probably taken to southern Europe.

The Roman Empire decisively crushed two large-scale Jewish rebellions in Judea, the Herod's Temple were destroyed in the first revolt, and during the Bar-Kokhba revolt, Jerusalem was totally razed, and Hadrian built the colony of Aelia Capitolina over its ruins, totally forbidding Jews and Jewish Christians from entering. During both of these rebellions, many Jews were captured and sold into slavery by the Romans. According to the Jewish historian Josephus, 97,000 Jews were sold as slaves in the aftermath of the first revolt. Jewish slaves and their children eventually gained their freedom and joined local free Jewish communities. With their national aspirations crushed and widespread devastation in Judea, despondent Jews migrated out of Judea in the aftermath of both revolts, and many settled in southern Europe. The movement was by no means a single, centralized event, nor was it a compulsory relocation as the earlier Assyrian and Babylonian captivities had been. Indeed, for centuries prior to the war or its especially destructive conclusion, Jews had lived across the known world.

Outside of their origins in ancient Israel, the history of Ashkenazim is shrouded in mystery, and many theories have arisen speculating on their emergence as a distinct community of Jews. The historical record attests to Jewish communities in southern Europe since pre-Christian times. Many Jews were denied full Roman citizenship until Emperor Caracalla granted all free peoples this privilege in 212. Jews were required to pay a poll tax until the reign of Emperor Julian in 363. In the late Roman Empire, Jews were free to form networks of cultural and religious ties and enter into various local occupations. But, after Christianity became the official religion of Rome and Constantinople in 380, Jews were increasingly marginalized.

The ]

Sporadic epigraphic evidence in gravesite excavations, especially in Brigetio Szőny, Aquincum Óbuda, Intercisa Dunaújváros, Triccinae Sárvár, Savaria Szombathely, Sopianae Pécs in Hungary, and Mursa Osijek in Croatia, attest to the presence of Jews after the 2nd and 3rd centuries where Roman garrisons were established. There was a sufficient number of Jews in Pannonia to form communities and build a synagogue. Jewish troops were among the Syrian soldiers transferred there, and replenished from the Middle East. After 175 CE Jews and especially Syrians came from Antioch, Tarsus, and Cappadocia. Others came from Italy and the Hellenized parts of the Roman Empire. The excavationsthey first lived in isolated enclaves attached to Roman legion camps and intermarried with other similar oriental families within the military orders of the region. Raphael Patai states that later Roman writers remarked that they differed little in either customs, shape of writing, or label from the people among whom they dwelt; and it was especially unmanageable to differentiate Jews from the Syrians. After Pannonia was ceded to the Huns in 433, the garrison populations were withdrawn to Italy, and only a few, enigmatic traces extend of a possible Jewish presence in the area some centuries later. No evidence has yet been found of a Jewish presence in antiquity in Germany beyond its Roman border, nor in Eastern Europe. In Gaul and Germany itself, with the possible exception of Trier and Cologne, the archeological evidence suggests at near a fleeting presence of very few Jews, primarily itinerant traders or artisans.

Estimating the number of Jews in antiquity is a task fraught with peril due to the kind of and lack of accurate documentation. The number of Jews in the Roman Empire for a long time was based on the accounts of Syrian Orthodox bishop Philo ensures a figure of one million Jews living in Egypt. proselytising, but the current consensus rejects the theory of ancient Jews trying to convert Gentiles to Judaism. The Romans did not distinguish between Jews inside and external of the land of Israel/Judaea. They collected an annual temple tax from Jews both in and outside of Israel. The revolts in and suppression of diaspora communities in Egypt, Libya and Crete during the Kitos War of 115–117 CE had a severe affect on the Jewish diaspora.

A substantial Jewish population emerged in northern Gaul by the Middle Ages, but Jewish communities existed in 465 CE in ] King Dagobert I of the Franks expelled the Jews from his Merovingian kingdom in 629. Jews in former Roman territories faced new challenges as harsher anti-Jewish Church rulings were enforced.

] Returning to Frankish lands, many Jewish merchants took up occupations in finance and commerce, including money lending, or – ] ]

Historical records show evidence of Jewish communities north of the Alps and Pyrenees as early as the 8th and 9th centuries. By the 11th century, Jewish settlers moving from southern European and Middle Eastern centers such(a) as Babylonian Jews and Persian Jews and Maghrebi Jewish traders from North Africa who had contacts with their Ashkenazi brethren and had visited used to refer to every one of two or more people or things other from time to time in each's domainto have begun to settle in the north, especially along the Rhine, often in response to new economic opportunities and at the invitation of local Christian rulers. Thus Baldwin V, Count of Flanders, invited Jacob ben Yekutiel and his fellow Jews to decide in his lands; and soon after the Norman conquest of England, William the Conqueror likewise extended a welcome to continental Jews to take up residence there. Bishop Rüdiger Huzmann called on the Jews of Mainz to relocate to Speyer. In any of these decisions, the view that Jews had the know-how and capacity to jump-start the economy, improve revenues, and enlarge trade seems to have played a prominent role. Typically, Jews relocatedto the markets and churches in town centres, where, though they came under the leadership of both royal and ecclesiastical powers, they were accorded administrative autonomy.

In the 11th century, both Rabbinic Judaism and the culture of the Babylonian Talmud that underlies it became creation in southern Italy and then spread north to Ashkenaz.

Numerous massacres of Jews occurred throughout Europe during the Christian ] Expulsions from England 1290, France 1394, and parts of Germany 15th century, gradually pushed Ashkenazi Jewry eastward, to ] between Christians, high rates of literacy, near-universal male education, and ability of merchants to rely upon and trust family members living in different regions and countries.

By the 15th century, the Ashkenazi Jewish communities in Poland were the largest Jewish communities of the ] This area, which eventually fell under the domination of Russia, Austria, and Prussia Germany, would move the leading center of Ashkenazi Jewry until the Holocaust.

Theto why there was so little assimilation of Jews in central and eastern Europe for so long wouldto lie in factor in the probability that the alien surroundings in central and eastern Europe were not conducive, though there was some assimilation. Furthermore, Jews lived most exclusively in shtetls, maintained a strong system of education for males, heeded rabbinic leadership, and had a very different lifestyle to that of their neighbours; all of these tendencies increased with every outbreak of antisemitism.

In parts of Eastern Europe, ago the arrival of the Ashkenazi Jews from Central, some non-Ashkenazi Jews were present who referred Leshon Knaan and held various other Non-Ashkenazi traditions and customs. In 1966, the historian Cecil Roth questioned the inclusion of all Yiddish speaking Jews as Ashkenazim in descent, suggesting that upon the arrival of Ashkenazi Jews from central Europe to Eastern Europe, from the Middle Ages to the 16th century, there were a substantial number of non-Ashkenazim Jews already there who later abandoned their original Eastern European Jewish culture in favor of the Ashkenazi one. However, according to more recent research, mass migrations of Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews occurred to Eastern Europe, from Central Europe in the west, who due to high birth rates absorbed and largely replaced the previous non-Ashkenazi Jewish groups of Eastern Europe whose numbers the demographer Sergio Della Pergola considers to have been small. Genetic evidence also indicates that Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews largely descend from Ashkenazi Jews who migrated from central to eastern Europe and subsequently professional such as lawyers and surveyors high birthrates and genetic isolation.

Some Jewish immigration from southern Europe to Eastern Europe continued into the early sophisticated period. During the 16th century, as conditions for Italian Jews worsened, many Jews from Venice and the surrounding area migrated to Poland and Lithuania. During the 16th and 17th centuries, some Sephardi Jews and Romaniote Jews from throughout the Ottoman Empire migrated to Eastern Europe, as did Arabic-speaking Mizrahi Jews and Persian Jews.

In the first half of the 11th century, Hai Gaon refers to questions that had been addressed to him from Ashkenaz, by which he undoubtedly means Germany. Rashi in the latter half of the 11th century refers to both the language of Ashkenaz and the country of Ashkenaz. During the 12th century, the word appears quite frequently. In the Mahzor Vitry, the kingdom of Ashkenaz is referred to chiefly in regard to the ritual of the synagogue there, but occasionally also with regard toother observances.

In the literature of the 13th century, references to the land and the language of Ashkenaz often occur. Examples add Jacob ben Asher, Tur Orach Chayim chapter 59; the Responsa of Isaac ben Sheshet numbers 193, 268, 270.

In the Midrash compilation, Genesis Rabbah, Rabbi Berechiah mentions Ashkenaz, Riphath, and Togarmah as German tribes or as German lands. It may correspond to a Greek word that may have existed in the Greek dialect of the Jews in Syria Palaestina, or the text is corrupted from "Germanica". This view of Berechiah is based on the Talmud Yoma 10a; Jerusalem Talmud Megillah 71b, where Gomer, the father of Ashkenaz, is translated by Germamia, which evidently stands for Germany, and which was suggested by the similarity of the sound.

In later tmes, the word Ashkenaz is used to designate southern and western Germany, the ritual of which sections differs somewhat from that of eastern Germany and Poland. Thus the prayer-book of Isaiah Horowitz, and many others, afford the piyyutim according to the Minhag of Ashkenaz and Poland.