Ashkenazi

The term Ashkenazi refers to a group of Jews who lived in the Rhineland valley and in neighbouring France before their migration eastward to Slavic lands (e.g., Poland, Lithuania, and Russia) after the Crusades (11th–13th century) and their descendants.

Today Ashkenazim (plural for Ashkenazi) constitute more than 80 percent of all the Jews in the world, vastly outnumbering Sephardic Jews. In the early 21st century, Ashkenazi Jews numbered about 11 million. In Israel the numbers of Ashkenazim and Sephardim are roughly equal. All Reform and Conservative Jewish congregations belong to the Ashkenazic tradition.

In time, all Jews who had adopted the “German rite” synagogue ritual were referred to as Ashkenazim to distinguish them from Sephardic (Spanish rite) Jews. Ashkenazim differ from Sephardim in their pronunciation of Hebrew, in cultural traditions, in synagogue cantillation (chanting), in their widespread use of Yiddish (until the 20th century), and especially in synagogue liturgy.

Millions of Ashkenazi Yiddish speakers were victims of the Nazi Holocaust. Yiddish was further suppressed by the Soviet Union, by the antagonism of early Israeli authorities guarding modern Hebrew, and by shifts to other primary languages in Western countries. The language is now in common use among the ultra-Orthodox Hasidim in numerous countries and among secular students of Yiddish at leading universities.