#Ashkenazim

[nesyanast]

Scene from the most famous Yiddish play The Dybbuk by the Vilner Trupe. 1910s.

[applesauce42069]

[notaplaceofhonour]

I understand and agree with pointing out that the Holocaust didn’t just affect the Jews that lived in Europe, and shedding light on the stories of Jews in other territories under Axis control. Every life lost or uprooted in the Holocaust matters and deserves to be remembered, not just Ashkenazim.

However, I’ve been seeing a bit of an overcorrection to the point that this valid & important point get twisted by some into the idea that Ashkenazim weren’t actually all that affected by the Holocaust at all and may have actually been safer than other Jews due to being White/European*, and I wanted to walk through exactly why that is so far from the reality and gets into really dangerous Holocaust Distortion.

The fact is that the vast majority of Holocaust victims were Ashkenazim. How do we know this? Well, first and most obvious without even getting into the numbers: the Nazis were most active in Eastern Europe, where most Jews were overwhelmingly Ashkenazi. Germany had colonies elsewhere and the affect the Holocaust had on Jews living in Africa and Asia is not any less important (and the fact remains that their stories are a genuine gap in Holocaust education that needs to be filled), but this doesn’t change the fact that the center of Nazi activity was Europe, and thus that is where their impact on Jews was most intense. But it’s important to not just go off of what seems “obvious” because what’s obvious to any given person is subjective and subject to bias. So let’s look at the numbers:

Estimates prior to the Holocaust put Ashkenazim at 92% of the world’s Jewish population (or roughly 14 million of the 15.3 million total Jewish population), meaning that it would be physically impossible for less than 4.7 million (or 78%) of the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust to be Ashkenazim.

Even that number is only possible to reach by assuming that only Ashkenazism survived and literally every non-Ashkenazi Jew died in the Holocaust, which we categorically know is not the case due to the continued existence of Sephardim & Mizrahim, as well as other Jews. So the number has to be higher than 78%.

Additionally, the fact that the proportion of the world’s Jewish population that was Ashkenazi fell so drastically during to the Holocaust and still hasn’t recovered (from 92% in 1930, only recovering to close to 75% in the last couple decades) means that not only a higher overall number of deaths were Ashkenazim, but that a higher proportion of the total Ashkenazi population died than from other groups.

We also know that 85% of Jews killed in the Holocaust were Yiddish-speakers. The fact that Yiddish is endemic to Ashkenazi culture (and not all Ashkenazim would have even been Yiddish-speakers) due to assimilation means that at least—and most likely more than—85% of Jews killed in the Holocaust were Ashkenazi.

So, no, Ashkenazim were not some privileged subcategory of Jews who avoided the worst of the Holocaust. They were the group most directly devastated by it.

That doesn’t change the fact that the devastation the Nazis and their allies wreaked on other Jews is every bit as important to acknowledge and discuss, and must not fall by the wayside. The stories and experiences of all victims & survivors deserve to be heard, remembered, and honored, not just the most common or most statistically representative of the majority of victims. However, we can (and must) do that without allowing the facts of the Holocaust to be distorted or suggesting Ashkenazim were somehow less affected by the Holocaust or more privileged under the Nazis. The Nazis hated all Jews. Antisemitism affects all Jews. Period.

*without getting too deep into how categories like Ashkanzi/Sephardi/etc. don’t map neatly onto race like so many people seem to want them to. that’s a different post, but just pointing that out

[saltchipfishshop]

Schlissel challah 🗝

Baking challah in the shape of a key (schlissel meaning key in Yiddish) is an Ashkenazi tradition the Shabbat after Pesach, and is said to represent the key to the promised land. I’m usually team poppyseed but sesame seeds are traditional for schlissel challah, because they are supposed to resemble the manna we ate in the desert.

I couldn’t find a technique I liked so I just made one up- I did a 5-strand braid for the stem, and a standard 3-strand for the teeth and the head.

Hope everybody had a wonderful chag!

[is-the-fire-real]

Taking Intro to Judaism is wild when you're converting to a Sephardic community.

We've had two classes in a row about kashrut. The Rabbi is Ashkenazi. He is also trying to teach us all the of the rules so we'll do fine before the biet din. So he's going down the list of stuff like "Probably no turkey, definitely no Fanta Naranja, no food from restaurants that aren't kashrut, milk and meat plates", etc. And again, I get it. He doesn't expect us to follow all of these rules all at once, we're just being educated.

But one thing I'm finding about Spanish Sephardim is that it's an even harder-core kind of diaspora. There's a broad tolerance for, or lack of observance of, food-related rules that I find fascinating.

Kitniyot are something we're expected to know about, but around here, you can have beans and rice during Pesach. During kabbalat shabbat, we were complaining about how it's impossible--not tricky, impossible--to get Passover wine while drinking plain old normal red wine the day after the Rabbi laid down all the rules about handling grapes.

The Rabbi was like "here look I carry a card with all the banned substances listed on it so when I shop I won't buy something with an insect- or blood-based preservative". Which is cool! But meanwhile, the cantor was like "holy shit, bro, how are you and your wife avoiding eating pork and shellfish IN SOUTHERN SPAIN, you are very serious about being Jews aren't you".

It just seems very Spanish to me (affectionate) to learn the rules and then shrug in their general direction because whatyagonnado?

Anyhow, I howled in agony over Fanta Naranja, but I think giving it up would be best anyway. Probably keeping turkey on the menu, though.

[todaysjewishholiday]

25 Iyyar 5784 (1-2 June 2024)

Shavua tov! Shabbat ends with the havdalah service late enough after sunset that three stars are visible in the night sky* and another six days of labor begin.

On the 25th of Iyyar in 4856, a mob of Christian Crusader knights not wanting to have to travel as far as the holy land to commit massacres attempted to attack the Jewish quarter of Cologne in the Rhineland. The Catholic bishop of the city called on civic authorities to bar the gates against the would be murderers and the Jewish community of Cologne was spared. Many other Jewish communities across Europe would not be so fortunate during the crusade years, when many concluded that if crossing the Mediterranean to kill people of other religions was considered praiseworthy a little slaughter closer to home could hardly go amiss. And Cologne’s Jewish community would later experience severe attacks in 5048 and 5109.

The twenty-fifth of Iyyar is the fifth night of the sixth week of the Omer count. Yesterday was the thirty-ninth day of the Omer. After tonight’s count, 9 days remain before Shavuot.

*personal lack of visibility due to light pollution or cloud cover not an issue. Zmanim for your locality easily available online.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Ashkenazim became familiar in the West after the great waves of Jewish immigration from Russia and Eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth century; had it remained at that, they might have gone down in history as a remarkable and interesting community with a rich culture to add to the wealth of human experience, but nothing more. As it was, political Zionism intervened with a definition of Jewish nationhood that was in reality nothing other than the ethnic Ashkenazi identity grafted onto the rest. In other words, the East European Ashkenazim reinterpreted themselves as the pan-Jewish nation, an imagined community with a fabricated unifying narrative. (Israel’s national anthem, it may be noted, was nothing other than a medley of nostalgic Russian tunes.) It was for that reason that generations of non-Ashkenazi Jews who were brought to populate the new Jewish state after 1948 were subjected to what one might call ‘Ashkenazification’, an acculturation process to make them more like ‘real’ or European Jews. But the most egregious aspect of this false Ashkenazi representation of ‘the Jewish people’ was the claim it then made for a primordial connection with Palestine.

Ghada Karmi, One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel

[askjumblr]

I'm a convert trying to figure out how to go about finding my Hebrew name - and I was wondering about the decorum for that? Things I should avoid? How do you know how to choose between the different types of names (like Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrahi, etc, languages or just Hebrew?)? Say example, I have Spanish ancestry, should I take a Ladino name? Or if my synagogue is Ashkenazi should I take a Yiddish name? Should I just stick with Hebrew? I have no idea and I am so confused lol

Since anon didn't state a FOR, and I've seen many variations between FORs, please state yours when commenting so that it's clear for everyone.

[nesyanast]

[koenji]

Yehudit Shadur (יהודית שדור, Israeli, 1928 - 2011).

[...] has been widely recognized as the foremost exponent in reviving the centuries-old, almost forgotten, Jewish folk art form of papercutting. Her vigorous compositions draw upon traditional Jewish themes and symbols, including passages from the Psalms and prophetic books of the Bible. Her work is a synthesis of venerable religious forms and contemporary perceptions rendered in a universally appealing artistic language. x

[chanaleah]

Timeline Of Efforts To Re-Establish A Sovereign Jewish Homeland In The Land Of Israel

credit to rootsmetals

written description under the cut

Infographic vertically detailing efforts to re-establish a sovereign jewish homeland in the land of israel, and which jewish communities initiated said efforts.

539 BCE - Effort initiated by Babylonian Jews

167-160 BCE - Effort initiated by Jews in the Land Of Israel

66-73 CE - Effort initiated by Jews in the Land Of Israel

351-352 CE - Effort initiated by Jews in the Land Of Israel

556, 572 CE - Effort initiated by Jews and Samaritans in the Land Of Israel

614-617 CE - Effort initiated by Persian Jews, joined by Jews in the Land Of Israel

9th, 10th Century CE - Effort initiated by Karaite Jews

1210 CE - Effort initiated by Ashkenazi Jews

16th Century CE - Effort initiated by Sephardi Jews

18th & 19th Centuries - Effort initiated by Ashkenazi Jews

Modern Political Zionism - Effort initiated by Ashkenazi Jews; joined by Jews from around the world

[ouroboros8ontology]

The werewolf is a sorcerer, or a demon which inhabits the earth in man’s form, but which at will assumes the shape of a wolf and attacks and consumes men. Like his feminine counterpart, the estrie, he requires human blood in his diet—another version of the vampire.

Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion; The Powers of Evil: “Foreign” Demons

[sugaronyourtongu3]

My poem about Jewishness

[todaysjewishholiday]

6 Elul 5784 (7-8 September 2024)

The fifty fourth century was a golden age for the Ashkenazim of Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. As with all such golden ages for the Jewish people, it was not without dangers, and it ended in a devastating conflagration, but while it lasted it was a time of a great flowering of rabbinical study and remarkable freedom of movement for Jews across the eastern lands of Europe. More than anything else, it was this age that established the strength of Ashkenazi Judaism from which modern Jewish orthodoxy has fed. And one of the great lights of this time, whose rabbinical career carried him across the full breadth of Ashkenaz, was Gershom Shaul Lipmann ben Nathan haLevi Heller, known to his contemporaries as the Tosfot Yom Tov.

Heller was born in 5339 in Bavaria, days after his father's sudden death at the age of 18. Despite Nathan Heller's brief life, he had fathered four children. Gershom was taken under the wing of his paternal grandfather, Rabbi Moses, who began his education in Torah study. After several years of study in a yeshiva near home, the adolescent Heller traveled on his own to the beit midrash of the Maharal of Prague, a giant of both Torah and secular studies who regularly debated with the great gentile scholars of his time. Shortly after his eighteenth birthday, Heller received semicha from the Maharal and an appointment as a dayan in Prague. He remained there for 27 years, producing a number of treatises including the one whose title became his rabbinic eponym, before journeying to Moravia to take up a rabbinical post there, and being offered the position of Chief Rabbi of Vienna after barely a year in the region.

Yom Tov was of great service to Vienna's scattered Jews, receiving permission to establish a centralized community, and creating a communal constitution and various communal institutions for the good of all. However, his organized and thoughtful approach soon made him enemies among the wealthier members of the kehilla. When the Gentile authorities imposed harsh taxes on the city's Jews, Heller led the community's leaders in deciding to collect the tax progressively as a percentage of individual wealth, rather than as a simple poll tax, to lighten the burden on the community's poor. The rich, however, were not happy being asked to pay their share, and accused their chief rabbi of slandering Christianity. Heller was arrested and sentenced to death, but his allies were able to persuade the Emperor to reduce the sentence to a fine of 10,000 thalers, and a ruling that he was not to serve as a rabbi anywhere in the Emperor's realm. As soon as the fine was paid off, Heller left for the eastern border.

He was warmly welcomed into the Jewish community of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and soon appointed to the Council of the Four Lands, which functioned as a Jewish proto-legislative body and as a gathering for Jewish leaders to discuss issues for which they needed to collectively appeal Gentile authorities. Yom Tov served for three years as a rabbinical authority in Nemirov, then moved to Ludmir, and from there to Krakow, where he served as one of the Av Beis Din of Krakow's rabbinical court, and also as head of the Krakow yeshiva. It was during his two decades in Krakow that the horrors of the Chmielnicki Revolt passed through the Commonwealth. He survived the massacres, and passed away six years later on 6 Elul 5414. He was laid to rest in a humble grave in a corner of Krakow's Jewish burial ground.