Ashkenaz

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For other uses, see Ashkenaz (disambiguation).
Ashkenaz is shown in Phrygia in this 1854 map of "The World as known to the Hebrews" (Lyman Coleman, Historical Textbook and Atlas of Biblical Geography)

Ashkenaz (

descendants of Noah
. Ashkenaz is the first son of
Sefarad
.

His name is related to the Assyrian Aškūza (Aškuzai, Iškuzai), the Scythians who expelled the Gimirri (Gimirrāi) from the Armenian highland of the Upper Euphrates area.[2]

Hebrew Bible

In the genealogies of the

Gomer and brother of Riphath and Togarmah (Genesis 10:3, 1 Chronicles 1:6), with Gomer being the grandson of Noah through Japheth
.

In Jeremiah 51:27, a kingdom of Ashkenaz was to be called together with

Minni against Babylon
, which reads:

Set ye up a standard in the land, blow the trumpet among the nations, prepare the nations against her [ie. Babylon], call together against her the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashchenaz; appoint a captain against her; cause the horses to come up as the rough caterpillars.

According to the

Ispakai
'of the land of Asguza,' a name (originally perhaps Asgunza) which the skepticism of Dillmann need not hinder us from identifying with Ashkenaz, and from considering as that of a horde from the north, of Indo-Germanic origin, which settled on the south of Lake Urumiyeh."

Medieval reception

The Karaite philologist David ben Abraham al-Fāsi, writing around the turn of the millennium, identified Ashkenaz as the ancestor of the Khazars.[3]

Rabbinic Judaism

In

Slavic territories,[1] and, from the 11th century onwards, with northern Europe and Germany.[4] The region of Ashkenaz was centred on the Rhineland and the Palatinate (notably Worms and Speyer), in what is now the westernmost part of Germany.[citation needed] Its geographic extent did not coincide with the German Christian principalities of the time, and it included northern France
.

How the name of Ashkenaz came to be associated in the rabbinic literature with the Rhineland is a subject of speculation.[4]

In rabbinic literature from the 11th century, Ashkenaz was considered the ruler of a kingdom in the North and of the Northern and Germanic people.[citation needed] (See below.)

Ashkenazi Jews

Main article: Ashkenazi Jews

Sometime in the post Biblical

Germany, earlier known as Loter,[5][7] where, especially in the Rhineland communities of Speyer, Worms and Mainz, the most important Jewish communities arose.[8] Rashi uses leshon Ashkenaz (Ashkenazi language) to describe the German language, and Byzantium and Syrian Jewish letters referred to the Crusaders as Ashkenazim.[7] Given the close links between the Jewish communities of France and Germany following the Carolingian unification, the term Ashkenazi came to refer to both the Jews of medieval Germany and France.[9] Ashkenazi Jewish culture later spread in the 16th century into Eastern Europe, where their rite replaced that of existing Jewish communities whom some scholars believe to have been larger in demographics than the Ashkenazi Jews themselves,[10]
and then to all parts of the world with the migrations of Jews who identified as "Ashkenazi Jews".

Armenian tradition

In Armenian tradition, Ashkenaz, along with Togarmah, was considered among the ancestors of the Armenians. Koriun, the earliest Armenian historian, calls the Armenians an "Askanazian (i.e., Ashkenazi) nation". He starts the "Life of Mashtots" with these words:

I had been thinking of the God-given alphabet of the Azkanazian nation and of the land of Armenia—when, in what time, and through what kind of man that new divine gift had been bestowed ...[11]

Later Armenian authors concur with this. Hovhannes Draskhanakerttsi (10th century) writes:

The sixth son was Tiras from whom were born our very own Ashkenaz [Ask'anaz] and Togarmah [T'orgom] who named the country that he possessed Thrace after himself, as well as Chittim [K'itiim] who brought under his sway the Macedonians. 7. The sons of Tiras were Ashkenaz, from whom descended the Sarmatians, Riphath, whence the Sauromatians [Soramatk'], and Togarmah, who according to Jeremiah subjugated the Ashkenazian army and called it the House of Togarmah; for at first Ashkenaz had named our people after himself in accord with the law of seniority, as we shall explain in its proper place.[12]

Because of this tradition, Askanaz is a male given name still used today by Armenians.

German royal genealogy

In 1498, a monk named

Pseudo-Berossus", now considered a forgery, claiming that Babylonian records had shown that Noah had more sons than the three sons of his listed in the Bible. Specifically, Tuiscon or Tuisto is given as the fourth son of Noah, who had been the first ruler of Scythia
and Germany following the dispersion of peoples, with him being succeeded by his son Mannus as the second king.

Later historians (e.g., Johannes Aventinus and Johann Hübner) managed to furnish numerous further details, including the assertion by James Anderson in the early 18th century that this Tuiscon was in fact none other than the biblical Ashkenaz, son of Gomer.[13] James Anderson's 1732 tome Royal genealogies reports a significant number of antiquarian or mythographic traditions regarding Askenaz as the first king of ancient Germany, for example the following entry:

Askenaz, or Askanes, called by

Euxin sea
(by some called Asken from him) and there founded the kingdom of the Germans and the Sarmatians ... when Askenaz himself was 24 years old, for he lived above 200 years, and reigned 176.

In the vocables of
Tetrarchies, and Governments, and brought colonies from diverse parts to increase it. He built the city Duisburg, made a body of laws in verse, and invented letters, which Kadmos
later imitated, for the Greek and High Dutch are alike in many words.

The 20 captains or dukes that came with Askenaz are: Sarmata, from whom
Azali; Hister – Istria; Adulas, Dietas, Ibalus – people that of old dwelt between the rivers Oenus and Rhenus; Epirus, from whom Epirus
.

Askenaz had a brother called Scytha (say the Germans) the father of the
Celts, Gauls and Galatians, which is confirmed by the historians Strabo and Aventinus, and by Alstedius in his Chronology, p. 201 etc. Askenaz, or Tuisco, after his death, was worshipped as the ambassador and interpreter of the gods, and from thence called the first German Mercury, from Tuitseben to interpret.[13]

In the 19th century, the German theologian

Aesir from Ashkenaz.[14]

References

  1. ^ a b Kraus. S, 1932, Hashemot 'ashkenaz usefarad, Tarbiz 3:423-435
  2. ^ Russell E. Gmirkin, Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch, T & T Clark, Edinburgh, 2006 pp.148, 149 n.57.
  3. ISBN 978-3-447-11573-5
    p.84
  4. ^
    ISBN 0-297-82941-6
    ., Chapter 3, footnote 9.
  5. ^ a b Paul Kriwaczek, Yiddish Civilisation, Hachette 2011 p. 173 n. 9.
  6. ^ Michael Miller, Rabbis and Revolution: The Jews of Moravia in the Age of Emancipation Stanford University Press,2010 p. 15.
  7. ^
    ISBN 978-0-02-866097-4
    .
  8. ^ Michael Brenner, A Short History of the Jews Princeton University Press 2010 p. 96.
  9. ^ David Malkiel, Reconstructing Ashkenaz: The Human Face of Franco-German Jewry, 1000–1250, Stanford University Press, 2008, p. ix.
  10. ^ Cecil Roth, "The World History of the Jewish People. Vol. XI (11): The Dark Ages. Jews in Christian Europe 711-1096 [Second Series: Medieval Period. Vol. Two: The Dark Ages", Rutgers University Press, 1966. Pp. 302-303.
  11. ^ Koriun, The Life of Mashtots, Yerevan, 1981. Translated from Old Armenian (Grabar) by Bedros Norehad
  12. ^ Hovhannes Draskhanakerttsi, History of Armenia, Chapter I 6-7 Archived June 22, 2012, at the Wayback Machine
  13. ^ a b James Anderson, Royal Genealogies, Or the Genealogical Tables of Emperors, Kings and Princes (1732) p. 441 (Table 213); also p.442 "The Most Ancient Kings of the Germans".
  14. The Table of Nations from the Book of Genesis
    ) (1850) by August Wilhelm Knobel
  • J. Simons: The Geographical and Topographical Texts of the Old Testament, Leiden, 1959, § 28.
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