By 1523, a Karaite community, consisting of 10 families, is recorded as living in Hebron, It was from them that, in 1540, Rabbi Malkiel Ashkenazi bought a courtyard ( El Cortijo ) and the house of prayer which he converted to the Sephardi Abraham Avinu Synagogue.

By 1850, the Jewish population consisted of 60 Sephardi families and a 30-year old Ashkenazi community of 50 families.

French Canadians and the Cajun community of Louisiana have an occurrence similar to the Ashkenazi Jews.

Stamford Hill is at the centre of an Ashkenazi Orthodox Jewish and predominantly Hasidic community estimated by the local council and others to be some 20, 000 strong.

Due to cheap housing the East End of London and Stepney has been home to various immigrants who contributed to the culture and history of the area, such as the Huguenots in the 17th century, the Irish in the 18th century, Ashkenazi Jews fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe towards the end of the 19th century, and the Bangladeshi community settling in the East End from the 1960s.

Until the Ashkenazi community first began to develop in the Early Middle Ages, the centers of Jewish religious authority were in the Islamic world, at Baghdad and in Islamic Spain.

Isaac ( ben Solomon ) Luria Ashkenazi ( 1534 – July 25, 1572 ) ( Hebrew: י ִ צ ְ ח ָ ק בן שלמה לו ּ ר ְ י ָ א אשכנזי Yitzhak Ben Sh ' lomo Lurya Ashkenazi ), commonly known as " Ha ' ARI " ( meaning " The Lion "), " Ha ' ARI Hakadosh " holy ARI or " ARIZaL " ARI, Zikhrono Livrakha was a foremost rabbi and Jewish mystic in the community of Safed in the Galilee region of Ottoman Palestine.

For two centuries the Speyer Jewish community was among the most important of the Empire and, in spite of pogroms, persecution and expulsion, had considerable influence on Ashkenazi culture and the spiritual and cultural life of the town.

The Jewish community still faces acts of violence and obstacles in the return of property rights to a 19th century Ashkenazi synagogue stolen by the Soviets.

* The musar tradition was revived by the Jewish ethics education movement known as the Mussar Movement that developed in the 19th century Orthodox Jewish European ( Ashkenazi ) community.

Due to the geographical distribution and the geopolitical entities affected by the Enlightenment, this philosophical revolution essentially affected only the Ashkenazi community ; however, because of the predominance of the Ashkenazi community in Israeli politics and in Jewish leadership worldwide, the effects have been significant for all Jews.

Founded in 1760 as a joint committee of the Sephardi ( Spanish and Portuguese ) and Ashkenazi ( Central and Eastern European ) Jewish communities in London, it has since become a widely recognised forum for the views of the different sectors of the UK Jewish community.

While Rebbe Aharon Roth, founder of Shomer Emunim, praised this custom, no Ashkenazi community, including the most strict Haredi circles, have ever practiced such a custom.

The Jewish community in the United States is composed predominantly of Ashkenazi Jews whose ancestors emigrated from Central and Eastern Europe.

The Ashkenazi community generally supports the view that hair must be combed straight so that there are no knots, but some Black Jews take issue with this stance, particularly when it comes to dreadlocks.

Prof. Gershon Shaked ( Hebrew University ) maintains in his study Modern Fiction ( Indiana University, 2000 ; p 102-3 ) that Kalo's book The Heap marked ' two turning points in Hebrew Literary History ; the beginning of modernist fiction in Israel, and the advent of Sephardi and Ashkenazi authors who wrote about the immigrant Sephardic community.

** A member of the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jewish community, a branch of European Jewry, formed in Middle Ages ' Germany

As the majority left their property behind in their home countries as they journeyed to Israel, many suffered a severe decrease in their socio-economic status aggravated by their cultural and political differences with the dominant Ashkenazi community.

North American cities have rarely had chief rabbis, although some do have them: Montreal, in fact, has two — one for the Ashkenazi community, the other for the Sephardi.

In 1921 Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of the British Mandate for Palestine, recognized the Beta Israel community as Jews.

Ashkenazi Hebrew, originating in Central and Eastern Europe, is still widely used in Ashkenazi Jewish religious services and studies in Israel and abroad, particularly in the Haredi and other Orthodox communities.

Over a long time, Jews formed distinct ethnic groups in several different geographic areas — amongst others, the Ashkenazi Jews ( of central and Eastern Europe ), the Sephardi Jews ( of Spain, Portugal, and North Africa ), the Beta Israel of Ethiopia, and the Yemenite Jews from the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula.

The language originated in the Ashkenazi culture that developed from about the 10th century in the Rhineland and then spread to Central and Eastern Europe and eventually to other continents.

For a significant portion of its history, Yiddish was the primary spoken language of the Ashkenazi Jews and once spanned a broad dialect continuum from Western Yiddish to three major groups within Eastern Yiddish, namely Litvish, Poylish and Ukrainish.

Ashkenazi culture later spread into Eastern Europe.

To larger degree modern Ashkenazi Jews are the descendants of Jews who migrated into northern France and lower Germany around 800 – 1000 CE, and later migrated also into Eastern Europe.

In 2006, a study by Doron Behar and Karl Skorecki of the Technion and Ramban Medical Center in Haifa, Israel demonstrated that the vast majority of Ashkenazi Jews, both men and women, have Middle Eastern ancestry.

Dr. David Goldstein, a Duke University geneticist and director of the Duke Center for Human Genome Variation, has noted that the Technion and Ramban team confirmed that genetic drift played a major role in shaping Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA, therefore mtDNA studies fail to draw a statistically significant linkage between modern Jews and Middle Eastern populations, however, this differs from the patrilineal case, where Dr. Goldstein said there is no question of a Middle Eastern origin.

The ancestry of most American Jews goes back to Eastern European Ashkenazi Jewish communities, which migrated to US on the course of 19th and 20th centuries, as well as more recent influxes of Persian, Israeli and other Middle Eastern Jews.

One study on Ashkenazi Jews stated " Taken as a whole, our results, along with those from previous studies, support the model of a Middle Eastern origin of the AJ population followed by subsequent admixture with host Europeans or populations more similar to Europeans.

About 1 / 40 individuals of Eastern European ( Ashkenazi ) Jewish ancestry are carriers.

The disease is named after the British ophthalmologist Waren Tay, who in 1881 first described a symptomatic red spot on the retina of the eye, and after the American neurologist Bernard Sachs of Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, who described in 1887 the cellular changes of Tay – Sachs disease and noted an increased disease prevalence in the Eastern European Ashkenazi Jewish population.

Since the overwhelming majority of Ashkenazi Jews no longer live in Eastern Europe, the isolation that once favored a distinct religious tradition and culture has vanished.

have suggested that the rest of Ashkenazi mtDNA is originated from ~ 150 women, most of those likely of Middle Eastern origin.

The IBD segment sharing and the proximity of European Jews to each other and to southern European populations suggested similar origins for European Jewry and refuted large-scale genetic contributions of Central and Eastern European and Slavic populations to the formation of Ashkenazi Jewry.

With this reference point, the linkage disequilibrium in the Ashkenazi Jewish population was interpreted as " matches signs of interbreeding or ' admixture ' between Middle Eastern and European populations ".

Between 1880 and the start of World War I in 1914, about two million Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews immigrated from Eastern Europe, where repeated pogroms made life unpredictable.

The state of Jalisco has several cities with large numbers of Anusim, mainly Guadalajara, Ciudad Guzmán, and Puerto Vallarta, although a steady influx of Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe during the late 19th century and early to mid-20th century into Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Veracruz is also widely known.

It made its way into North American cuisine and English vernacular by way of Slavic and Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe.

The Ashkenazi expellees and their High German Yiddish language left a significant imprint on Eastern Central Europe, in towns like Lviv ( Lemberg ), Lublin, Minsk and Chernivtsi ( Czernowitz ), but also in the Bohemian capital Prague as well as in numerous shtetls.

After almost two millennia of existence of the Jewish diaspora without a national state, the Zionist movement was founded in the late 19th century by secular Jews, largely as a response by Ashkenazi Jews to rising antisemitism in Europe, exemplified by the Dreyfus affair in France and the Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire.

Later, Jews from Western and Central Europe also came to be called Ashkenazi because the main centers of Jewish learning were located in Germany.

This means that a person can be Ashkenazi but not considered a Jew by some of those within the Jewish communities, making the term " Ashkenazi " more applicable as broad ethnicity which evolved from the practice of Judaism in Europe.

The term " Misnagdim " gained a common usage among Jews living in Europe as the term that referred to Ashkenazi Jews who opposed the rise and spread of early Hasidic Judaism, particularly as embodied by Hasidism's founder, Rabbi Yisroel ( Israel ) ben Eliezer ( 1698 – 1760 ), who was known as the Baal Shem Tov or BESHT.

His disciples attracted many followers among Ashkenazi Jews, and established numerous Hasidic groups across Europe.

The particular forms which the denominations have taken on have been shaped by immigration of the Ashkenazi Jewish communities, once concentrated in eastern and central Europe, to western and mostly Anglophone countries ( in particular, in North America ).

Between 1881 and 1920, approximately 3 million Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe immigrated to America, many of them fleeing pogroms and the difficult economic conditions which were widespread in much of Eastern Europe during this time.

During the Middle Ages, Jews divided into distinct regional groups which today are generally addressed according to two primary geographical groupings: the Ashkenazi Jews of Northern and Eastern Europe and Sephardi Jews of Iberia, North Africa and the Middle East.

During the Middle Ages, Jews divided into distinct regional groups which today are generally addressed according to two primary geographical groupings: the Ashkenazi of Northern and Eastern Europe and Sephardic Jews of Iberia, North Africa and the Middle East.

Ethno-religious groups which have long resisted complete integration, for example, the Romani people and the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe, practice a higher level of endogamy.