The Ashkenazic Jews seem to have been noticed in Western Russia and Poland, by about the year 800 AD. Is there any reason why they chose to live in such a cold and different climate than Judea? If we accept that the migration began after the destruction of the Temple, how long would it have taken for this migration to happen? Is there a good book that describes what is known about this? One would think that they would have preferred a more Mediterranean-type climate-Russia and Poland are cold.
A lot of Jewish migrations had to do with where Jews were relatively tolerated. Better to live in a very alien climate where you are tolerated or at least left alone, than to live in a familiar climate where you are persecuted. This is especially true if you make your living doing something other than farming, as many Jews have done.
The move wasn’t Israel to Moscow direct, it was in stages and took, as you note, several hundred years. Also, “Russia” is a pretty big place and includes areas with mediterranean climate - it’s not all Vladivostok.
The question can be generalized to, “why does anyone live there?” Climate is simply not the only driver of migration patterns.
Right.
You might ask, “Why do people live in northern Alaska? Why don’t they all move to Florida?” The answer, of course, includes the facts that housing in Florida is more expensive and that Alaska has a surplus of certain jobs (e.g. oil drillers) that aren’t really available in Florida to any significant extent.
Massacres of Jews in Germany served as pep rallies during the Crusades. Around this same time, Poland/Lithuania acquired huge areas of Ukraine, and needed an educated class of people to collect taxes and start businesses.
Jews were migrating to a remarkable number of places well before the destruction of the Temple. E.g., they were in Georgia (ex-SSR) by the 6th century BC. Those groups would have no “climate” issues continuing the northern journey into what is now southern Russia.
There was a large Jewish group in Yemen, still some in India (dating to between the destruction of the first and second Temples), a small group in China over a thousand years ago, etc.
The rulers of the Khazars (in now southern Russia) famously converted to Judaism in the 8th century. Although whether this had any long term impact is very much debatable.
They didn’t usually “one-hop” from the Levant to far off places. Even you spread out a few hundred miles once a generation of two, you can get places.
I have also wondered about the relatively large numbers of Jews who came to inhabit eastern European territory now belonging to Poland and Russia.
When you say “by about 800 AD” it would indicate that the migration was complete by then. That is a chronological milepost I have never heard; I always assumed the Jewish migration east lasted much longer, possibly well into the mid Middle Ages.
I do know that as of 800 AD the lands north and due east of the Elbe river were not yet christianized. Both the Germanic Vikings (founders of “Rus”- the first Russian state) and the Slavic Poles remained pagan well into the 10th century. Also, the Slavic ethnic group, which eventually inherited most of eastern Europe, only came into existence in about the 5th century, so Jewish eastern migration east might be viewed as coinciding with pagan Viking and Slavic movement in the same direction.
Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that the pagan Vikings and Slavs did not view the Dark Age and Early Middle Age Jews with the same hostility that Christians did.
Kind of piggy-backing on this: To me it seems like Judaism or Judaism-like religions were a lot “bigger” in the middle-east and surroundings in the early middle ages than it gets press for. I.e. it may never have been an evangelical religion like Christianity, but would have a significant presence well beyond Judea. Is that an accurate assessment?
And given that, it wouldn’t be “let’s haul ass from Judea to Moscow for funsies!”, but “let’s move from wherever we are settled now” which may have had a more comparable climate.
From Wikipedia:
In short, Jews migrating north from Italy were joined by others who had been kicked out of Western Europe.
Right. This has most likely been the case for many groups over time. Consider that during the height of the Roman Empire, many ethnic Romans moved to what is now England. Some of them (or their descendants) stayed around and become assimilated into the Celtic and/or Anglo-Saxon cultures. Many generations later, some descendants packed up and boarded one of the ships headed for North America, perhaps settling in Massachusetts or Virginia. A few generations later, descendants are packing up to “Go West, young man!” and start a new life in Kansas or Minnesota or wherever. A few generations later, a descendant joins the US Navy and gets posted at Pearl Harbor. That, my friends, is why we have Romans in Polynesia.
And by 1917 you had my grandmother, with a Jewish Chicago gangster father and a Wisconsin Fox Indian mother.
in 1264, Bolesław the Pious, the Duke of Poland issued what was called the Statute of Kalisz, which extended rights to Jews. Jews could testify in court, it was illegal to kill or hit a Jew, it was illegal to vandalize or destroy a synagogue, Jews no longer had to pay special taxes just because they were Jews, it became illegal to deface Jewish cemeteries, Jewish courts had jurisdiction over Jews, etc.
At the same time that Boleslaw was issuing these laws, conditions for Jews in Germany were getting worse. Worked up by the Crusades and a push for more piety and public religion, a lot of German towns were putting new restrictions on Jews, and in a lot of places, Jews were facing mob harassment and lynching. So, a lot of Jewish refugees fled into Polish lands, which was part of the reason that places like Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine had such large Jewish populations.
The difference is that through all of these transitions, the Jews maintained their distinct cultural identity, whereas the Romans did not. It would be as if there were Romans in Polynesia still erecting temples to Jupiter and having gladiatorial games, instead of just being some dude who probably has some Roman ancestry if you think of it.
The resistance of the Jewish communities to assimilation is what causes people to imagine that they must have schlepped directly and quickly from Judea to Moscow. Most other ethnic groups would have lost their distinct identity in one or more of the intermediate stages.
Roman culture didn’t stay static for all that time. Neither did Jewish culture. Jews in Russia or Poland in the Middle Ages did not eat latkes or potato kugel. It’s possible that they were polygamists. They didn’t speak Yiddish, or at least not a form of it that would be comprehensible to a modern Yiddish speaker. They probably didn’t wear shtreimels, or other forms of Jewish dress (other than the tzitzit that are mandated by the Torah) that we would recognize today. The Romans did change religions over that time, which the Jews did not, but having the same religion isn’t the same thing as having the same culture. Having a different religion isn’t the same thing as having a different culture, either- there are people of several religions who identify culturally as Americans, for example.
Jews had a religion that told them not to assimilate, and were sometimes prevented from assimilating by Christian cultures.
The guy with Roman ancestry probably didn’t assimilate into Polynesian culture, either. He probably still spoke a European language influenced by Latin. He didn’t worship Polynesian gods- he most likely worshipped at a Christian church, like many other people of Roman ancestry do. He could get foods that were familiar to him and alien to pre-contact Polynesian cultures. Maybe he adopted a few elements of Polynesian culture- Jews in eastern Europe did the same thing with the local cultures. The difference is, there weren’t enough Jews in eastern Europe for Jewish culture to eclipse the local culture, the way there are enough people with European ancestry in Polynesia for European culture to eclipse Polynesian culture.
Based on the history of St. Paul and the apostles, there were well-established decent-sized communities of Jews all over the eastern Mediterranean and even in Rome, by 50AD. Presumably thanks to the empire, various ethnic groups engaged in trade managed to move all over the Roman empire; and if that was because of trade, presumably beyond the empire.
You could even make a “Ship of Theseus” argument about English-speaking Irish people. Is an ethnicity that has, over history, had its language replaced (Irish->English), religion replaced (Druidism->Catholicism), and it’s writing system replaced (Ogham->Roman alphabet) still the same ethnicity? At what point do you start telling people that they aren’t worthy enough to Riverdance?
The Jews weren’t the only group that had far flung migrations, but they are one of the few that maintained they’re cultural heritage. Avoiding assimilation is a component of this.
Another group that did likewise are the Romani people. Left North India maybe 6th or 7th century. Reached the Middle East at least a thousand years ago. Then into SE Europe in the 14th century if not much earlier. Once immigration to America became commonplace, they continued there.
Again, a lot of varied climates along the way, none of which mattered.
The homeland of the Turkic people was near Mongolia. And some of them reached Europe quite a while ago while still retaining their language to this day. (The Turks did this mainly by being the assimilators, rather than the assimilatees.)
Many, many other groups did something similar but lost their identity along the way.
For all of that, you don’t hear Hawaiians saying “Proximo anno Romae refectae”. The consistent self-identity, the awareness of exile, and the consistent longing for what they perceive as their historical homeland are pretty distinctive to Jews. At least, in the long term. Maybe the Palestinians have some of this in turn, but their exile hasn’t been millennia long yet.
Yes, Jewish identity was often self-preserving, but there were many historical Jews who were very assimilationist. Still, there was a core of consistent self-preserved identity. This is interesting. Maybe unique.
Jewish culture was both self-preserving (strongly non-assimilationist) and non-assimilating. Jews in every place in the diaspora did no proselytizing; preferred not to seek converts and new members; were not expansive or aggressive. I’m not sure you can say that about any other displaced culture, since many times the “displacement” was self-initiated: conquest/colonization.
Jews didn’t do proselytizing during most of the diaspora because for most of the diaspora, Jews lived in places where it was illegal. Jews living in Christian and Muslim countries, which was most of them, faced imprisonment and death for trying. But there was proselytizing in the early Roman Empire, in pre-Muslim Arabia, among the Khazars of Central Asia, and so on.