Ashkenazy

Rhine Theory

Since Ashkenazi are German-speaking European Jews, their history is usually begun with the appearance of Jews on the banks of the Rhine , which in Antiquity served as the border between Rome and Germanic tribes . The arrival of Jews on these lands is associated with the expansion of the Roman Empire , which swallowed Judea in the 1st century. Jewish communities are widely distributed throughout the cities of the Empire. Already in the 1st century, Jewish communities appeared north of the Alps in Gaul . In 321, a Jewish community existed in Cologne ^[3] . However, this group of Jews was more likely Romaniots and could not yet be considered real Ashkenazi, since Yiddish had not yet formed, and the spoken language of the Empire was Latin. Perhaps this group of Jews was expelled from France (Gaul) by King Dagobert I in the 7th century ^[4] .

In 801, the name of Yitzhak, who lived in the city of Aachen, the capital of the Frankish state, was mentioned. He is called the "forefather of the Ashkenazi Jews" ^[5] . Charlemagne entrusts him with organizing an embassy to the Arab caliph Harun al-Rashid . Obviously, this successful venture contributed to the fact that by 960, Ashkenazi communities were already deeply rooted along the banks of the Rhine . History has preserved the name of the rabbi of Mainz of those years - Gershom ben Yehuda , who is credited with banning polygamy. In Germany, many centers of Judaism are being created ( Worms , Speyer , Strasbourg ) and the main everyday language of communication among Jews is Germanic ( Yiddish ). As part of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, German-speaking Jews culturally and linguistically assimilate the migration flow of Italian Jews who have lived on the Apennine Peninsula since the time of the Roman Republic .

In the era of the Crusades (from the XI century), the tension between Jews and the local population begins, fueled by the spread of blood libel . In the 13th century, Jews were ordered to wear decals (the six-pointed yellow star of David) and settle in certain places ( ghettos ). In some places they are expelled from the country. For example, Jews were expelled from England in 1290 ^[6] . Among the famous Ashkenazi leaders of this period is Meir from Rothenburg .

Khazar theory

There is a theory claiming that Ashkenazi are the descendants of the Khazarian residents of Judaism who migrated to Western Europe in the 10th century after the defeat of Khazaria by the Kiev prince Svyatoslav . The Eastern European Jewish communities did assimilate a certain number of descendants of the Khazars , a Turkic-speaking nomadic people of mixed origin, without significant Jewish roots. However, the Khazar theory claims that the descendants of the Khazars formed the very basis of Ashkenazi. Thus, the Rhine and Khazar theories argue about the directions of migration of the ancestors of the Ashkenazi and who assimilated whom: European Jews of the few migrants from the east or, on the contrary, the descendants of the inhabitants of Khazaria, moving west - of the few Jews of eastern and central Europe ^{[7] [8 ] ]} .

This theory has both supporters and opponents. The theory gives rise to question the historical connection of Jews with Palestine, since, according to this theory, the ancestors of the vast majority of Jews have very little or nothing to do with the Land of Israel . On the other hand, the theory allows us to assert that Ashkenazi, as the heirs of the Khazars, are quite the indigenous, and not alien, people of Russia or Ukraine ^[7] .

The denial of the Khazar hypothesis is based on demographic and other arguments. In particular, it is indicated that in the Yiddish language there are practically no words of Turkic origin, which, according to researchers, shows the absence of the influence of the Khazars on the ethnogenesis of ashkenazes. 70 percent of Yiddish vocabulary are Middle German dialects, 20% are Hebraism, and 10% are Slavic. This is consistent with the Rhine theory, but completely inexplicable by the Khazar ^[9] .

Genetic research

According to one study, on the paternal side, the most common haplogroup among Ashkenazi with roots from Poland is haplogroup R (about 30%) ^[10] . Studies of the prevalence of different haplogroups and specific subclades among different groups of Ashkenazi and among the peoples of Europe and the Middle East suggest that most Ashkenazi are descendants of immigrants from the Middle East to Europe (through Italy), and the group of founders at some point passed through “ bottleneck ” , which reduced the number of men in the group to 350. Modern methods and the amount of collected genetic material do not allow to date the time of resettlement, more precisely than the interval 1300-2200 years ago ^{[1 1]} . Among Levitical Ashkenazi, 65% have a subclade R1a-M582 of the haplogroup R1a (also found among Ashkenazi in general and in insignificant amounts among other peoples of the Middle East), and are supposedly from 2600-3600 years from one ancestor who lived in the Middle East ago. ^[eleven]

Studies Refuting Khazar Theory

Published in 2010 in a number of scientific journals, including in the authoritative Nature , the results of genetic studies claim that the total contribution of the Khazars to East European Jewry is less than 12.5% ^{[12] [13]} . Professor of Genetics Leonid Chernin notes that mostly Jews belong to the haplogroups prevalent in the Middle East (some mostly in the Middle East) and the majority of scholars consider the contribution of the Khazars to Jewish genetics to be “negligible” ^[14] . In August 2012, Dr. Harry Ostrer, in his book Heritage: The Genetic History of the Jewish People, summarized his and other work in the field of genetics over the past 20 years and came to the conclusion that all the major Jewish groups have a common Middle Eastern origin. Ostrer also claimed that he refuted the Khazar theory of the origin of ashkenazi ^[15] . According to Nicholas Wade, "Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews have about 30% of European descent, and the rest is Middle East." He further noted that "the two communities are very similar to each other genetically, which is unexpected because they have been separated for so long." In this regard, he points to Atzmon’s findings that “common genetic elements suggest that members of any Jewish community are as closely related as fourth-cousins ​​or five-cousins ​​in a large population, and the likelihood of such a connection is about 10 times higher than between two people taken at random from a street in New York ” ^[16] . In 2012, genetic analysis also showed proximity to Ashkenazi North African Jews. In general, Ashkenazi have more common lines with other Jewish and Middle Eastern groups than with a non-Jewish population in the areas of Jewish residence in Eastern and Central Europe ^[17] .

Eran Elhaik Research

In January 2013, the results of a study of more than half a million single-nucleotide mutations identified in the genomes of 1237 people, representing both the Jewish population of Eastern Europe and the Caucasian, Asian and Middle Eastern ethnic groups, were published. The results of studies conducted by Dr. Eran Elhaik were published in Genome Biology and Evolution ^[18] . According to the publication, most of the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe descend from the descendants of the Khazar Khaganate population who migrated there in the V – XII centuries from the territories of the Middle East and Mesopotamia and migrated west in the X – XIV centuries as the Kaganate collapsed. Dr. Eran Elhaik argues that it was the people from the Khazars, and not the Jews of the Rhine communities, who formed the basis for the formation of a sub-ethnic group of Ashkenazi ^[8] . In 2016, he and co-authors published a study in which, using his own method, the so-called “genetic GPS”, suggested that the ancestors of the Ashkenazi originally lived in the north-east of modern Turkey . This place is the region of Iskenaz villages - 40 ° 9'N, 40 ° 26'E, Eskenaz - 40 ° 4'N, 40 ° 8'E and Auchanaz - 40 ° 5'N, 40 ° 4'E). According to Elhaik, the ancestors of the Ashkenazi were the local Greek-speaking population, converted to Judaism by Persian Jews . In his opinion, the ethnonym "ashkenaz" itself came from the word "ashguz", because, as he claims, the Assyrians and Babylonians called the Scythians . Beginning in the 690s, persecution by Byzantium supposedly forced them to move to the territory of Khazaria ^[19] . In the same year, Pavel Flegontov and Alexei Kasyan criticized the methodology used by Eran Elhaik in his research, and noted a lot of obvious stretches in his conclusions. In their opinion, the method gives correct results only in the study of modern and unmixed populations; for tasks like the one that Elhaik solved, he is absolutely unsuitable. The researchers' attempt, as an experiment, to determine using the method the “place of origin” of modern populations of the New World gave frankly absurd results ^[20] . “He's just wrong,” said Marcus Feldman of Stanford University, a leading researcher in Jewish genetics. “If you take a thorough genetic analysis of the population over the past 15 years ... there is no doubt about the prevalence of Middle Eastern origin.” “This is an unrealistic premise,” said geneticist at the University of Arizona Michael Hammer, one of the best Y chromosome researchers in the world. Geneticist Razib Khan accused the researcher of selectively using the results and fitting them to a pre-invented conclusion, at the same time noting: “it is not surprising that we will find a small but significant Khazar contribution to the Jewish gene pool” ^[21] . Other experts use even harsher phrases when criticizing this work: Sergio della Pergola called it “falsification,” Shaul Stamfer “complete nonsense” - indicating that the authors did not use materials from other European groups of Jews ^[22] . Professor Dovid Katz (Vilnius University) ridicules the language analysis of the study: “the authors combined precise, but contextually meaningless genetic correlations with ridiculous linguistic theories.” ^[23]
However, Eran Elhaik did not leave the criticism unanswered. In his article on arXiv.org, he continues to argue about the relative accuracy of GPS, recalling studies in which the algorithm correctly determined the country of origin of 83 percent of two thousand people. GPS also correctly indicated the home islands for 87.5 percent of Oceania's inhabitants (200 in total). As for the Ashkenazi, the scholar continues to insist that his work confirms their non-Jewish origin. In his opinion, GPS allows you to reconstruct the biological and demographic history of an ethnic group according to the frequencies of different gene variants, and the more time has passed since its inception, the more accurate the result. ^[24]

Maternal Origin Studies

In 2013, the results of a study of the maternal inherited mitochondrial DNA of Ashkenazi Jews were published, raising their origin almost exclusively to the original female sex in northern Italy - the vast majority of Ashkenazi were the descendants of only 4 women, moreover non-Jews (it is believed that they were married young unmarried immigrants) ^{[25] [26] [27]} .

Allele Frequency Distribution Research

The first study of the distribution of allele frequencies in the whole sequenced genomes of 128 Ashkenazi Jews (2014) estimated their origin approximately equally from the Middle Eastern and European original populations. The same study showed that 25–32 generations ago (around the 15th century) there was a sharp — up to 300–400 people — reduction in the population of the ancestors of this subethnic Jewish group, of which modern Ashkenazes grew in subsequent centuries ^[28] . According to scientists from Yale , the Albert Einstein Institute , the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Sloan-Kettering Memorial Cancer Center in New York , who studied the genetic formula of Ashkenazi Jews, all Ashkenazi Jews are descendants of approximately 350 people who lived 600-800 years ago (i.e., Ashkenazi at that time passed through the “bottleneck” ^{[29] [30]} .

Polish homeland

In the 13th century, unbearable living conditions for Jews in Western Europe contrasted with the benevolence of the Polish kings. The first letter protecting the rights of Jews in Poland was signed by King Boleslaw in 1264 ^[35] . The privileges of the Jews were expanded by King Casimir III . Relatively “hothouse” conditions have led Ashkenazi to feel at home in Poland for a while. The number of Jews grew and they formed communities not only in large shopping centers of the country, but also in small " towns " in the east of the country, where they served as a kind of layer between the Polish gentry and the local Orthodox population. By the sixteenth century, the number of Jews in Poland was 80% of the Jews of the whole world ^[36] . A need arose to coordinate the actions of individual communities: kagalls and chief rabbis appeared. At this time, stone synagogues were being built in Grodno ( Great Choral Synagogue ) and Lviv ( Golden Rose ). The great Jewish theologian Maharsha is born in Krakow. Jews in the Commonwealth at that time - up to 10% of the total population.

In the XVII century, an acute national-economic conflict broke out, fueled by the political interests of neighbors. The uprising of Khmelnitsky led to the emergence of the Ashkenazi diaspora in the Ottoman Empire and Western Europe. It also strengthened the mystical mood among Jews and led to the emergence of Hasidism , whose centers were Belz ^[37] , Berdichev , Bratslav ^[38] , Lyubavichi ^[39] , Medzhibozh and Chernobyl ^[40] . The founder of Hasidism is considered Baal Shemtov . In the XVIII century, the first Hasidic synagogue Beit Hasidim appeared in Lviv . The Jewish communities of Lithuania ( Misnagdim ) became the center of resistance to Hasidism based on the preservation of traditional Judaism, and Vilnius, thanks to the activities of the Vilnius Gaon, even received the nickname of Lithuanian Jerusalem ^[41] .

By this time, most Western European countries were either “Jewish-free” lands, like France , or populated by Sephardim , like the Netherlands and England . Small communities in German cities eked out a miserable existence from exile to exile and were numerically significantly inferior to the eastern ones. The German depopulation after the Thirty Years War opened the way for the Polish Ashkenazes to the west.

Nevertheless, the number of Jews in Poland continued to grow, and by 1831 exceeded 430 thousand people, and by the beginning of the 20th century reached 1.7 million people ^[42] . Over 90% of Jews lived in cities and took an active part in entrepreneurial activity.

An irreparable blow to Jewry in Poland was inflicted by genocide by the German occupiers during the Second World War. The number of Polish Jews declined during the war years from 3 million to 380 thousand people ^[43] .

Modern History

The sections of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Enlightenment in the 18th century led to the fact that Western Europe regained its attractiveness in the eyes of the Ashkenazi. In Germany, the attitude towards Jews softens and the Haskal phenomenon (Jewish enlightenment), initiated by Moses Mendelssohn, appears. The demographic and economic pressure that the Jews exerted on the European states torn by the contradictions of early capitalism created a new crisis. The expression of this crisis was political anti-Semitism and the mass emigration of Ashkenazi to the New World , including from Russia, under whose power the Jews fell after the partition of Poland and where, until the beginning of the 20th century, there was a Pale of Settlement . The most famous Russian city with a significant Jewish population was Odessa ^[44] .

In 1880, 67% of the total Jewish population lived in the Russian Empire ^[45] . According to Alexander Solzhenitsyn , after the abolition of serfdom and liberal reforms of Alexander II in 1861, which eliminated the advantage of personally free Jews as tenants and intermediaries in commercial and industrial transactions, there was a sharp enrichment of the wealthiest part of the Ashkenazi community and an equally sharp impoverishment of everyone else ^{[46 ]} . The worsening financial situation was the outcome of Ashkenazi youth, on the one hand, in the revolutionary movement (where the peak of losses occurred during the years of the Russian revolution and civil war ), and on the other hand, into emigration (the total Jewish emigration from Russia for the period 1880-1928 was 2.265 million people ^[47] ). According to Simon Kuznets , Jews with a high level of income and / or education, and less educated and poorer ones, went to Europe and the New World from the Pale of Settlement to inner Russia, primarily to the capital, St. Petersburg ^[48] . The active participation of Ashkenazi in the revolutionary movement (where the project of the socialist international proposed by Ashkenaz Karl Marx became the ideological basis for workers' revolutions) and emigration were prompted by the ongoing oppression of Jews in the Russian Empire and mass Jewish pogroms . As of 2010, 1.6% of the total Jewish people are in the Russian Federation ^[49] .

The national movement of the 19th century led to the emergence of Zionism , founded by Theodor Herzl , in his book The Jewish State , which expressed confidence that "the nations among which Jews live are all hidden or openly anti-Semitic." In 1897, the World Zionist Congress convened in Basel , which proclaimed a course towards the creation of a national Jewish state on the territory of its historical homeland in Palestine ^[50] . In Europe, at the end of the 19th century, as a result of the synthesis of a number of anti-Semitic schools, racial anti-Semitism arose ^[51] . It became the ideology of a number of far-right parties, including the NSDAP , which came to power in Germany in 1933, headed by Adolf Hitler . During the Second World War , during the so-called “ final solution of the Jewish question ”, the Nazis destroyed about 6 million Jews in Europe ^[52] .

After the war, Ashkenazi initiated the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, on the basis of which the Hebrew-speaking nation of Israel began to form. Nevertheless, some Ashkenazi retain their originality in Israel ^[53] .

There is a so-called Ashkenazian exodus - a dialect - of the Hebrew language ("loshn-kodesh", that is, "holy language"), which differs from Sephardic exodus and modern Hebrew by the pronunciation of some vowels (vowels) and consonants. In oral speech it is used for reading the Torah and prayers in Ashkenazi synagogues .

Genetic studies show the common origin of ashkenazes from a relatively small, closed Jewish group ^{[29] [30]} , which, due to the bottleneck effect (estimated around the 9th – 10th centuries) and gene drift, had a strong effect on their gene pool. Among ashkenazy, the risk of a number of genetic diseases is markedly increased, which forces genetic tests to be carried out in large quantities. Thus, the proportion of carriers of the Tay – Sachs disease mutation in their environment reaches 3%, which exceeds the average value by an order of magnitude and is one of the observed causes of infant mortality ^{[54] [55] [56]} .

• Yemeni Jews
• Ashkenazi canon

• Behar, Doron M .; Ene Metspalu, Toomas Kivisild, Alessandro Achilli, Yarin Hadid, Shay Tzur, Luisa Pereira, Antonio Amorim, Lluı's Quintana-Murci, Kari Majamaa, Corinna Herrnstadt, Neil Howell, Oleg Balanovsky, Ildus Kuthenwnov, Billy Andrey Tamir, Antonio Torroni, Richard Villems, and Karl Skorecki (March 2006). "The Matrilineal Ancestry of Ashkenazi Jewry: Portrait of a Recent Founder Event." The American Journal of Human Genetics 78 (3): 487-97. PMID 16404693
• Birnbaum, Solomon A. The cultural structure of East Ashkenazic Jewry . // The Slavonic and East European Review . - November 1946. - Vol. 25 - No. 64.

• Ashkenazy - article from the Electronic Jewish Encyclopedia
• About Ashkenazi Jews and Ashkenaz country (inaccessible link)
• Genetics of Jewish groups
• From Charlemagne to Yiddishite and the Holocaust: an experience of civilization history Review of the book “A Thousand Years of Ashkenazi Culture”.
• Ashkenazi revolution
• Jews and Evolution
• The origin of the Jews found scientists