Ashkenazi Jewish ethnicity indicates genetic origins in the Jewish community of Germany and France. Ashkenazi Jews are a European Jewish diaspora who trace their communal origins to Germany and France, and later to an eastward migration towards Poland, the Baltic rim, and the Slavic countries. Today, Ashkenazi Jews constitute over 80% of the world’s Jewish population, with the largest communities located in Israel and the U.S. Due to centuries of endogamy and segregation from surrounding cultures, the Ashkenazi Jewish ethnic group is very tight-knit genetically.
Ashkenazi Jewish history
Ashkenazi Jews emerged as a distinct community around the tenth century when they settled along the Rhineland and the Palatinate in present-day Germany. Traditionally, the Jewish people traces its origins to the tribes of Biblical Israel; though there is some speculation as to the exact origins of the Ashkenazi community, the theory best supported by evidence holds that early founders of this community made their way through Spain, France, and Italy during Roman rule, eventually reaching the Rhineland valley. Over the next 5 centuries, the push of persecution and the pull of better opportunities brought a large portion of the Ashkenazi Jewish population to settle in Poland, Lithuania, and Russia. As the Golden Age of the Jews in Spain waned and eventually ended in 1492, the center of Jewish spiritual life shifted to Poland, which became the largest community of the diaspora and remained so until the twentieth century.
The Ashkenazi Jewish community faced many dark times and hardships over the centuries, from the Crusades in the eleventh-fifteenth centuries to the Cossacks in the seventeenth century to the pogroms of the nineteenth century to the Holocaust. Ashkenazi Jews responded to these challenges and tragedies with remarkable resilience, maintaining strong community ties and nourishing their spirits with intense Torah scholarship. They established religious schools — yeshivas — of great renown, some of which were relocated to the United States or Israel and continue to produce exceptional scholars to this day. The Hassidic movement was founded in the 1700s by Israel ben Eliezer (commonly known as the Baal Shem Tov) and quickly spread throughout Europe, breathing new life into Jewish tradition and bringing joy and hope to communities devastated by persecution and poverty. The movement was met with resistance from some Jewish communities, however, who saw its unconventional approach as frivolous and disrespectful to tradition, and its emphasis on mysticism as dangerous. A deep schism emerged between Hassidim and misnagdim (“resisters”) that raged within the Ashkenazi community for several centuries. Despite this, certain ideas from Hassidism worked their way into mainstream Jewish thought and have become inseparable from it — even among non-Ashkenazi communities.
In the late eighteenth century, a process of Jewish emancipation began in various nations in Europe, creating the opportunity for Jews to integrate into modern European society. This integration gave birth to several new intellectual, political, and spiritual movements in Central and Eastern Europe. One was the haskala, or Jewish Enlightenment: a new movement in Jewish scholarship and literature that built on Jewish learning traditions while incorporating the study of Jewish history and the newly reinvigorated modern Hebrew language. Another movement born during this period was the Reform movement, which called to move away from traditional Jewish practice and integrate modernity into Jewish spiritual life. A third was Zionism: Jewish nationalism, which advocated the establishment of a Jewish homeland to serve as a safe haven protecting Jews from persecution. Many Ashkenazi Jews also joined the mass migration towards the United States during this period, seeking a better life and greater opportunities for the future.
The need for a safe haven became tragically urgent in the twentieth century, when one-third of the world’s Jews — most of them Ashkenazi — were annihilated in the Holocaust. After World War II, Jewish emigration from Europe accelerated, predominantly to the United States and the newly formed State of Israel, bringing with them the spirit of resilience, passion for learning and innovation, and love of life that characterized their ancestors.
Ashkenazi Jewish culture
Though Ashkenazi Jews are distinguished from their Sephardic - North African, Middle Eastern, African, and Asian brethren by distinct customs, cultural practices, cuisine, and local histories, all these communities share a common tradition and cohesive identity as Jews. Ashkenazi Jewry contributed immeasurably to the world of Jewish spiritual practice and thought, especially During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when it served as a global center for Torah scholarship and the home base of the Hassidic spiritual renewal movement.
The value of education is strongly embedded in Jewish culture. Historically, Judaism has placed a heavy emphasis on Torah study, and the imperative to pursue education and learning was not lost even among those Jews who abandoned traditional Jewish practice and embraced a secular lifestyle. This cultural tendency might serve to explain why, despite the fact that Jews constitute a mere 0.2% of the world’s population, about a quarter of all Nobel Prize laureates have been Jewish. Ashkenazi Jewish intellectuals have made outstanding contributions in the fields of science, humanities, politics, and the arts.
Yiddish culture found expression in many forms, including theater, cantorial music, klezmer music, poetry, and drama. Yiddish authors such as Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer brought life in the shtetl to global audiences; Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Milkman was adapted to Broadway and later to film as the highly popular Fiddler on the Roof. What is known today as “Jewish humor” — a kind of humor that places an emphasis on satire, irony, and self-deprecation — developed those distinct characteristics in Eastern Europe, and is embodied in the work of some of American’s most celebrated comedians, satirical novelists, and film directors, such as Joseph Heller, Woody Allen, Ephraim Kishon, Mel Brooks, and Jerry Seinfeld among many others.
Jewish Ashkenazi cuisine reflects the geography, climate, and local culinary traditions of the countries where this community lived. Hallmark dishes such as the braided challah bread, chicken soup with matzo ball dumplings, and cholent (a slow-cooked stew containing meats, grains, and beans) have their origins in the shtetls of Europe. Ashkenazi Jews are heavily represented in New York City and contributed some of the city’s most well-known cuisines and culinary institutions, including the bagel (which originated in the Jewish communities of Poland) and the delicatessen (which originated in Germany and was popularized by Ashkenazi Jews in the nineteenth century).
Ashkenazi Jewish languages
For much of history, Ashkenazi Jews were united linguistically through Yiddish: a German-based vernacular heavily infused with Hebrew and Aramaic, with elements of Slavic languages and even some traces of Romance languages. Yiddish was spoken in Jewish communities throughout Eastern Europe as an everyday language, while Hebrew was reserved for liturgical and ceremonial use. Ashkenazi Jews also spoke the languages corresponding to their locales: Hungarian, Polish, German, Lithuanian, Russian, Ukrainian, and so on. Yiddish has seen a decline in the past century due to mass migration and the loss of a significant Yiddish-speaking community in the Holocaust, but the language still thrives as a vernacular among certain Ashkenazi Jewish communities, particularly in the Hassidic sects.
See also
Explore more about ethnicity estimates
- MyHeritage DNA at MyHeritage
- Ethnicities around the world at MyHeritage
- What Is My Ethnicity? How MyHeritage Estimates Ethnicities at MyHeritage Knowledge Base
- Where's My Ethnicity?!: Why An Ethnicity Might Not Show Up In Your DNA (and How To Find Evidence Of It Anyway) at MyHeritage Knowledge Base