Ashkenazi

The Ashkenazim are the Jewish diaspora community that took shape in medieval Germany and northern France; rabbis of the time applied the biblical name Ashkenaz to Germany, and the name later covered the Jews of both lands. From the tenth century their communities consolidated in Rhineland cities and Troyes, where the commentator Rashi laid the foundations of Ashkenazi religious learning in the eleventh century.

The First Crusade brought the Rhineland massacres of 1096, and later crusader and Black Death pogroms drove a steady eastward migration, encouraged by Poland's Casimir III. By the sixteenth century most Ashkenazim lived in the Kingdom of Poland and its eastern neighbours.

Their vernacular was Yiddish, a Middle High German tongue written in Hebrew letters. In the eighteenth century Hasidism arose among them in Poland-Lithuania while the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, spread from Germany, after which emancipation and nineteenth-century pogroms drove many westward and overseas.