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— CH. 1 · INTRODUCTION —

Ashkenazi Jews

~7 min read · Ch. 1 of 7
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  • Ashkenazi Jews trace their origins to communities that took root in the Rhineland during the 10th century, and yet by 1930 their descendants would account for 92% of all Jews on earth. That is a stunning demographic reversal. At the end of the 11th century, just 3% of world Jewry was Ashkenazi. How did a small cluster of communities along the Rhine and in northern France grow into the dominant branch of a global people? The answers run through medieval massacres, royal invitations, a language built from Middle High German and Hebrew, a catastrophe unlike anything in human history, and a body of genetic evidence that has kept scientists arguing for decades.

  • The word Ashkenaz appears in the book of Genesis as the first son of Gomer, son of Japhet, son of Noah. In the book of Jeremiah, Ashkenaz is one of three kingdoms called on by God to resist Babylon, alongside Minni and Ararat. By the 4th century, Rabbi Berekhiah was glossing Ashkenaz as a name for German tribes or German lands, and a 6th-century comment on Eusebius linked the name to Scandza, the mythic cradle of Germanic peoples. Saadia Gaon, writing in the 10th century, identified Ashkenaz with the Slavs. The 10th-century historian Yovhannes Drasxanakertc'i associated the name with Armenia. In 1932, Samuel Krauss proposed a connection to the Khazars, a theory his contemporary Jacob Mann disputed. What the shifting glosses reveal is that for Jewish scholars, biblical geography was not static: Spain became Sefarad, France became Tsarefat, Bohemia became the Land of Canaan. By the time Rashi, the great Talmudic commentator, used the phrase leshon Ashkenaz to describe German vernacular expressions, the name had settled firmly on Germany and its Jewish communities, especially in the Rhineland cities of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz.

  • Jewish settlers were present north of the Alps as early as the 8th and 9th centuries, drawn by the stability that followed Charlemagne's expansion around 800. Charlemagne granted Jews freedoms comparable to those once enjoyed under Rome, and merchants arrived from southern France, moving north along the Rhone River. Germany saw new communities by the Rhine and Danube, including the SHuM cluster of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz. Baldwin V, Count of Flanders, invited Jacob ben Yekutiel and his fellow Jews to settle in his lands. Bishop Rudiger Huzmann called on the Jews of Mainz to relocate to Speyer. William the Conqueror extended a welcome to continental Jews after the Norman conquest of England. Then, in 1096, crusader mobs swept through France and Germany and devastated those very communities in what are known as the Rhineland massacres. The massacres were a turning point. Over the following centuries, expulsions from England in 1290, France in 1394, and parts of Germany in the 15th century pushed Ashkenazi Jewry steadily eastward. Poland was accepting: the Statute of Kalisz of 1264 granted Jews special protection, and by the 15th century the Ashkenazi communities there were the largest in the Diaspora. The Black Death persecutions of the 14th century accelerated this movement further, and by the 16th century the bulk of Ashkenazim had settled in the Kingdom of Poland, encompassing what is today Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and parts of Russia.

  • Yiddish emerged by the 11th century from contact between Judeo-Latin speakers and various High German vernaculars. It is a Germanic language written in Hebrew letters, deeply influenced by Hebrew and Aramaic, with additional threads from Romance and, later, Slavic tongues. Before the Holocaust, more than 11 million people worldwide spoke Yiddish. For centuries it was simply the language of everyday Ashkenazi life, from the Rhineland to Riga to Romania, while liturgical Ashkenazi Hebrew served prayer and scholarship. The Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, changed this. Beginning in the late 18th century, Maskilim, the adherents of this movement, pushed for adoption of national languages and for revival of Hebrew as a spoken tongue. Yiddish declined in prestige, stigmatized by assimilationists and later by Zionists. Hebrew, whose daily use had been primarily liturgical until then, was progressively revived as a common language through the 19th century and into the 20th. The Yiddishist movement, which sought to preserve and revive the language, faded through the 20th century; the Holocaust killed around 5 million Yiddish speakers among its approximately 6 million Jewish victims, a blow from which the language has never fully recovered. Yet in the 21st century a revival is underway, including Duolingo adding Yiddish as a language option, and Hasidic and Haredi communities continue to use Yiddish in daily life today.

  • Of the estimated 8.8 million Jews living in Europe at the start of World War II, the majority were Ashkenazi. About 6 million, more than two-thirds of that total, were systematically murdered. Poland lost 3 million of its 3.3 million Jews, a death rate of 91%. Ukraine lost 900,000 of 1.5 million, roughly 60%. Germany, Hungary, the Baltic states, and other Slavic nations lost between 50% and 90% of their Jewish populations. France lost over 25%. As a proportion of world Jewry, Ashkenazim fell from an estimated 92% in 1930 to around 74% to 85% in later estimates, the wide range reflecting methodological differences among demographers including Sergio DellaPergola. The Holocaust also ended the dynamic development of Yiddish in a matter of years, because the vast majority of its speakers were gone. Many surviving Ashkenazi Jews emigrated after the war to Israel, the United States, Canada, Argentina, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Israeli demographer Sergio DellaPergola's statistics showed Ashkenazim comprising 74% of Jews worldwide in 2000, and later estimates placed the total Ashkenazi population at around 10-13 million out of roughly 15.8 million total Jews.

  • Genetic studies of Ashkenazi origins began in the 1990s. Research by Gil Atzmon of the Longevity Genes Project at Albert Einstein College of Medicine suggests that Ashkenazim branched off from other Jewish populations around the time of the destruction of the First Temple, roughly 2,500 years ago, and then went through a severe bottleneck, with a population of several million reducing to just 400 founding families who left northern Italy around the year 1000. A 2000 study by Hammer and co-authors found that Ashkenazi Y-chromosomes contained mutations common among Middle Eastern peoples but rare among indigenous Europeans, indicating that male lines trace predominantly to the Middle East. A 2006 study by Behar and co-authors, examining 1,000 units of haplogroup K in mitochondrial DNA, suggested that about 40% of today's Ashkenazim descend from just four founding women likely from a Levantine genetic pool in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE. A 2025 study by Joseph Livni and Karl Skorecki examined a broader sample and found that fewer than 15% of present-day Ashkenazi Jews carry absorbed mitochondrial DNA from outside populations, supporting a unified Near Eastern origin for both maternal and paternal founding lineages. A 2013 study conducted by 30 geneticists from 13 universities across nine countries found no evidence for the so-called Khazar hypothesis, which had proposed that Ashkenazim descended largely from Turkic converts rather than from ancient Middle Eastern populations. Any two Ashkenazi Jewish participants in the Atzmon study shared about as much DNA as fourth or fifth cousins.

  • Joseph Karo's Shulchan Aruch, published in 1563, codified Jewish law, and together with the notes added by Moses Isserles, it became the normative legal code for Ashkenazic Jews in the century after publication. Practical differences from Sephardic practice persist today in many areas of religious observance. Ashkenazi Jews traditionally refrain from eating legumes, grain, millet, and rice during Passover, while Sephardic Jews typically do not prohibit these foods. Ashkenazi married women commonly wear wigs as a hair covering. Ashkenazi Jews traditionally name newborns after deceased relatives, while Sephardic Jews often name children after living grandparents. In prayer, Ashkenazi tefillin are wound toward the body rather than away from it, and Ashkenazi men traditionally don tefillin while standing. The most distinctive consonantal difference in Ashkenazi Hebrew pronunciation is the rendering of the Hebrew letter tav in certain contexts as an /s/ sound rather than a /t/ or /th/ sound. As of 2020-66% of American Jews identified as Ashkenazic. Though Ashkenazi Jews have never exceeded 3% of the American population, by 2006 they accounted for 37% of winners of the U.S. National Medal of Science, 25% of American Nobel Prize winners in literature, and 40% of American Nobel Prize winners in science and economics. In Israel, where Ashkenazim comprised 80% of the Jewish population in 1948, intermarriage between ethnic groups increased steadily between the 1950s and the late 1990s, with the share of Jewish Israelis having multiethnic parents doubling from 14% to 28%.

Common questions

Where did Ashkenazi Jews originally come from?

Ashkenazi Jews trace their origins to Jewish communities that consolidated in the Rhineland (western Germany) and northern France during the 10th century, having migrated from centers in the Italian Peninsula and the Southern Levant. Genetic research indicates their deeper ancestry lies in ancient populations of the Middle East, with both paternal and maternal founding lineages pointing predominantly to a Near Eastern origin.

What percentage of Jews worldwide are Ashkenazi?

At their population peak around 1930, Ashkenazim were estimated to account for 92% of world Jewry. After the Holocaust, estimates place their current share at roughly 74% to 85% of the global Jewish population, depending on the methodology used. The estimated Ashkenazi population today is around 10-13 million out of approximately 15.8 million total Jews.

What language do Ashkenazi Jews speak?

Historically Ashkenazi Jews spoke Yiddish, a Germanic language written in Hebrew letters and heavily influenced by Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic languages. Before the Holocaust, more than 11 million people worldwide spoke Yiddish. Following the Holocaust and the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language, Hebrew has replaced Yiddish for most Ashkenazi Jews, though Hasidic and Haredi communities continue to use Yiddish in daily life.

How did the Holocaust affect the Ashkenazi Jewish population?

Of an estimated 8.8 million Jews living in Europe at the start of World War II, about 6 million, more than two-thirds, were systematically murdered in the Holocaust, the large majority of them Ashkenazi. Poland lost 3 million of its 3.3 million Jews (91%). The Holocaust also ended the dynamic development of Yiddish, as approximately 5 million of the Jewish victims were Yiddish speakers.

What is the Khazar hypothesis about Ashkenazi Jewish origins?

The Khazar hypothesis, proposed in the late 19th century, suggested that Ashkenazi Jews descended primarily from Turkic Khazar converts who migrated westward into Central Europe, rather than from Jews who migrated eastward from France and Germany. A 2013 study by 30 geneticists from 13 universities across nine countries found no genetic evidence supporting this hypothesis, concluding that Ashkenazi Jews derive their ancestry primarily from populations of the Middle East and Europe.

What religious customs are distinctive to Ashkenazi Jews?

Ashkenazi Jews follow the German rite synagogue ritual, codified in Joseph Karo's Shulchan Aruch (1563) together with the notes of Moses Isserles. Distinctive customs include refraining from legumes and rice during Passover, naming newborns after deceased rather than living relatives, wearing wigs as a hair covering for married women, and pronouncing certain Hebrew letters differently from Sephardic Jews, notably the letter tav as an /s/ sound in specific contexts.

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All sources

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