hello fellow students of jewish history later this month i'm delighted to be addressing a
group of students in budapest associated with the ashkenazium a remarkable new institution
that is founded by my colleague and friend dean michael keagle and thanks to the generosity of
dr kegel and the ashkenazium we've decided to put the public part of these classes online so
that people can participate globally these 12 lectures will be open to the global community
please rsvp totally free and i look forward to interacting with you as we explore the millennium
of jewish history in the lands of ashkenaz and beyond so let us start today with just a little
for spice a little bit of an appetizer to ask a basic question what is ashkenaz what do we mean
when we use this strange word ashkenaz so it turns out that this particular word occurs in the bible
it occurs in genesis 10 also in chronicles and one other passage we're going to look at in jeremiah
here's a screenshot from the web page safaria which is a tremendous resource for all kinds of
torah texts and here in genesis 10 3 we have the first reference to ashkenaz basically here we have
a lineage of noah that is noah of the flood he has a son named japheth in the ashkenazic
pronunciation that would be yafes yafes has a son named gomer and then gomer has a son
named ashkenaz this is the first citation of the name ashkenaz right so he's basically the great
grandson of noah through the greek line that's the way that we have it described in genesis
so how does this connect to ashkenazi jews well basically ashkenaz is the name of a people right
a lineage of people from this one forefather ashkenaz later it will be associated with a
particular place we're going to look at that in just a second and later that place will be
associated in the jewish mind with the jews who live there in other words there's no intrinsic
kind of ethnic connection between ashkenaz and the lineage that followed from that biblical figure
and the jews today other than the coincidence of the geographic location that is ascribed to
ashkenaz in other words although ashkenaz is their great great something uncle
uh the jews who are descended from abraham isaac and jacob ten generations after noah
have no other connection with ashkenaz to to express this another way i am a canadian jew uh
you can tell because uh the way i say about and that i apologize for a lot of things stuff like
that but basically there's nothing intrinsically canadian about my jewishness or jewish about my
canadian-ness other than the fact that my grandparents all emigrated to canada over a
century ago and that's what makes me a canadian jew similarly we have ashkenazi jews who at
some point ended up in a land that was associated with ashkenaz now who are these ashkenazi jews uh
according to one of the great scholars of the 20th century uh we're talking about basically something
like five to ten thousand people who lived in this region of ashkenaz around the year 900 who by the
time you got to the 20th century there about 12 million of them on the cusp of the disastrous
world war ii and that represented about 80 percent of world jewry at the time in other words
if you ran into a jew in the first half of the 20th century before the holocaust was more than
likely you ran into an ashkenazi jew there are many other jews scattered throughout the world
sephardic jews eduta jews even asian jews but the demographic weight was clearly behind the
ashkenazim so let's go to the next question we've got this idea of the word ashkenaz is somehow
associated with this biblical figure where is ashkenaz so one of the hints we can use to figure
this out is a passage in the book of jeremiah here's another screenshot from the safari website
and you can see here that jeremiah is in one of his classic jeremiah's right one of his you know
sort of dirge-like imprecations uh in this case he's uh cursing babylonia who would of course take
the jews into exile in the 6th century before the common era and he talks about the vengeance that
would one day be meted out against the babylonian captors of the jews in verse 27 you see here he
says i'll read english raise a standard on earth sound a horn among the nations appoint nations
against her that is against babylonia assemble kingdoms against her ararat mini and ashkenaz
designate a marshall against her bring up horses like swarming locusts in other words these three
regions ararat mini and ashkenaz will somehow converge to destroy babylonia so jeremiah seems
to be speaking about the location which had the descendants of ashkenaz living and that somehow
they would represent later threat to babylonia so if we have a look at where that might be and in
the 18th century in particular there was a lot of enthusiasm to try and locate these biblical names
and their later uh you know where they ended up in the middle east here is a an interesting map
from roughly that period and you can see right in the center is the land of israel and then looking
to the northeast in this circled area that's where babylonia would be right mesopotamia
the neo-babilions to be technically correct and the regions that would come down and attack her
according to the passage in jeremiah would be in asia minor here you can see on the lower right
of the circle there's the mountain range that is associated with ararat we speak about mount ararat
but in the ancient biblical mind ararat was really a mountainous region not a particular mountain
and here the the author of this map has labeled ashkenaz in the region of the phrygians so we
have some interesting associations to suggest that this might be the correct location for
ashkenaz but they're not really that strong some of the earliest and most enthusiastic defenders
of this asia minor connection would include the great shadow rabbi shmuel david lutzatto who
wrote in the 19th century but when you look at the research of another very important scholar
shmuel krauss he suggests that they actually came a little bit to the north somewhere above the
caspian sea somewhere between the volga and the elba rivers now this is especially interesting and
dr krauss really followed up on this quite a bit on the suggestion that perhaps the ashkenazim
should be associated with the remarkable khazar people that is a thesis which for other reasons
totally blew up in the 20th century and we'll discuss that god willing in the first full lecture
but for now let's just talk a little bit about where is the actual land of ashkenaz because none
of these associations are specifically connected with the jews they are connected rather with
the ashkenazim the original biblical ashkenazim descendants of ashkenaz and they exist basically
in a realm of supposition and theory so when we say ashkenaz and we're referring to jews
what we're really talking about is germany and in particular the rhineland in fact when we look
at the first times that jews start referring to themselves as being ashkenazi which is around
the 12th century they're basically talking about the rhineland and in the centuries prior
to that because there are jews in this region considerably earlier they speak about themselves
as being rhineland jews and later that somehow morphs into ashkenaz jews perhaps borrowing from
this idea that the children of ashkenaz moved somewhere north and this is somewhere north
but there's no other real connection between the name ashkenaz in the bible and this region which
jews later came to call ashkenaz what happened to those ashkenazi jews they basically spread out to
the eastern regions especially from about the 13th and 14th century onwards and you get a much larger
population of these rhineland jews living in ashkenaz and then in the late 19th century there
is a large flow of jews to western locations and a smaller number to the land of israel so that's
why for example in america about three-quarters of the jews who moved to america at the beginning
of the 20th century are ashkenazic and their descendants today of course are the dominant
sub-ethnic group among jews so we're going to explore this in the course of much greater
detail we're going to pick up with that whole khazar question which is really quite fascinating
i hope that you will be able to join us because it's really exciting to think of having a global
population of students in a live lecture like this but let us recall that when we're speaking about
ashkenaz we're really talking about two different things most people use this term ashkenaz to refer
to those jews who have some albeit distant roots in the rhineland region of germany
whereas the biblical term ashkenaz really refers to this great grandson of noah and has
no specifically jewish connection okay i hope you found this for spice appealing and i hope you will
join us in the ashkenazium lectures please reserve your spot today thanks very much for watching
hmm
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