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. He discusses the long and often fraught period of intellectual, cultural, economic, and political exchange with the Christian majority, and chronicles such Jewish movements as kabbalah (Jewish mysticism), messianism (Sabbateanism), and (in the modern period) Jewish socialism (“Bundism”) and Zionism.

The scope of Ashkenazi is vast, beginning with a portrait of Jews in the late Roman Empire and then mapping the first central European Jewish settlements in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the expulsions of the late fifteenth century, the subsequent migration to Russia, Lithuania, and Poland, followed by remigration westward in the nineteenth century after the start of Russian pogroms. Finally, Schäfer considers the impact of the Holocaust, and the founding of the state of Israel—which was spearheaded by Zionist leaders of largely Ashkenazi origins.