118-479: Ullmann is a German surname also associated with Ashkenazi Jews . It means "man from Ulm ". Notable people with the surname include: Ashkenazi Jews Ashkenazi Jews ( / ˌ ɑː ʃ k ə ˈ n ɑː z i , ˌ æ ʃ -/ A(H)SH -kə- NAH -zee ; also known as Ashkenazic Jews or Ashkenazim ) constitute a Jewish diaspora population that emerged in the Holy Roman Empire around
236-775: A brief period of stability and unity in Francia . This created opportunities for Jewish merchants to settle again north of the Alps. Charlemagne granted the Jews freedoms similar to those once enjoyed under the Roman Empire . In addition, Jews from southern Italy, fleeing religious persecution, began to move into Central Europe. Returning to Frankish lands, many Jewish merchants took up occupations in finance and commerce, including money lending, or usury . (Church legislation banned Christians from lending money in exchange for interest.) From Charlemagne's time to
354-401: A completely unknown writing system in 19th-century Assyriology . It was successfully deciphered by 1857. The cuneiform script changed considerably over more than 2,000 years. The image below shows the development of the sign SAĜ "head" (Borger nr. 184, U+12295 𒊕 ). Stages: The cuneiform script was developed from pictographic proto-writing in the late 4th millennium BC, stemming from
472-637: A figure of one million Jews living in Egypt. Brian McGing rejects Baron's figures entirely, arguing that we have no clue as to the size of the Jewish demographic in the ancient world. Sometimes the scholars who accepted the high number of Jews in Rome had explained it by Jews having been active in proselytising . The idea of ancient Jews trying to convert Gentiles to Judaism is nowadays rejected by several scholars. The Romans did not distinguish between Jews inside and outside of
590-550: A given sign could have various meanings depending on context. The sign inventory was reduced from some 1,500 signs to some 600 signs, and writing became increasingly phonological . Determinative signs were re-introduced to avoid ambiguity. Cuneiform writing proper thus arises from the more primitive system of pictographs at about that time, labeled the Early Bronze Age II epoch by historians. The earliest known Sumerian king, whose name appears on contemporary cuneiform tablets,
708-577: A language structure typical of the non-Indo-European agglutinative Sumerian language . The first tablets using syllabic elements date to the Early Dynastic I–II periods c. 2800 BC , and they are agreed to be clearly in Sumerian. This is the time when some pictographic element started to be used for their phonetic value, permitting the recording of abstract ideas or personal names. Many pictographs began to lose their original function, and
826-632: A number of push and pull factors . More Jews moved into these communities as a result of wars, persecution, unrest, and for opportunities in trade and commerce. Jews migrated to southern Europe from the Middle East voluntarily for opportunities in trade and commerce. Following Alexander the Great 's conquests, Jews migrated to Greek settlements in the Eastern Mediterranean, spurred on by economic opportunities. Jewish economic migration to southern Europe
944-641: A phonetic complement. Yet even in those days, the Babylonian syllabary remained a mixture of logographic and phonemic writing. Elamite cuneiform was a simplified form of the Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform, used to write the Elamite language in the area that corresponds to modern Iran from the 3rd millennium BC to the 4th century BC. Elamite cuneiform at times competed with other local scripts, Proto-Elamite and Linear Elamite . The earliest known Elamite cuneiform text
1062-432: A pointed stylus, sometimes called "linear cuneiform". Many of the early dynastic inscriptions, particularly those made on stone, continued to use the linear style as late as circa 2000 BC. In the mid-3rd millennium BC, a new wedge-tipped stylus was introduced which was pushed into the clay, producing wedge-shaped cuneiform. This development made writing quicker and easier, especially when writing on soft clay. By adjusting
1180-477: A resemblance to Old Japanese , written in a Chinese-derived script, where some of these Sinograms were used as logograms and others as phonetic characters. This "mixed" method of writing continued through the end of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, although there were periods when "purism" was in fashion and there was a more marked tendency to spell out the words laboriously, in preference to using signs with
1298-504: A result of Judeo-Latin language contact with various High German vernaculars in the medieval period. It is a Germanic language written in Hebrew letters, and heavily influenced by Hebrew and Aramaic , with some elements of Romance and later Slavic languages . Historical records show evidence of Jewish communities north of the Alps and Pyrenees as early as the 8th and 9th centuries. By
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#17328554901601416-548: A sharpened reed stylus or incised in stone. This early style lacked the characteristic wedge shape of the strokes. Most Proto-Cuneiform records from this period were of an accounting nature. The proto-cuneiform sign list has grown, as new texts are discovered, and shrunk, as variant signs are combined. The current sign list is 705 elements long with 42 being numeric and four considered pre-proto-Elamite. Certain signs to indicate names of gods, countries, cities, vessels, birds, trees, etc., are known as determinatives and were
1534-559: A slightly different way. From the 6th century, the Akkadian language was marginalized by Aramaic , written in the Aramaic alphabet , but Akkadian cuneiform remained in use in the literary tradition well into the times of the Parthian Empire (250 BC–226 AD). The last known cuneiform inscription, an astronomical text, was written in 75 AD. The ability to read cuneiform may have persisted until
1652-607: A stylus. Writing is first recorded in Uruk , at the end of the 4th millennium BC, and soon after in various parts of the Near-East . An ancient Mesopotamian poem gives the first known story of the invention of writing : Because the messenger's mouth was heavy and he couldn't repeat [the message], the Lord of Kulaba patted some clay and put words on it, like a tablet. Until then, there had been no putting words on clay. The cuneiform writing system
1770-520: A transformation in their interpretation of Judaism. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, Jews who remained in or returned to historical German lands experienced a cultural reorientation. Under the influence of the Haskalah and the struggle for emancipation, as well as the intellectual and cultural ferment in urban centres, some gradually abandoned Yiddish in favor of German and developed new forms of Jewish religious life and cultural identity . Throughout
1888-539: A very different lifestyle to that of their neighbours; all of these tendencies increased with every outbreak of antisemitism . In parts of Eastern Europe, before the arrival of the Ashkenazi Jews from Central Europe, some non-Ashkenazi Jews were present who spoke Leshon Knaan and held various other Non-Ashkenazi traditions and customs. In 1966, the historian Cecil Roth questioned the inclusion of all Yiddish speaking Jews as Ashkenazim in descent, suggesting that upon
2006-531: A very high toll of life and enslavement. The First Jewish-Roman War (66–73 CE) resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple . Two generations later, the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132–136 CE) erupted. Judea's countryside was devastated, and many were killed, displaced or sold into slavery. Jerusalem was rebuilt as a Roman colony under the name of Aelia Capitolina , and the province of Judea
2124-428: Is Enmebaragesi of Kish (fl. c. 2600 BC ). Surviving records became less fragmentary for following reigns and by the arrival of Sargon, it had become standard practice for each major city-state to date documents by year-names, commemorating the exploits of its king. Geoffrey Sampson stated that Egyptian hieroglyphs "came into existence a little after Sumerian script , and, probably, [were] invented under
2242-514: Is a logo - syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East . The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era . Cuneiform scripts are marked by and named for the characteristic wedge-shaped impressions ( Latin : cuneus ) which form their signs . Cuneiform is the earliest known writing system and
2360-552: Is a treaty between Akkadians and the Elamites that dates back to 2200 BC. Some believe it might have been in use since 2500 BC. The tablets are poorly preserved, so only limited parts can be read, but it is understood that the text is a treaty between the Akkad king Nāramsîn and Elamite ruler Hita , as indicated by frequent references like "Nāramsîn's friend is my friend, Nāramsîn's enemy is my enemy". The most famous Elamite scriptures and
2478-579: Is also believed to have occurred during the Roman period. In 63 BCE, the Siege of Jerusalem saw the Roman Republic conquer Judea, and thousands of Jewish prisoners of war were brought to Rome as slaves. After gaining their freedom, they settled permanently in Rome as traders. It is likely that there was an additional influx of Jewish slaves taken to southern Europe by Roman forces after the capture of Jerusalem by
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#17328554901602596-579: Is an adaptation of the Old Assyrian cuneiform of c. 1800 BC to the Hittite language and was used from the 17th until approximately the 13th century BC. More or less the same system was used by the scribes of the Hittite Empire for two other Anatolian languages , namely Luwian (alongside the native Anatolian hieroglyphics ) and Palaic , as well as for the isolate Hattic language . When the cuneiform script
2714-429: Is called gunû or "gunification"; if signs are cross-hatched with additional Winkelhaken , they are called šešig ; if signs are modified by the removal of a wedge or wedges, they are called nutillu . "Typical" signs have about five to ten wedges, while complex ligatures can consist of twenty or more (although it is not always clear if a ligature should be considered a single sign or two collated, but distinct signs);
2832-646: The Saquliba or Slavic territories , and such usage covered also the lands of tribes neighboring the Slavs, and Eastern and Central Europe. In modern times, Samuel Krauss identified the Biblical "Ashkenaz" with Khazaria . Sometime in the Early Medieval period, the Jews of central and eastern Europe came to be called by this term. Conforming to the custom of designating areas of Jewish settlement with biblical names, Spain
2950-741: The Cimmerians . The Biblical Ashkenaz is usually derived from Assyrian Aškūza ( cuneiform Aškuzai/Iškuzai ), a people who expelled the Cimmerians from the Armenian area of the Upper Euphrates ; the name Aškūza is identified with the Scythians . The intrusive n in the Biblical name is likely due to a scribal error confusing a vav ו with a nun נ . In Jeremiah 51:27, Ashkenaz figures as one of three kingdoms in
3068-711: The Crusaders as Ashkenazim. Given the close links between the Jewish communities of France and Germany following the Carolingian unification , the term Ashkenazi came to refer to the Jews of both medieval Germany and France. Like other Jewish ethnic groups , the Ashkenazi originate from the Israelites and Hebrews of historical Israel and Judah . Ashkenazi Jews share a significant amount of ancestry with other Jewish populations and derive their ancestry mostly from populations in
3186-473: The Holocaust . The answer to why there was so little assimilation of Jews in central and eastern Europe for so long would seem to lie in part in the probability that the alien surroundings in central and eastern Europe were not conducive, though there was some assimilation. Furthermore, Jews lived almost exclusively in shtetls , maintained a strong system of education for males, heeded rabbinic leadership, and had
3304-453: The Iron Age (c. 10th to 6th centuries BC), Assyrian cuneiform was further simplified. The characters remained the same as those of Sumero-Akkadian cuneiforms, but the graphic design of each character relied more heavily on wedges and square angles, making them significantly more abstract: Babylonian cuneiform was simplified along similar lines during that period, albeit to a lesser extent and in
3422-622: The Isthmus of Corinth in Greece. Jewish slaves and their children eventually gained their freedom and joined local free Jewish communities. Many Jews were denied full Roman citizenship until Emperor Caracalla granted all free peoples this privilege in 212 CE. Jews were required to pay a poll tax until the reign of Emperor Julian in 363 CE. In the late Roman Empire, Jews were free to form networks of cultural and religious ties and enter into various local occupations. However, after Christianity became
3540-654: The Minhag of Ashkenaz and Poland. According to 16th-century mystic Rabbi Elijah of Chelm , Ashkenazi Jews lived in Jerusalem during the 11th century. The story is told that a German-speaking Jew saved the life of a young German man surnamed Dolberger. So when the knights of the First Crusade came to siege Jerusalem, one of Dolberger's family members who was among them rescued Jews in Palestine and carried them back to Worms to repay
3658-545: The Republican Party , while Conservative, Reform, and non denominational ones tend to support the Democratic Party. Religious Jews have minhagim , customs, in addition to halakha , or religious law, and different interpretations of the law. Different groups of religious Jews in different geographic areas historically adopted different customs and interpretations. On certain issues, Orthodox Jews are required to follow
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3776-848: The SHuM cities of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz. The cluster of cities contain the earliest Jewish settlements north of the Alps, and played a major role in the formation of Ashkenazi Jewish religious tradition, along with Troyes and Sens in France. Nonetheless, Jewish life in Germany persisted, while some Ashkenazi Jews joined Sephardic Jewry in Spain. Expulsions from England (1290), France (1394), and parts of Germany (15th century), gradually pushed Ashkenazi Jewry eastward, to Poland (10th century), Lithuania (10th century), and Russia (12th century). Over this period of several hundred years, some have suggested, Jewish economic activity
3894-673: The Statute of Kalisz of 1264. By the 15th century, the Ashkenazi Jewish communities in Poland were the largest Jewish communities of the Diaspora. This area, which eventually fell under the domination of Russia, Austria , and Prussia (Germany) following the Partitions of Poland , and was later largely regained by reborn Poland in the interbellum , would remain the main center of Ashkenazi Jewry until
4012-729: The Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin , the Louvre , the Istanbul Archaeology Museums , the National Museum of Iraq , the Yale Babylonian Collection (approx. 40,000), and Penn Museum . Most of these have "lain in these collections for a century without being translated, studied or published", as there are only a few hundred qualified cuneiformists in the world. The decipherment of cuneiform began with
4130-520: The Winkelhaken impressed vertically by the tip of the stylus. The signs exemplary of these basic wedges are: Except for the Winkelhaken , which has no tail, the length of the wedges' tails could vary as required for sign composition. Signs tilted by about 45 degrees are called tenû in Akkadian, thus DIŠ is a vertical wedge and DIŠ tenû a diagonal one. If a sign is modified with additional wedges, this
4248-465: The 11th century, Hai Gaon refers to questions that had been addressed to him from Ashkenaz, by which he undoubtedly means Germany. Rashi in the latter half of the 11th century refers to both the language of Ashkenaz and the country of Ashkenaz. During the 12th century, the word appears quite frequently. In the Mahzor Vitry , the kingdom of Ashkenaz is referred to chiefly in regard to the ritual of
4366-473: The 11th century, Jewish settlers moving from southern European and Middle Eastern centers (such as Babylonian Jews and Persian Jews ) and Maghrebi Jewish traders from North Africa who had contacts with their Ashkenazi brethren and had visited each other from time to time in each's domain appear to have begun to settle in the north, especially along the Rhine, often in response to new economic opportunities and at
4484-401: The 23rd century BC ( short chronology ). The Akkadian language being East Semitic , its structure was completely different from Sumerian. The Akkadians found a practical solution in writing their language phonetically, using the corresponding Sumerian phonetic signs. Still, many of the Sumerian characters were retained for their logographic value as well: for example the character for "sheep"
4602-504: The 3rd millennium Sumerian script. Ugaritic was written using the Ugaritic alphabet , a standard Semitic style alphabet (an abjad ) written using the cuneiform method. Between half a million and two million cuneiform tablets are estimated to have been excavated in modern times, of which only approximately 30,000 –100,000 have been read or published. The British Museum holds the largest collection (approx. 130,000 tablets), followed by
4720-473: The Akkadian period, at the time of the Uruk ruler Lugalzagesi (r. c. 2294–2270 BC). The vertical style remained for monumental purposes on stone stelas until the middle of the 2nd millennium. Written Sumerian was used as a scribal language until the first century AD. The spoken language died out between about 2100 and 1700 BC. The archaic cuneiform script was adopted by the Akkadian Empire from
4838-517: The Hellenized parts of the Roman Empire. The excavations suggest they first lived in isolated enclaves attached to Roman legion camps and intermarried with other similar oriental families within the military orders of the region. Raphael Patai states that later Roman writers remarked that they differed little in either customs, manner of writing, or names from the people among whom they dwelt; and it
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4956-604: The Holocaust. These included 3 million of 3.3 million Polish Jews (91%); 900,000 of 1.5 million in Ukraine (60%); and 50–90% of the Jews of other Slavic nations, Germany, Hungary, and the Baltic states, and over 25% of the Jews in France. Sephardi communities suffered similar devastation in a few countries, including Greece, the Netherlands and the former Yugoslavia. As the large majority of
5074-475: The Middle East, Southern Europe and Eastern Europe. Other than their origins in ancient Israel, the question of how Ashkenazi Jews came to exist as a distinct community is unknown, and has given rise to several theories. Beginning in the fourth century BCE, Jewish colonies sprang up in southern Europe, including the Aegean Islands, Greece, and Italy. Jews left ancient Israel for a number of causes, including
5192-542: The Old Persian text. Because Elamite is unlike its neighboring Semitic languages , the script's decipherment was delayed until the 1840s. Elamite cuneiform appears to have used far fewer signs than its Akkadian prototype and initially relied primarily on syllabograms, but logograms became more common in later texts. Many signs soon acquired highly distinctive local shape variants that are often difficult to recognise as related to their Akkadian prototypes. Hittite cuneiform
5310-715: The Responsa of Isaac ben Sheshet (numbers 193, 268, 270). In the Midrash compilation, Genesis Rabbah , Rabbi Berechiah mentions Ashkenaz, Riphath, and Togarmah as German tribes or as German lands. It may correspond to a Greek word that may have existed in the Greek dialect of the Jews in Syria Palaestina , or the text is corrupted from "Germanica". This view of Berechiah is based on the Talmud (Yoma 10a; Jerusalem Talmud Megillah 71b), where Gomer,
5428-471: The Sumerian signs of the terms in question, added as a guide for the reader. Proper names continued to be usually written in purely "logographic" fashion. The first inscribed tablets were purely pictographic, which makes it technically difficult to know in which language they were written. Different languages have been proposed, though usually Sumerian is assumed. Later tablets dating after c. 2900 BC start to use syllabic elements, which clearly show
5546-510: The Sumerians was not intuitive to Semitic speakers. From the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age (20th century BC), the script evolved to accommodate the various dialects of Akkadian: Old Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian. At this stage, the former pictograms were reduced to a high level of abstraction, and were composed of only five basic wedge shapes: horizontal, vertical, two diagonals and
5664-788: The United States after the war. Following the Holocaust, some sources place Ashkenazim today as making up approximately 83%–85% of Jews worldwide, while Sergio DellaPergola in a rough calculation of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews , implies that Ashkenazi make up a notably lower figure, less than 74%. Other estimates place Ashkenazi Jews as making up about 75% of Jews worldwide. Jews of mixed background are increasingly common, partly because of intermarriage between Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi, and partly because many do not see such historic markers as relevant to their life experiences as Jews. Religious Ashkenazi Jews living in Israel are obliged to follow
5782-424: The arrival of Ashkenazi Jews from central Europe to Eastern Europe, from the Middle Ages to the 16th century, there were a substantial number of non-Ashkenazim Jews already there who later abandoned their original Eastern European Jewish culture in favor of the Ashkenazi one. However, according to more recent research, mass migrations of Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews occurred to Eastern Europe, from Central Europe in
5900-475: The authority of the chief Ashkenazi rabbi in halakhic matters. In this respect, a religiously Ashkenazi Jew is an Israeli who is more likely to support certain religious interests in Israel, including certain political parties. These political parties result from the fact that a portion of the Israeli electorate votes for Jewish religious parties; although the electoral map changes from one election to another, there are generally several small parties associated with
6018-414: The beginning, similar-sounding words such as "life" [til] and "arrow" [ti] were written with the same symbol (𒋾). As a result, many signs gradually changed from being logograms to also functioning as syllabograms , so that for example, the sign for the word "arrow" would become the sign for the sound "ti". Syllabograms were used in Sumerian writing especially to express grammatical elements, and their use
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#17328554901606136-545: The centuries, Ashkenazim made significant contributions to Europe's philosophy , scholarship, literature , art , music , and science . As a proportion of the world Jewish population , Ashkenazim were estimated to be 3% in the 11th century, rising to 92% in 1930 near the population's peak. The Ashkenazi population was significantly diminished by the Holocaust carried out by Nazi Germany during World War II which killed some six million Jews, affecting almost every European Jewish family. In 1933, prior to World War II,
6254-431: The compound IGI.A (𒅆𒀀) – "eye" + "water" – has the reading imhur , meaning "foam"). Several symbols had too many meanings to permit clarity. Therefore, symbols were put together to indicate both the sound and the meaning of a symbol. For instance, the word 'raven' (UGA) had the same logogram (𒉀) as the word 'soap' (NAGA), the name of a city (EREŠ), and the patron goddess of Eresh (NISABA). To disambiguate and identify
6372-426: The cradle of Germanic tribes, as early as a 6th-century gloss to the Historia Ecclesiastica of Eusebius . In the 10th-century History of Armenia of Yovhannes Drasxanakertc'i (1.15), Ashkenaz was associated with Armenia, as it was occasionally in Jewish usage, where its denotation extended at times to Adiabene , Khazaria , Crimea and areas to the east. His contemporary Saadia Gaon identified Ashkenaz with
6490-409: The culture of the Babylonian Talmud that underlies it became established in southern Italy and then spread north to Ashkenaz. Numerous massacres of Jews occurred throughout Europe during the Christian Crusades . Inspired by the preaching of a First Crusade, crusader mobs in France and Germany perpetrated the Rhineland massacres of 1096, devastating Jewish communities along the Rhine River, including
6608-447: The cuneiform logo-syllabary proper. The latest known cuneiform tablet dates to 75 AD. Cuneiform was rediscovered in modern times in the early 17th century with the publication of the trilingual Achaemenid royal inscriptions at Persepolis ; these were first deciphered in the early 19th century. The modern study of cuneiform belongs to the ambiguously named field of Assyriology , as the earliest excavations of cuneiform libraries – in
6726-459: The customs of their ancestors and do not believe they have the option of picking and choosing. For this reason, observant Jews at times find it important for religious reasons to ascertain who their household's religious ancestors are in order to know what customs their household should follow. These times include, for example, when two Jews of different ethnic background marry, when a non-Jew converts to Judaism and determines what customs to follow for
6844-456: The decipherment of Old Persian cuneiform in 1836. The first cuneiform inscriptions published in modern times were copied from the Achaemenid royal inscriptions in the ruins of Persepolis , with the first complete and accurate copy being published in 1778 by Carsten Niebuhr . Niebuhr's publication was used by Grotefend in 1802 to make the first breakthrough – the realization that Niebuhr had published three different languages side by side and
6962-466: The degree and sources of European admixture , with some focusing on the European genetic origin in Ashkenazi maternal lineages, contrasting with the predominantly Middle Eastern genetic origin in paternal lineages. The name Ashkenazi derives from the biblical figure of Ashkenaz , the first son of Gomer , son of Japhet , son of Noah , and a Japhetic patriarch in the Table of Nations ( Genesis 10 ). The name of Gomer has often been linked to
7080-497: The development of Egyptian hieroglyphs, with the suggestion the former influenced the latter. But given the lack of direct evidence for the transfer of writing, "no definitive determination has been made as to the origin of hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt". Others have held that "the evidence for such direct influence remains flimsy" and that "a very credible argument can also be made for the independent development of writing in Egypt..." Early cuneiform inscriptions were made by using
7198-446: The early Achaemenid rulers from the 6th century BC down to the 4th century BC. Because of its simplicity and logical structure, the Old Persian cuneiform script was the first to be deciphered by modern scholars, starting with the accomplishments of Georg Friedrich Grotefend in 1802. Various ancient bilingual or trilingual inscriptions then permitted to decipher the other, much more complicated and more ancient scripts, as far back as to
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#17328554901607316-440: The early Middle Ages, some Jews assimilated into the dominant Greek and Latin cultures, mostly through conversion to Christianity. King Dagobert I of the Franks expelled the Jews from his Merovingian kingdom in 629. Jews in former Roman territories faced new challenges as harsher anti-Jewish Church rulings were enforced. Charlemagne 's expansion of the Frankish empire around 800, including northern Italy and Rome, brought on
7434-399: The early modern period. During the 16th century, as conditions for Italian Jews worsened, many Jews from Venice and the surrounding area migrated to Poland and Lithuania. During the 16th and 17th centuries, some Sephardi Jews and Romaniote Jews from throughout the Ottoman Empire migrated to Eastern Europe, as did Arabic-speaking Mizrahi Jews and Persian Jews . In the first half of
7552-529: The economy, media, and politics of Israel since its founding. During the first decades of Israel as a state, strong cultural conflict occurred between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews (mainly east European Ashkenazim). The roots of this conflict, which still exists to a much smaller extent in present-day Israeli society, are chiefly attributed to the concept of the " melting pot ". That is to say, all Jewish immigrants who arrived in Israel were strongly encouraged to "meltdown" their own particular exilic identities within
7670-438: The emancipation, Zionism developed in central Europe. Other Jews, particularly those in the Pale of Settlement , turned to socialism . These tendencies would be united in Labor Zionism , the founding ideology of the State of Israel. Of the estimated 8.8 million Jews living in Europe at the beginning of World War II , the majority of whom were Ashkenazi, about 6 million – more than two-thirds – were systematically murdered in
7788-429: The end of the first millennium CE . They traditionally speak Yiddish , a language that originated in the 9th century, and largely migrated towards northern and eastern Europe during the late Middle Ages due to persecution . Hebrew was primarily used as a literary and sacred language until its 20th-century revival as a common language in Israel. Ashkenazim adapted their traditions to Europe and underwent
7906-488: The estimated worldwide Jewish population was 15.3 million. Israeli demographer and statistician Sergio D. Pergola implied that Ashkenazim comprised 65–70% of Jews worldwide in 2000, while other estimates suggest more than 75%. As of 2013 , the population was estimated to be between 10 million and 11.2 million. Genetic studies indicate that Ashkenazim have both Levantine and European (mainly southern European) ancestry. These studies draw diverging conclusions about
8024-402: The far north, the others being Minni and Ararat (corresponding to Urartu ), called on by God to resist Babylon. In the Yoma tractate of the Babylonian Talmud the name Gomer is rendered as Germania , which elsewhere in rabbinical literature was identified with Germanikia in northwestern Syria, but later became associated with Germania . Ashkenaz is linked to Scandza/Scanzia , viewed as
8142-411: The father of Ashkenaz, is translated by Germamia , which evidently stands for Germany, and which was suggested by the similarity of the sound. In later times, the word Ashkenaz is used to designate southern and western Germany, the ritual of which sections differs somewhat from that of eastern Germany and Poland. Thus the prayer-book of Isaiah Horowitz , and many others, give the piyyutim according to
8260-444: The favor. Further evidence of German communities in the holy city comes in the form of halakhic questions sent from Germany to Jerusalem during the second half of the 11th century. Material relating to the history of German Jews has been preserved in the communal accounts of certain communities on the Rhine, a Memorbuch , and a Liebesbrief , documents that are now part of the Sassoon Collection. Heinrich Graetz also added to
8378-417: The first time, or when a lapsed or less observant Jew returns to traditional Judaism and must determine what was done in his or her family's past. In this sense, "Ashkenazic" refers both to a family ancestry and to a body of customs binding on Jews of that ancestry. Reform Judaism , which does not necessarily follow those minhagim, did nonetheless originate among Ashkenazi Jews. Cuneiform Cuneiform
8496-438: The forces of Herod the Great with assistance from Roman forces in 37 BCE. It is known that Jewish war captives were sold into slavery after the suppression of a minor Jewish revolt in 53 BCE, and some were probably taken to southern Europe. Regarding Jewish settlements founded in southern Europe during the Roman era, E. Mary Smallwood wrote that "no date or origin can be assigned to the numerous settlements eventually known in
8614-494: The general social "pot" in order to become Israeli. As of 2020, 63% of American Jews are Ashkenazim. A disproportionate amount of Ashkenazi Americans are religious compared to American Jews of other racial groups. They live in large populations in the states of New York, California, Florida, and New Jersey. The majority of American Ashkenazi Jewish voters vote for the Democratic Party , although Orthodox ones tend to support
8732-459: The history of German Jewry in modern times in the abstract of his seminal work, History of the Jews , which he entitled "Volksthümliche Geschichte der Juden." In an essay on Sephardi Jewry, Daniel Elazar at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs summarized the demographic history of Ashkenazi Jews in the last thousand years. He noted that at the end of the 11th century, 97% of world Jewry
8850-409: The idea that Jews had the know-how and capacity to jump-start the economy, improve revenues, and enlarge trade seems to have played a prominent role. Typically, Jews relocated close to the markets and churches in town centres, where, though they came under the authority of both royal and ecclesiastical powers, they were accorded administrative autonomy. In the 11th century, both Rabbinic Judaism and
8968-413: The influence of the latter", and that it is "probable that the general idea of expressing words of a language in writing was brought to Egypt from Sumerian Mesopotamia". There are many instances of Egypt-Mesopotamia relations at the time of the invention of writing, and standard reconstructions of the development of writing generally place the development of the Sumerian proto-cuneiform script before
9086-458: The interests of religious Ashkenazi Jews. The role of religious parties, including small religious parties that play important roles as coalition members, results in turn from Israel's composition as a complex society in which competing social, economic, and religious interests stand for election to the Knesset , a unicameral legislature with 120 seats. Ashkenazi Jews have played a prominent role in
9204-505: The invitation of local Christian rulers. Thus Baldwin V, Count of Flanders , invited Jacob ben Yekutiel and his fellow Jews to settle in his lands; and soon after the Norman conquest of England , William the Conqueror likewise extended a welcome to continental Jews to take up residence there. Bishop Rüdiger Huzmann called on the Jews of Mainz to relocate to Speyer . In all of these decisions,
9322-741: The land of Israel/Judaea. They collected an annual temple tax from Jews both in and outside of Israel. The revolts in and suppression of diaspora communities in Egypt, Libya and Crete during the Kitos War of 115–117 CE had a severe impact on the Jewish diaspora. A substantial Jewish population emerged in northern Gaul by the Middle Ages, but Jewish communities existed in 465 CE in Brittany , in 524 CE in Valence , and in 533 CE in Orléans . Throughout this period and into
9440-407: The ligature KAxGUR 7 consists of 31 strokes. Most later adaptations of Sumerian cuneiform preserved at least some aspects of the Sumerian script. Written Akkadian included phonetic symbols from the Sumerian syllabary , together with logograms that were read as whole words. Many signs in the script were polyvalent, having both a syllabic and logographic meaning. The complexity of the system bears
9558-559: The majority of the American Jewish community since 1750. In the context of the European Enlightenment , Jewish emancipation began in 18th century France and spread throughout Western and Central Europe. Disabilities that had limited the rights of Jews since the Middle Ages were abolished, including the requirements to wear distinctive clothing, pay special taxes, and live in ghettos isolated from non-Jewish communities and
9676-443: The meaning and the other the pronunciation (e.g. 𒅗 ka 'mouth' was combined with the sign 𒉣 nun 'prince' to express the word 𒅻 nundum , meaning 'lip', formally KA×NUN; cf. Chinese phono-semantic compounds ). Another way of expressing words that had no sign of their own was by so-called 'Diri compounds' – sign sequences that have, in combination, a reading different from the sum of the individual constituent signs (for example,
9794-560: The mid-19th century – were in the area of ancient Assyria . An estimated half a million tablets are held in museums across the world, but comparatively few of these are published . The largest collections belong to the British Museum ( approx. 130,000 tablets), the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin , the Louvre , the Istanbul Archaeology Museums , the National Museum of Iraq , the Yale Babylonian Collection ( approx. 40,000 tablets), and Penn Museum . Writing began after pottery
9912-457: The mid-first century became widely accepted, including by Louis Feldman . However, contemporary scholars now accept that Bar Hebraeus based his figure on a census of total Roman citizens and thus included non-Jews, the figure of 6,944,000 being recorded in Eusebius' Chronicon . Louis Feldman, previously an active supporter of the figure, now states that he and Baron were mistaken. Philo gives
10030-475: The migration patterns of Jews from Southern and Western Europe to Central and Eastern Europe. In 1740, a family from Lithuania became the first Ashkenazi Jews to settle in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem. In the generations after emigration from the west, Jewish communities in places like Poland, Russia, and Belarus enjoyed a comparatively stable socio-political environment. A thriving publishing industry and
10148-484: The movement was by no means a singular, centralized event, and a Jewish diaspora had already been established before. During both of these rebellions, many Jews were captured and sold into slavery by the Romans. According to the Jewish historian Josephus , 97,000 Jews were sold as slaves in the aftermath of the first revolt. In one occasion, Vespasian reportedly ordered 6,000 Jewish prisoners of war from Galilee to work on
10266-463: The near eastern token system used for accounting. The meaning and usage of these tokens is still a matter of debate. These tokens were in use from the 9th millennium BC and remained in occasional use even late in the 2nd millennium BC. Early tokens with pictographic shapes of animals, associated with numbers, were discovered in Tell Brak , and date to the mid-4th millennium BC. It has been suggested that
10384-1080: The official religion of Rome and Constantinople in 380 CE, Jews were increasingly marginalized. The Synagogue in the Agora of Athens is dated to the period between 267 and 396 CE. The Stobi Synagogue in Macedonia was built on the ruins of a more ancient synagogue in the 4th century, while later in the 5th century, the synagogue was transformed into a Christian basilica. Hellenistic Judaism thrived in Antioch and Alexandria , and many of these Greek-speaking Jews would convert to Christianity. Sporadic epigraphic evidence in gravesite excavations, particularly in Brigetio ( Szőny ), Aquincum ( Óbuda ), Intercisa ( Dunaújváros ), Triccinae ( Sárvár ), Savaria ( Szombathely ), Sopianae ( Pécs ) in Hungary, and Mursa ( Osijek ) in Croatia, attest to
10502-522: The ones that ultimately led to its decipherment are the ones found in the trilingual Behistun inscriptions , commissioned by the Achaemenid kings. The inscriptions, similar to that of the Rosetta Stone 's, were written in three different writing systems. The first was Old Persian , which was deciphered in 1802 by Georg Friedrich Grotefend . The second, Babylonian cuneiform, was deciphered shortly after
10620-475: The possible exception of Trier and Cologne , the archeological evidence suggests at most a fleeting presence of very few Jews, primarily itinerant traders or artisans. Estimating the number of Jews in antiquity is a task fraught with peril due to the nature of and lack of accurate documentation. The number of Jews in the Roman Empire for a long time was based on the accounts of Syrian Orthodox bishop Bar Hebraeus who lived between 1226 and 1286 CE, who stated by
10738-506: The presence of Jews after the 2nd and 3rd centuries where Roman garrisons were established. There was a sufficient number of Jews in Pannonia to form communities and build a synagogue. Jewish troops were among the Syrian soldiers transferred there, and replenished from the Middle East. After 175 CE Jews and especially Syrians came from Antioch , Tarsus , and Cappadocia . Others came from Italy and
10856-507: The present, Jewish life in northern Europe is well documented. By the 11th century, when Rashi of Troyes wrote his commentaries, Jews in what came to be known as "Ashkenaz" were known for their halakhic learning , and Talmudic studies . They were criticized by Sephardim and other Jewish scholars in Islamic lands for their lack of expertise in Jewish jurisprudence and general ignorance of Hebrew linguistics and literature. Yiddish emerged as
10974-462: The printing of hundreds of biblical commentaries precipitated the development of the Hasidic movement as well as major Jewish academic centers. After two centuries of comparative tolerance in the new nations, massive westward emigration occurred in the 19th and 20th centuries in response to pogroms in the east and the economic opportunities offered in other parts of the world. Ashkenazi Jews have made up
11092-480: The prohibitions on certain professions. Laws were passed to integrate Jews into their host countries, forcing Ashkenazi Jews to adopt family names (they had formerly used patronymics ). Newfound inclusion into public life led to cultural growth in the Haskalah , or Jewish Enlightenment, with its goal of integrating modern European values into Jewish life. As a reaction to increasing antisemitism and assimilation following
11210-449: The relative position of the stylus to the tablet, the writer could use a single tool to make a variety of impressions. For numbers, a round-tipped stylus was initially used, until the wedge-tipped stylus was generalized. The direction of writing was from top-to-bottom and right-to-left. Cuneiform clay tablets could be fired in kilns to bake them hard, and so provide a permanent record, or they could be left moist and recycled if permanence
11328-415: The syllable [ɡu] had fourteen different symbols. The inventory of signs was expanded by the combination of existing signs into compound signs. They could either derive their meaning from a combination of the meanings of both original signs (e.g. 𒅗 ka 'mouth' and 𒀀 a 'water' were combined to form the sign for 𒅘 nag̃ 'drink', formally KA×A; cf. Chinese compound ideographs ), or one sign could suggest
11446-438: The synagogue there, but occasionally also with regard to certain other observances. In the literature of the 13th century, references to the land and the language of Ashkenaz often occur. Examples include Solomon ben Aderet 's Responsa (vol. i., No. 395); the Responsa of Asher ben Jehiel (pp. 4, 6); his Halakot (Berakot i. 12, ed. Wilna, p. 10); the work of his son Jacob ben Asher , Tur Orach Chayim (chapter 59);
11564-424: The third century AD. The complexity of cuneiforms prompted the development of a number of simplified versions of the script. Old Persian cuneiform was developed with an independent and unrelated set of simple cuneiform characters, by Darius the Great in the 5th century BC. Most scholars consider this writing system to be an independent invention because it has no obvious connections with other writing systems at
11682-413: The time of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, as many as six million Jews were already living in the Roman Empire, a conclusion which has been contested as highly exaggerated. The 13th-century author Bar Hebraeus gave a figure of 6,944,000 Jews in the Roman world. Salo Wittmayer Baron considered the figure convincing. The figure of seven million within and one million outside the Roman world in
11800-432: The time, such as Elamite , Akkadian, Hurrian , and Hittite cuneiforms. It formed a semi-alphabetic syllabary, using far fewer wedge strokes than Assyrian used, together with a handful of logograms for frequently occurring words like "god" ( 𐏎 ), "king" ( 𐏋 ) or "country" ( 𐏌 ). This almost purely alphabetical form of the cuneiform script (36 phonetic characters and 8 logograms), was specially designed and used by
11918-652: The token shapes were the original basis for some of the Sumerian pictographs. Mesopotamia's "proto-literate" period spans roughly the 35th to 32nd centuries BC. The first unequivocal written documents start with the Uruk IV period, from circa 3,300 BC, followed by tablets found in Uruk III, Jemdet Nasr , Early Dynastic I Ur and Susa (in Proto-Elamite ) dating to the period until circa 2,900 BC. Originally, pictographs were either drawn on clay tablets in vertical columns with
12036-585: The two languages are related, their writing systems seem to have been developed separately. For Hurrian, there were even different systems in different polities (in Mitanni , in Mari , in the Hittite Empire). The Hurrian orthographies were generally characterised by more extensive use of syllabograms and more limited use of logograms than Akkadian. Urartian, in comparison, retained a more significant role for logograms. In
12154-526: The victims were Ashkenazi Jews, their percentage dropped from an estimate of 92% of world Jewry in 1930 to nearly 80% of world Jewry today. The Holocaust also effectively put an end to the dynamic development of the Yiddish language in the previous decades , as the vast majority of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, around 5 million, were Yiddish speakers. Many of the surviving Ashkenazi Jews emigrated to countries such as Israel, Canada, Argentina, Australia , and
12272-585: The west, and some may have been founded as a result of the dispersal of Palestinian Jews after the revolts of AD 66–70 and 132–135, but it is reasonable to conjecture that many, such as the settlement in Puteoli attested in 4 BC, went back to the late republic or early empire and originated in voluntary emigration and the lure of trade and commerce." The first and second centuries CE saw a series of unsuccessful large-scale Jewish revolts against Rome . The Roman suppression of these revolts led to wide-scale destruction,
12390-518: The west, who due to high birth rates absorbed and largely replaced the preceding non-Ashkenazi Jewish groups of Eastern Europe (whose numbers the demographer Sergio Della Pergola considers to have been small). Genetic evidence also indicates that Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews largely descend from Ashkenazi Jews who migrated from central to eastern Europe and subsequently experienced high birthrates and genetic isolation. Some Jewish immigration from southern Europe to Eastern Europe continued into
12508-565: The word more precisely, two phonetic complements were added – Ú (𒌑) for the syllable [u] in front of the symbol and GA (𒂵) for the syllable [ga] behind. Finally, the symbol for 'bird', MUŠEN (𒄷) was added to ensure proper interpretation. As a result, the whole word could be spelt 𒌑𒉀𒂵𒄷, i.e. Ú.NAGA.GA (among the many variant spellings that the word could have). For unknown reasons, cuneiform pictographs, until then written vertically, were rotated 90° counterclockwise, in effect putting them on their side. This change first occurred slightly before
12626-543: Was Sephardic and 3% Ashkenazi; in the mid-17th century, "Sephardim still outnumbered Ashkenazim three to two"; by the end of the 18th century, "Ashkenazim outnumbered Sephardim three to two, the result of improved living conditions in Christian Europe versus the Ottoman Muslim world." By 1930, Arthur Ruppin estimated that Ashkenazi Jews accounted for nearly 92% of world Jewry. These factors are sheer demography showing
12744-561: Was adapted to writing Hittite, a layer of Akkadian logographic spellings, also known as Akkadograms, was added to the script, in addition to the Sumerian logograms, or Sumerograms, which were already inherent in the Akkadian writing system and which Hittite also kept. Thus the pronunciations of many Hittite words which were conventionally written by logograms are now unknown. The Hurrian language (attested 2300–1000 BC) and Urartian language (attested 9th–6th century BC) were also written in adapted versions of Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform. Although
12862-645: Was denominated Sefarad ( Obadiah 20), France was called Tsarefat ( 1 Kings 17:9 ), and Bohemia was called the Land of Canaan . By the high medieval period, Talmudic commentators like Rashi began to use Ashkenaz/Eretz Ashkenaz to designate Germany , earlier known as Loter , where, especially in the Rhineland communities of Speyer , Worms and Mainz , the most important Jewish communities arose. Rashi uses leshon Ashkenaz (Ashkenazi language) to describe Yiddish, and Byzantium and Syrian Jewish letters referred to
12980-578: Was especially difficult to differentiate Jews from the Syrians. After Pannonia was ceded to the Huns in 433, the garrison populations were withdrawn to Italy, and only a few, enigmatic traces remain of a possible Jewish presence in the area some centuries later. No evidence has yet been found of a Jewish presence in antiquity in Germany beyond its Roman border, nor in Eastern Europe. In Gaul and Germany itself, with
13098-478: Was focused on trade, business management, and financial services, due to several presumed factors: Christian European prohibitions restricting certain activities by Jews, preventing certain financial activities (such as " usurious " loans) between Christians, high rates of literacy, near-universal male education, and ability of merchants to rely upon and trust family members living in different regions and countries. In Poland, Jews were granted special protection by
13216-406: Was further developed and modified in the writing of the Akkadian language to express its sounds. Often, words that had a similar meaning but very different sounds were written with the same symbol. For instance the Sumerian words 'tooth' [zu], 'mouth' [ka] and 'voice' [gu] were all written with the original pictogram for mouth (𒅗). Words that sounded alike would have different signs; for instance,
13334-448: Was in use for more than three millennia, through several stages of development, from the 31st century BC down to the second century AD. The latest firmly dateable tablet, from Uruk, dates to 79/80 AD. Ultimately, it was completely replaced by alphabetic writing , in the general sense, in the course of the Roman era , and there are no cuneiform systems in current use. It had to be deciphered as
13452-478: Was invented, during the Neolithic , when clay tokens were used to record specific amounts of livestock or commodities. In recent years a contrarian view has arisen on the tokens being the precursor of writing. These tokens were initially impressed on the surface of round clay envelopes ( clay bullae ) and then stored in them. The tokens were then progressively replaced by flat tablets, on which signs were recorded with
13570-451: Was not needed. Most surviving cuneiform tablets were of the latter kind, accidentally preserved when fires destroyed the tablets' storage place and effectively baked them, unintentionally ensuring their longevity. The script was widely used on commemorative stelae and carved reliefs to record the achievements of the ruler in whose honor the monument had been erected. The spoken language included many homophones and near-homophones, and in
13688-706: Was originally developed to write the Sumerian language of southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq ). Over the course of its history, cuneiform was adapted to write a number of languages in addition to Sumerian. Akkadian texts are attested from the 24th century BC onward and make up the bulk of the cuneiform record. Akkadian cuneiform was itself adapted to write the Hittite language in the early second millennium BC . The other languages with significant cuneiform corpora are Eblaite , Elamite , Hurrian , Luwian , and Urartian . The Old Persian and Ugaritic alphabets feature cuneiform-style signs; however, they are unrelated to
13806-546: Was renamed Syria Palaestina . Jews were prohibited from entering the city on pain of death. Jewish presence in the region significantly dwindled after the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt. With their national aspirations crushed and widespread devastation in Judea, despondent Jews migrated out of Judea in the aftermath of both revolts, and many settled in southern Europe. In contrast to the earlier Assyrian and Babylonian captivities,
13924-406: Was retained, but was now pronounced immerum , rather than the Sumerian udu . Such retained individual signs or, sometimes, entire sign combinations with logographic value are known as Sumerograms , a type of heterogram . The East Semitic languages employed equivalents for many signs that were distorted or abbreviated to represent new values because the syllabic nature of the script as refined by
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