In part 2 of this series, we began tracing the Israelite heritage of Ashkenazi Jews by documenting how early Judean exiles came to live in Italy, and then following that community’s continuous presence through the 8th century. This section covers the migration of Italian Jews to the German Rhineland―where Ashkenazi Jewish identity and culture began to develop―and their painful medieval history through the 14th century.

Jewish settlement in Germany began under the auspices of the Holy Roman Empire. Despite its name, the Holy Roman Empire was primarily based in German territories, having begun when German ruler Charlemagne was crowned emperor in the year 800 by the Roman Catholic pope. In the 820s, Charlemagne’s successor issued multiple charters which guaranteed specific rights and legal protections for Jews―preventing their mistreatment by government and church officials, prohibiting heavy tolls on them, and permitting them to “live according to their [Jewish] law.”¹ German rulers enacted such policies in order to encourage Jewish settlement in the empire, because they viewed Jews as an economic asset. Due in no small part to Jews’ high literacy levels from religious learning, they “were better qualified for activities in trade and the monetary economy than their new Christian neighbors.”² This economic proficiency developed over the following centuries to include a specialty in offering loans. It was generally unprofitable for Christians to lend money, since they were often discouraged or forbidden from charging interest on loans to each other; as a result, Jews (who were permitted to charge interest) became the main group in the Holy Roman Empire who could operate successfully as moneylenders,³ further bolstering their financial role in the empire.

The first major Jewish settlement in Germany began with the arrival of the Kalonymus family sometime around 870–950. This scholarly rabbinic clan had lived in the southern Italian town of Lucca until Rabbi Moses ben Kalonymus, his sons, and other esteemed members of his community were brought northward by a Holy Roman Emperor.⁴ They settled in Mainz, a German town in the Rhineland, where “they multiplied and flourished very much” (according to the writings of Moses’ 4th-great grandson).⁵ The Kalonymus family was just one example of a larger “Italy-Rhineland route of Jewish immigration,”⁶ in which a stream of Jews (especially merchants with their families) moved from Italy to Germany⁷ to receive the new opportunities which the empire offered. As the Jewish population grew, and as more town charters invited the merchant presence of Jews⁸ to bring economic strength,⁹ the burgeoning Ashkenazi Jewish community (“Ashkenazi” in Hebrew meant “German”¹⁰) spread out and continued to form new German settlements throughout the 10th and 11th centuries.¹¹

This peaceful period of Jewish immigration to Germany was soon shattered, as the following centuries erupted with persecution. Whereas Jews received support from German rulers (and ambivalence from the institutional Church), the general Christian populace “tended to be strongly negative” toward Jewish immigrants, especially because they connected Jews with the crucifixion of Jesus.¹² These societal sentiments drove the masses to violence in 1096, with the Rhineland Massacres during the First Crusade. As Christian soldiers from western Europe journeyed to Jerusalem, they passed through the Jewish communities of Germany. Though the Crusaders’ holy war against “the enemies of God” was aimed at Muslims, they saw German Jews―whom they deemed to be “of all races the worst foes of God”―as more immediate targets.¹³ They proceeded to launch widespread attacks to terrorize, murder, and forcibly convert Jews throughout the region, with some Jews even committing suicide to escape conversion.¹⁴ In Mainz, Rabbi Kalonymus ben Meshullam led the Jewish community to take up arms in a failed defensive effort, ending in their deaths.¹⁵

Throughout the 12th and 13th centuries, European Jewish communities faced repeated incidents of persecution. The Second Crusade (1147–49) brought another wave of attacks against Jews, though they were more localized.¹⁶ A few decades later in 1171, the French town of Blois executed their small Ashkenazi community on the charge of ritually murdering a Christian child―though no child had died or even gone missing―marking the first of many instances across Europe where Jews were condemned to death for blood libel allegations.¹⁷ The most widespread massacre of this period broke out in 1298, when an estimated 10,000 Jews across 146 communities were killed by Christian mobs who accused Jews of religious crimes against Catholicism.¹⁸

These attacks reached a new height in the 14th century, during the Black Death pogroms of 1348–51. As the bubonic plague swept through Europe killing millions of people, the populace became desperate to find its source, and soon came to blame the Jews. Centuries’ worth of antisemitic tropes and rumors—painting Jews as malicious and bloodthirsty—made them an easy scapegoat to carry responsibility for the sickness. “Jews were accused of poisoning food, wells and streams, tortured into confessions, rounded up in city squares or their synagogues, and exterminated en masse.”¹⁹ Countless thousands of souls, estimated to have comprised over half of the European Jewish population,²⁰ were killed in persecutions recorded across 342 towns,²¹ making this “the largest murder of Jews before the Holocaust.”²²

Though their path was marred by pain and oppression, the history of Ashkenazi Jews remained unbroken―from the expulsion of Israelites from Judea, to their sojourn in Italy, to their establishment in the German Rhineland. The next part of this series will show how German persecution drove Ashkenazi Jews’ migration eastward to Poland, and how―after the bloody centuries that followed―they returned to the Land of Israel in the present day.

What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

1. These official charters, called formulae imperiales, were issued by Louis I the Pious as templates (formulas) for future legislation. Though their protections were offered to individual Jews by name, they served as precedent for protections of Jews in general throughout the empire. As an interesting note, these formulae use the terms “Hebreus” (Hebrew) and “Iudeus” (Jew) interchangeably.
   Formulae Imperiales, nos. 30, 31, and 52 (ed. Karl Zeumer, MGH Formulae, pp. 309–310, 325). dmgh.de.
   For English translation, see David Harrison Horton, “Anti-Jewish Polemics in Carolingian Gaul: The Campaigns of Agobard and Amulo Against the Jews of Lyons” (Master's thesis, Western Michigan University, 1995), Appendix B, 70–76. wmich.edu. ↩︎
2. Alfred Haverkamp, Jews in the Medieval German Kingdom, trans. Christoph Cluse (Trier: Arye Maimon Institute for Jewish History, 2015), 16. hbz-nrw.de. ↩︎
3. Robert Chazan, The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom, 1000–1500 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 58–59. archive.org. ↩︎
4. Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), vol. 11, s.v. “Kalonymus.” archive.org ↩︎
5. Ibid.
   The passage translated in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, written around 1220 by Eleazer of Worms (son of Judah, son of Kalonymus, son of Moses, son of Judah, son of Kalonymus, son of Moses from Lucca), is also accessible in a manuscript written in the original Hebrew.
   Eleazar ben Judah of Worms, Perush Tefillot (Commentary on the Prayers), Ms. hébr. 772 (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 15th century), p. 127, digitized by the National Library of Israel. nli.org.il. ↩︎
6. Robert Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 21. archive.org. ↩︎
7. Haverkamp, Jews in the Medieval German Kingdom, 15–16.
   Additionally, paleographic evidence supports that Jews from Southern Italy emigrated to the Rhineland at the beginning of the formation of Ashkenazi Jewish communities.
   Mauro Perani, “The Early Hebrew Script of Southern Italy Brought to Rhineland in the 9th c. and the Writing of the 11th–13th c. Epitaphs of Jewish Cemeteries,” in European Genizah: Newly Discovered Hebrew Binding Fragments in Context, ed. Andreas Lehnardt, European Genizah: Texts and Studies 5 (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 270–311. academia.edu. ↩︎
8. A 965 declaration from Holy Roman Emperor Otto the Great refers to “Jews [and] other merchants residing there” (“Iudei vel ceteri ibi manentes negotiatores”), indicating that Jews in general were essentially viewed as a type of merchant.
   Theodor Sickel, ed., Die Urkunden Konrad I., Heinrich I. und Otto I. (MGH Diplomata regum et imperatorum Germaniae 1; Hannover: Hahn, 1879–84), 415–416. dmgh.de. Translation provided by Google. ↩︎
9. An example of this attitude is the Bishop of Speyer’s land grant to Jews in 1084. He wrote that he had “brought in the Jews… [and] placed them outside the town” in order to “increase the honor I was bestowing on the place,” granting them “full power to change gold and silver, and to buy and sell what they please… that they may enjoy the same privileges as the Jews in any other city of Germany.”
   Rudiger Huozmann, Bishop of Speyer, “Grant of Lands & Privileges to the Jews, 1084,” Internet Medieval Sourcebook, ed. Paul Halsall. fordham.edu. ↩︎
10. During this time, Jews thought that Germany corresponded to the territory of the ancient kingdom of Ashkenaz, mentioned briefly in Jeremiah 51:27 (the inhabitants of which had descended from Japheth’s grandson by the same name, see Genesis 10:3 and 1 Chronicles 1:6). Thus, Jews began to refer to Germany in Hebrew as “Ashkenaz,” which in turn led to the Jews living in the region being described as “Ashkenazi.” This demonym remained with the descendants of these Jews as they migrated from Germany to other lands, such as France and England, and later Poland and Lithuania, and even America and Israel today. Ashkenazi Jews do not descend from Ashkenaz the grandson of Japheth, but rather lived in the region where Ashkenaz supposedly settled.
    Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., vol. 2, s.v. “Ashkenaz.” archive.org. ↩︎
11. According to Alexander Beider, “An uninterrupted presence of Jews in German territories is attested from the tenth century onwards. The earliest references correspond to the following places: Mainz (circa 950), Magdeburg (965), Merseburg (973), Worms, and Regensburg (both circa 980). During the second half of the 11th century, we also learn about the Jewish presence in Bonn, Cologne, Halle, Speyer, Trier, and Xanten.”
    “Yiddish in Eastern Europe,” in Languages in Jewish Communities, Past and Present, ed. Benjamin Hary and Sarah Bunin Benor (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2018), 281. academia.org. ↩︎
12. Robert Chazan, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 6, The Middle Ages: The Christian World, ed. Robert Chazan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 3–4. academia.edu. ↩︎
13. Guibert of Nogent (contemporary Christian source), Autobiography, trans. C. C. Swinton Bland (London: George Routledge, 1925), bk. 2, ch. 5. fordham.edu.
    Solomon bar Simson (contemporary Jewish source), in Shlomo Eidelberg, ed. and trans., The Jews and the Crusaders: The Hebrew Chronicles of the First and Second Crusades (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 25–26. archive.org. ↩︎
14. bar Simson, in Eidelberg, The Jews and the Crusaders, 23. ↩︎
15. Ibid., 30, 46. ↩︎
16. Chazan, The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom, 53, 182–183. archive.org.
    Ephraim of Bonn, “Sefer Zekhirah (Book of Remembrance),” in Eidelberg, The Jews and the Crusaders, 120-133. archive.org. ↩︎
17. Robert Chazan, “The Blois Incident of 1171: A Study in Jewish Intercommunal Organization,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 36 (1968): 13–31. academia.org. ↩︎
18. Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 50. archive.org.
    The religious crime which the mobs falsely accused Jews of perpetrating was host desecration: the abuse of the bread of Communion/the Eucharist, which, in Catholic theology, is the very body of Jesus. The medieval accusation was that Jews would maliciously obtain communion wafers in order to stab, burn, or otherwise torture them as a means of injuring Jesus Himself.
    Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., vol. 9, s.v. “Host, Desecration of.” archive.org. ↩︎
19. Samuel Cohn, The Black Death and the Burning of Jews, Past & Present 196 (2007): 4. academia.edu. ↩︎
20. This estimate does not include plague deaths, which would have further reduced the Jewish population.
    Haverkamp, Jews in the Medieval German Kingdom, 48. ↩︎
21. Richard Gottheil and Joseph Jacobs, “Black Death,” in The Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1906), accessed May 31, 2026, jewishencyclopedia.com. ↩︎
22. Cohn, “The Black Death and the Burning of Jews,” 4, note 2. ↩︎