Ashkenazi Jews

Ashkenaz is the medieval Hebrew name for the German lands, and the communities that formed there in the tenth and eleventh centuries, above all Speyer, Worms and Mainz, the ShUM cities, became the root of a distinct Jewish civilization. Its scholars fixed a liturgical rite and a body of legal custom, minhag Ashkenaz, that its descendants carried everywhere; its martyrs of the First Crusade massacres of 1096 shaped a liturgy of remembrance; and its vernacular, Yiddish, fused medieval German with Hebrew, Aramaic and later Slavic elements into the language of a thousand years of daily life.

From the thirteenth century, expulsion and opportunity drew Ashkenazi Jews eastward into Poland and Lithuania, where charters of protection and communal self-government, the kahal and the Council of Four Lands, allowed the largest Jewish population in the world to grow. The market town with its synagogue, study house and cemetery, the shtetl of later memory, became the setting of Ashkenazi life, documented in exhaustive detail by the YIVO Institute founded in Vilna in 1925.

The nineteenth century brought the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment, mass emigration westward after the pogroms of 1881, and the growth of Zionism, socialism and secular Yiddish culture as rival answers to modernity. The Holocaust murdered most of European Jewry and ended the Eastern European heartland; its surviving branches, in Israel, the United States and beyond, now carry the Ashkenazi inheritance.

Ashkenazi religious life has repeatedly produced intense movements of piety. The medieval Hasidei Ashkenaz of the Rhineland cultivated asceticism and mystical prayer, a current Gershom Scholem placed at the head of his history of Jewish mysticism. Lurianic Kabbalah, spreading from Safed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, saturated Ashkenazi liturgy and folk imagination, and left legends like the Golem of Prague, the clay servant attributed to Rabbi Judah Loew, and the dybbuk, the clinging spirit of Yiddish folklore and drama.

In the eighteenth century Podolia, Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, taught a joyful devotion in which sincere prayer counted for as much as scholarship, and the movement his disciples built, Hasidism, organized itself around the courts of hereditary rebbes. Its opponents, the misnagdim led from Vilna, answered with the great Lithuanian yeshivot, academies of Talmudic analysis whose method still governs traditional study. The quarrel cooled into two enduring styles of Ashkenazi Orthodoxy, both transplanted to Israel and America after the Holocaust, where Hasidic courts such as Chabad and Satmar and the yeshiva world alike rebuilt.

Ashkenaz also produced Judaism's modern denominations: Reform and Conservative Judaism began as German Ashkenazi responses to emancipation, and the Ashkenazi rite, analyzed in Ismar Elbogen's comprehensive history of Jewish liturgy, remains the base text of most synagogues in the English-speaking world.