Ashkenazim
Since the Middle Ages, the Hebrew term Ashkenaz has been used to refer to the area of present-day Germany, where the thriving Jewish communities of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz formed an important center of Jewish scholarship. The term later came to include northern France and northern Italy. The term Ashkenazim (singular: Ashkenazi) is derived from this name and refers to the descendants of Jews from these medieval communities, who eventually spread across both Western and Eastern Europe and later around the world.
Ashkenazim in History
Over the centuries, Ashkenazi Jews developed a shared cultural tradition. Their language was Yiddish, which developed from Middle High German and incorporates elements of Hebrew and Slavic languages. Yiddish is written using the Hebrew alphabet.
Sephardim
The other major group of European Jews is known as the Sephardim (singular: Sephardi). Sephardic Jews originally lived on the Iberian Peninsula, in what is now Spain and Portugal. Following their mass expulsion in 1492, they also settled in the Ottoman Empire, which extended across parts of present-day Turkey, North Africa, the Middle East, and southeastern Europe, as well as in parts of northern Europe. Sephardic Jews also developed a distinct language, known as Ladino or Judeo-Spanish.
Other Jewish Groups
Besides Ashkenazim and Sephardim, who account for most of the world’s Jews, there have been many small Jewish ethnic groups with their own traditional cultures and distinct languages, such as the Baghdadi Jews of Iraq and East Asia, the Berber Jews of North Africa, the Romaniote Jews of Greece, the Mountain Jews of the Caucasus, the Persian Jews of Iran, the Beta Israel of Ethiopia, the Cochin Jews of India, the Bukharan Jews of Central Asia, and others.
Nearly all Jewish languages besides Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino are now critically endangered or no longer in active use, as their speakers have migrated elsewhere and their descendants have shifted to national languages such as English, Hebrew, Russian, Spanish, and French.
Ashkenazim Today
The term Ashkenazi generally refers to a person’s heritage or cultural identity and does not necessarily indicate where a person lives. Large waves of emigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, followed by the persecution of European Jews by Nazi Germany, led many Ashkenazi Jews to settle in other parts of the world, particularly the United States and Israel.
An estimated 85 percent of Jews murdered in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers. As a result of the Holocaust, migration, and linguistic assimilation, only a minority of Ashkenazi Jews today speak Yiddish as their first language.