• Source: Ashkenaz

Ashkenaz (Hebrew: אַשְׁכְּנָז‎ ʾAškənāz) in the Hebrew Bible is one of the descendants of Noah.
Ashkenaz is the first son of Gomer, and a Japhetic patriarch in the Table of Nations. In rabbinic literature, the descendants of Ashkenaz were first associated with the Scythian cultures, then later with the Slavic territories, and, from the 11th century onwards, with Germany and northern Europe, or the Indo-European people, in a manner similar to Tzarfat or 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.




Hebrew Bible


In the genealogies of the Hebrew Bible, Ashkenaz (Hebrew: אַשְׁכְּנַז, ’Aškənaz; Greek: Ἀσχανάζ, romanized: Askhanáz) was a descendant of Noah. He was the first son of 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 Ararat and 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 Encyclopaedia Biblica, "Ashkenaz must have been one of the migratory peoples which in the time of Esar-haddon, burst upon the northern provinces of Asia Minor, and upon Armenia. One branch of this great migration appears to have reached Lake Urumiyeh; for in the revolt which Esar-haddon chastised, the Mannai, who lived to the SW of that lake, sought the help of 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.




= Rabbinic Judaism

=
In rabbinic literature, the kingdom of Ashkenaz was first associated with the Scythian region, then later with the Slavic territories, and, from the 11th century onwards, with northern Europe and Germany. 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. 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.
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. (See below.)




= Ashkenazi Jews

=

Sometime in the post Biblical early medieval period, the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe came to be called by the name Ashkenazim, in conformity with the custom of designating areas of Jewish settlement with biblical names, Spain being identified as Sefarad (Obadiah 1:20), France as Tsarefat (1 Kings 17:9), and Bohemia as 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 the German language, and Byzantium and Syrian Jewish letters referred to 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 both the Jews of medieval Germany and France. 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, 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 ...
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.
Because of this tradition, Askanaz is a male given name still used today by Armenians.




= German royal genealogy

=
In 1498, a monk named Annio da Viterbo published fragments known as "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. 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:

In the 19th century, the German theologian August Wilhelm Knobel again equated Ashkenaz with the Germans, deriving the name of the Aesir from Ashkenaz.




References



J. Simons: The Geographical and Topographical Texts of the Old Testament, Leiden, 1959, § 28.

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