Ashkenaz

Ashkenaz ( he, ''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, 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.Russell E. Gmirkin
''Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch''
T & T Clark, Edinburgh, 2006 pp.148, 149 n.57.

Hebrew Bible

In the genealogies of the Hebrew Bible, Ashkenaz (Hebrew: , ''’Aškănaz''; el, Ἀσχανάζ, translit=Askhanáz) was a descendant of Noah. He was the first son of Gomer and brother of Riphath and Togarmah (, ), with Gomer being the grandson of Noah through Japheth.

According to , 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 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."

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,Kraus. S, 1932, Hashemot 'ashkenaz usefarad, Tarbiz 3:423-435 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., Chapter 3, footnote 9.

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'',Paul Kriwaczek
''Yiddish Civilisation''
Hachette 2011 p. 173 n. 9. in conformity with the custom of designating areas of Jewish settlement with biblical names, Spain being identified as ''Sefarad'' (), France as ''Tsarefat'' (), 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