Ashkenazi: A History from Antiquity to Modern Times

From a prize-winning historian, the first comprehensive narrative history of Ashkenazi Jews: their culture, their religion, their daily lives, and their many migrations Covering two millennia of history, from late antiquity to the twentieth century, this landmark volume by an eminent historian traces the long trajectory of Ashkenazi Jews, that branch of the Jewish people who migrated from the Levant into central and then eastern Europe. Because religion, in the form of rabbinic Judaism, played so central a role in the lives of almost all Jews before modernity, author Peter Schäfer examines the ways in which the institutions and practices of the rabbis were transplanted, and transformed, during these periods of migration. Schäfer describes the establishment and flourishing of centers of rabbinic learning and innovation in the new European homelands—places including Cologne, Frankfurt, Worms, and Troyes, the French home of the legendary medieval Talmudic sage Rashi.