Ashkenaz

“Ashkenaz” is one of the most disputed Biblical place-names. It appears in the Hebrew Bible as the name of one of Noah’s descendants (Genesis 10:3) and as a reference to the kingdom of Ashkenaz, prophesied to be called together with Ararat and Minnai to wage war against Babylon (Jeremiah 51:27). 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.Medieval Jews associated the term with the geographical area centered on the Rhineland of Western Germany. That theory however has been challenged by certain modern scholars.They argue that the Rhineland hypothesis cannot explain why a name that denotes “Scythians” and was associated with the Near East became associated with German lands in the 11th to 13th centuries. In addition to tracing Ashkenazi Jews to the ancient Iranian lands of Ashkenaz and uncovering the villages whose names may derive from “Ashkenaz,” the partial Iranian origin of the Ashkenazi Jews, was further supported by their genetic similarity to Sephardic Mountain Jews and Iranian Jews as well as their similarity to Near Eastern populations and simulated “native” Turkish and Caucasus populations.