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.

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 [i.e. 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."

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

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.^{[citation needed]} Its geographic extent did not coincide with the German Christian principalities of the time, and it included northern France.