All Jews Are Ashkenazi

If there is a Jewish character featured in mainstream media, he or she will most likely be portrayed as Ashkenazi, even when that portrayal does not fit that character's background or the setting. Oy vey!

This means that the Jew will be apparently of Central or Eastern European descent, will probably eat gefilte fish and bagels with lox, and may frequently drop Yiddish words into their speech (Yiddish being a Germanic language traditionally spoken almost entirely in Central Europe, especially Poland). They will never observe the customs of Jews of other backgrounds, or, indeed, even acknowledge their existence in the first place. The family names of Jews will almost always have "berg(er)", "man", "stein", "eis(er)", "baum", "feld", "bach", "-witz/vitz/wicz" or "-sky/ski". These "Jewish names" are actually of Germanic or Slavic grammar adopted by Ashkenazi Jews. The trope is so pervasive that viewers from outside East-Central Europe tend to think only Jews have these names.

In Real Life, while 65-70 percent of the world's Jewish population are in fact Ashkenazim, there are many other Jewish ethnicities, formed from migrant populations from the Levant who mixed with other ethnocultural groups around the world. These include the Sephardim (Iberian), the Mizrahim (fully Levantine; there may, depending on who's counting, be more Mizrahim in Israel than Ashkenazim, but there are certainly more Sephardim and Mizrahim combined than Ashkenazim there), the Temanim (Yemenite), the Kaifeng Jews (Chinese), Bene Israelites (Indian), and the Habashim (Ethiopian). Indeed, there are Jews from almost every country and culture, all with their own distinct names and customs. And this is not counting converts, who can (and do) come from every cultural background imaginable.

The trope has its origins in America, particularly in New York and Los Angeles, where Jewish culture is not only more visible than elsewhere but dominated by Ashkenazi tradition; indeed, a whopping 90 percent of present-day American Jews are Ashkenazi.^note There are about as many Jews in the US as there are in Israel, so Israel's half-and-half division is balanced out by America's Ashkenazi homogenity to form the worldwide 65-70% share. This was not always the case, however. In 1850, a considerable majority of Jews living in English-speaking countries were Sephardic, which can make works from this period featuring Jewish characters a bit confusing (even leaving aside the near-constant antisemitism). It was not until the late 19th and early 20th centuries that a large number of Ashkenazi Jews immigrated to the United States (and to a lesser extent, Western Europe) to flee from persecution in the Russian Empire (mainly from areas comprising modern-day Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine). The trope is also commonly used to avoid leaving viewers wondering why a given character behaves like a Jew but looks like an Arab.

In historical works, this can sometimes be a case of Translation Convention.^note For example, the Jewish innkeeper in I, Claudius presumably spoke Latin with a recognizably Jewish accent of that era (based on his native Aramaic or Koine Greek); arguably, having the character speak with a cliche Yiddish accent was a simple way to depict this to a predominantly Anglo-American audience, in the same vein as giving the working-class Roman characters Cockney accents.

Compare Christianity is Catholic, All Muslims Are Arab, Latino Is Brown, and Interchangeable Asian Cultures for other cases of diverse groups being reduced to a single ethnicity and/or culture.

Note that this trope is not about the simple presence of Ashkenazi Jews in a work, but rather about the implicit or explicit assumption that all Jews share the same East-Central European cultural roots (e.g. by having Jewish characters speaking with Yiddish accents where their background and/or time period would make this improbable). Please do not add examples along the lines of "Character X is Ashkenazi" when it is nothing remarkable. Similarly, it's not worth listing an "aversion" if a work just happens to have a Jew who's Sephardi or Mizrahi.

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Examples:

Animation

• Averted in M.K. 22, though since it's an Israeli series, it's a given. Out of the show's four main Jewish characters, two (Shukrun and Chanuka) are Mizrahi, and two (Shulman and Levinstein) are Ashkenazi.

Comic Books

• Rule of Funny-based Asterix example in the album Asterix and the Black Gold - Ashkenazi Jews in Jerusalem in 50 B.C.
• By the same token, The Cartoon History of the Universe, where Jews are often seen saying "Oy" and other historical non-Ashkenazi Jews use Yiddishisms (e.g. Salome calling her nephew Archelaus a "schmuck" and a "schlemiel" in a presentation to Emperor Augustus) purely for the humor value.
  • Note that much of Larry Gonick's work - which covers topics ranging from statistics to human sexuality, all presented in comic book form - includes a certain amount of Borscht Belt humor, including Self-Deprecation (Gonick is of Ashkenazi descent himself), regardless of the topic at hand.
• The Rabbi's Cat:
  • The story takes place within the Sephardic community of Algiers in the 1920s, where Ashkenazi Jews are considered weird and foreign (such as having to wait five hours to drink milk after eating meat instead of three). The second volume introduces a singular Ashkenazi Jew, a Russian painter who smuggled himself into Africa in a crate full of prayer books (who is viewed as an oddball by pretty much everyone else). The second volume also involves a quest to track down a hidden city of Beta Israel/Ethiopian Jews.
  • The trope is played straight in-universe by the character of El Rebibo, a Sephardic Jewish entertainer in Paris who has to portray a stereotypical Arab because he can't manage the Polish accent needed to portray a stereotypical (to the Parisians) Jew.
• Lampshaded (and also subverted) in The Name of the Game by Will Eisner. In the opening narrative, Eisner goes into detail on the different waves of Jews coming to America. Thus, the Sephardic arrived first, making up a Jewish elite. Then, from 1830 and onwards, the Ashkenazi Jews started their immigration from the Germanies, followed by the eastern European Jews (also Ashkenazi).

  These new immigrants were a crude and noisy people. But they were intelligent, resourceful and innovative, an ideal trait for life in this big and open country that was often crude and noisy itself but where opportunity was so abundant. The hard-working newcomers thrived. They were Ashkenazis, just one rung below the Sephardics on the Jewish social ladder.

• Also by Eisner, the autobiographical To the Heart of the Storm, telling the story of Eisner`s childhood and family. Rose, his maternal aunt, stands out as the most stereotypical Ashkenazi, with phrases like this:

  Hah! A dentist with a college degree she wants yet!

Fan Works

• Nathaniel Kurtzberg in Marc Being In A Gang Rights devolves into speaking Yiddish when he is trying to complain about someone to their face without them knowing and even unknowingly when he is regaining consciousness, implying that it is his first language.

Films — Live-Action

• In You Don't Mess with the Zohan, Israeli culture is rife with Yiddishisms (e.g. "feygele") despite Yiddish (both language and culture) being largely foreign in Israel (except amongst Charedim). However the movie is a subversion in that while Yiddish as a Second Language is played pretty straight, the film's featured Jews are mostly actual real Israelis and thus not Ashkenazi by majority.
• Used extensively in Mel Brooks's History of the World Part I for comedy. Even the Spanish Sephardic Jews in the Inquisition song wear Hasidic outfits (also anachronistic) absurdly speak in Yiddish accents with smatterings of Yiddish such as "Oy gevalt!" But none of the film even pretends to try to be taken seriously. Mel Brooks plays Torquemada, ironically appropriate since many historians believe he was of Jewish descent.
• In Agora, Jews are mostly European looking, though some do have Mizhrahic and Sephardic features.
• Played puzzlingly straight in The Infidel where a British Muslim taxi driver figures out he is actually Jewish by birth. Rather than making him a member of the well-established Persian Jewish community (actor Omid Djalili is of Iranian descent and looks it), they gave him an inexplicably anglo-Ashkenazi birth name and background.
• Averted in Every Time We Say Goodbye, which features an American RAF pilot played by Tom Hanks being stationed in Jerusalem, who meets and falls in love with a Sephardic girl and has to deal with her disapproving and large family. The film is notable for being partially in Ladino aka Judeo-Spanish, the language of Sephardic Jews.
• Lévy and Goliath: All the Jews seen in the film are Ashkenazi, since it mainly takes place in such communities that originated in Eastern Europe and moved to Antwerp (nicknamed "The Northern Jerusalem") and Paris. Ironically, actors Richard Anconina and Michel Boujenah are Sephardic with roots in Northern Africa, not Ashkenazi.
• Pain & Gain: Kershaw is from Colombia but addresses his rabbi with the Yiddish salutation, "Gut yontiff!" Given his surname, it's possible that he has some Ashkenazi or European ancestry.
• Averted in Pearl S. Buck's Peony, a novel about the history of the Kaifeng Jews, a nearly extinct division of Jews that lived in China before being largely assimilated into Han society.
• French comedy series La Vérité si je mens! is set in the Parisian textile industry, which heavily involves the Jewish communities of the Sentier district, which are majority Sephardi, thus averting the trope. The main character is a Gentile who passes as Jewish through Coincidental Accidental Disguise and integrates said communities, and everyone assumes he's an Ashkenazi.
• Discussed in Uncut Gems: The black opal that drives most of the plot was mined by the Beta Israel in Ethiopia. The main character Howard Ratner is an observant Jew with an Ashkenazi name who says he had no idea there were black Jews living in Ethiopia until seeing a television show about it.

Literature

• Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle features a number of Sephardic and Mizrachi Jews, however in one scene Jewish galley slaves of Barbary pirates sing "Havah Nagilah." In addition to being a humorous anachronism, the song was written by an Ashkenazi Jew in Ottoman Palestine and set to an Ashkenazi melody, making it more a part of Ashkenazi culture.
• The prequel book to Kyril Bonfiglioli's "Charlie Mortdecai" series All the Tea in China partially averts this, but also kind of plays is straight for Rule of Funny reasons. Mortdecai is loosely based on the famous art dealer Joseph Duveen, and was given the same background, that of descent from upper middle class Sephardic Jews in the Netherlands. However, the ancestor character behaves like a (somewhat offensive) Askenazi Jewish stereotype, including his use of Yiddish as a Second Language.
• In Primo Levi's The Truce the author is an Italian Holocaust survivor who travels through Eastern Europe along with other Italian Jews to get back to Italy. They met some Jewish women from the Soviet Union who don't believe they're also Jewish because they can't speak Yiddish. Italian Jews are neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardic, although over the centuries there has been a sizable migration from both communities because Italy was relatively safer than anti-Semitic Eastern Europe and the ultra-Catholic Spain.
• Michael Chabon:
  • Played straight in the novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union. The community of Sitka is heavily based on Ashkenazi culture. This is justified by the fact that the city-state is populated mostly by descendants of Jews who fled the Nazis.
  • Also seen in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay in a New York City setting where it makes sense.
  • The whole point of Gentlemen of the Road, however, is to avert this trope. The two main characters are a Frankish and an Abyssinian Jew who travel to the Khazar khaganate, a Turkic nation that practiced Judaism.
• In Pelagia and the Red Rooster by Boris Akunin, the eccentric rabbi Emmanuel is implied to be the time-traveling real-world prototype of Jesus (i. e. a Jew from the first-century Galilee). However, he also has a lisp and mannerisms reminiscent of stereotypical depictions of Ashkenazi Jews.
• Played With in The Sparrow by Mary Russell. It is precisely because Sofia is a Sephard, and behaves like one, that Fr. Sandoz's quasi-Spanish gallantry and old-fashioned beard are off-putting to her; it's also why Sandoz doesn't recognize that she's Jewish at all.
• Averted (and lampshaded, by Lew Salmon) in the Village Tales series. Sir Ben Salmon RA, his nephew and eventual heir Lew, and Lew's wife Melanie, are, like many British Jews, descended of Ashkenazim (mostly Baltic traders) and Sephardim (mostly via Amsterdam): which is Truth in Television, as, for a long time, Jews in London and the Low Countries were so few that they had no choice but to marry across such minor divides.
• Very much averted in A Wolf in the Soul. Almost everyone in the story is at least partially Sephardi, other than the two major supporting characters who are black converts. The author is even careful to differentiate between Ashkenazi and Sephardi pronunciations when transliterating Hebrew.
• One of many anachronisms in Ariana Franklin's Mistress of the Art of Death. The Jews of 12th century Cambridge speak Yiddish.
• Averted to the point of almost being inverted in 1632 - while the one up-timer Jewish couple is presumably Ashkenazi, almost all named downtimer Jewish characters and particularly the Abrabanel clan are Sephardim as would be expected in mid 17th century Central and Western Europe. The inner monologue of Rebecca Abrabanel consequently features Spanish/Sefardi as a second language instead of the requisite Yiddish as a Second Language for Ashkenazi Jews. However, the narrative has not yet focused much on Eastern Europe where the vast majority of Ashkenazi Jews lived at that time.

Live-Action TV

• Rachel Berry of Glee fits this, because in order to figure out whether or not Puck was Quinn's baby daddy she told Quinn that her cousin was worried about her baby having Tay-Sachs, and tells Quinn that she only has to worry about the disease if the father of her baby is Jewish. This is despite the fact that Rachel Berry's actress, Lea Michele, is actually of Sephardic ancestry. (Ironically, Quinn's actress, Dianna Agron, is actually Ashkenazi.) Though it may be debatable, as she may have simply made it up to learn the truth about the paternity of Quinn's child.
• The supposedly-Israeli businessman Ari Frankel in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia not only has a Yiddish last name, but also speaks completely unaccented American English. While there are a few natural-born Israelis who can do this (usually American-educated or born to American parents), the obviously non-Israeli actor hardly portrayed a typical person from Israel.
• In Magic City, most of the main characters are Jews and all of the Jews are Ashkenazi.
• In an episode of Mad Men, one of the executives remarks that the Israelis don't look anything like New York Jews, who would largely be Ashkenazi. Don Draper later asks a New York Jew to tell him about Israel, and she admits that she doesn't know much about it, besides advising him not to cross an Israeli.
• In an episode of Raising Hope, when Burt goes to a deli with Jimmy to find out what it means to be Jewish, they all burst into song detailing stereotypes about Jews and their cultural features, all of which refer specifically to Eastern European Jewish Americans.
• Zigzagged on Will & Grace. Grace hires a new secretary from Iran who gets away with answering the phone in Farsi and acting extremely unprofessionally in general, to the point she shreds plans Grace worked on all night for an important client. She is overjoyed when she discovers that the secretary is Jewish and gleefully fires her. It looks like an aversion of this trope at first glance, but the employee said she was Jewish ‘like a brisket’, which is hardly a universal staple of Jewish cuisine.
• There's an episode of Law & Order where an Iranian character accuses the police of being involved in a Zionist conspiracy. In response, Anita gestures to Kevin and herself while sarcastically asking "Do we look like Zionists?" She's presumably trying to calm the man down by insinuating that she and Kevin can't be Jewish because they're black, even though there are many black Jews in certain parts of the world.
• Murder in the First: Averted with Raffi Veracruz, who appears to be Sephardic judging by her name (like the actress playing her, Emmanuelle Chriqui, who comes from a Sephardic family).
• I, Claudius: While Herod, a thoroughly Romanized and upperclass Jew, speaks and behaves much like any Roman using The Queen's Latin, the only other Jewish character in the series, Gershom the innkeeper, speaks with a Yiddish accent to convey that he's Jewish.

Theatre

• In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Rosencrantz tells a joke in which an early Christian who hasn't heard about St Paul's conversion questions why "Saul of Tarsus" is in Christian Heaven, and gets the reply "Tarsus, schmarsus, I'm Paul, already!" This is something of a double example: Not only wouldn't St Paul have spoken like that (which is the joke), but a 16th century Dane wouldn't have thought of joking that he did.

Video Games

• In L.A. Noire, the prime suspect in one of the cases is a Jewish jeweler. Though his swarthy complexion and decidedly un-ashkenazi name "Kalou" suggest that he is of Sephardic descent, he still peppers his speech with Yiddish.
• Averted in Crusader Kings II: While the autogenerated, randomly appearing Jews in Europe are mostly Ashkenazi, there is also a chance that they are Sephardim, especially if you have Iberian culture yourself. Also, the two big Jewish nations in the game are the Ethiopian kingdom of Semien (later Auxium) and the Jewish Khazar Khaganate, both of which follow their own culture and speak their own language (Ethiopian and Kazar respectively). Any character with any culture can be converted to Judaism while keeping their original culture, resulting in things like Jewish Sweden or Jewish Afghanistan. All in all, the game does a pretty good job at portraying Jewish culture during this time period.
• Crusader Kings III does this by accident or by the limitations of the game engine. After 1000 AD, all Rabbinical Jewish faiths switch from Polygamous to Monogamous. However, this was strictly an Ashkenazi ruling, and didn't apply to Sephardic Jews. (It also wouldn't have applied to the Khazars, if they still had a country then.)

Web Original

• This Buzzfeed vid shows non-Jews eating ‘Jewish food’ for the first time, all of which is very, very Ashkenazi.^note The Other Wiki has an article about Jewish cuisine in general, in case you’re interested. And when Israelis (Whose ideas of Jewish food are much, much more influenced by Mizrahi cuisine) found out about it...
  Random Israeli Youtuber: "No wonder [the people in the video think the food]'s ugly, it's only Ashkenazi food. Had you gave them kibbeh and khrayme, they would have fucked the plate."
• The "Hot Israeli Girls" Tumblr consists of a disproportionate amount of Ashkenazi women.
• In this blog, the American author blames the expulsion of (Sephardic) Jews from Spain for the fact that she can't find any bagels - A Polish Ashkenazi dish created more than a century after.

Web Videos

• In the ContraPoints episode “Debating the Alt-Right,” Saul gets this treatment. Fritz even sings "Hava Nagila" at him while he looks on incredulously.

Western Animation

• Played with in Elena of Avalor (which takes place in a world connected to the Earth via "the second star to the right"), where the Galonians are Latino Jewish and observe both Ashkenazi and Sephardic traditions.
• In Family Guy, Peter Griffin's retelling of the Exodus story via his ancestor "Moses Griffin" portrays the Biblical Israelites (i.e. a generation of ancient Hebrews born and raised in Egypt) as stereotypical Ashkenazi Jews.

Real Life

• There's some Truth in Television here, since the majority of Jews worldwide are Ashkenazi, though the estimates vary from as low as 65% to as high as 85%. Most live in the United States and Israel (but see below).
• This trope was inverted in Western Europe prior to the 18th century or so, where most Jews were Sephardi. Still partly the case in France.
• Inverted in Israel, where the majority of Jews are Mizrahi (estimated around 60%), and about half of Israeli Jews follow Sephardic rites. Israeli Hebrew pronunciation (which is a Sephardi pronunciation with Ashkenazi influences^note Historical Sephardis largely lived in Arabic-speaking societies and would not have merged Ayin with Aleph or Qoph with Kaf, and would have pronounced Resh as a coronal trill (like the "r" sounds in Arabic and Spanish) rather than a uvular one (like French and German); these shifts are prevalent in Israeli Hebrew, largely because they were prevalent among Ashkenazis.) is becoming standard outside of Orthodox circles, even among American Jews.
• Ironically, Jews with the last name Ashkenazi are usually not Ashkenazi (actor Lior Ashkenazi is Sephardi with his parents originating from Turkey, for instance). Though the name probably originated from someone in their distant family history who was Ashkenazi, generations later, they're more likely to have predominantly Sephardi ancestry from southern Europe or the Ottoman Empire.
• It's often assumed that there's some sort of religious restriction against Jews naming a child after a living relative. That's actually just an Ashkenazi custom. Naming children after living relatives is quite common among Sephardim.
• Even among Ashkenazi Jews there are numerous differences in religious rite and practice. The Eastern Ashkenazi rite is the most common and familiar among traditional Ashkenazi Jews; many don't even know that there is a Western Ashkenazi rite, and it can be found only in one synagogue in the world, in New York City.
• Most of the early pioneers of American comics were immigrants of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. Most of them used pen names. Fathers of the Marvel Universe Jack Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg) and Stan Lee (born Stanley Lieber) both grew up in Depression-era New York in Jewish neighborhoods after their parents immigrated to the States around the time of World War I. Superman's Moses in the Bullrushes background was meant to be an allegory for creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's parents' escaping antisemitism in modern-day Lithuania and Ukraine. Batman's creators were both Ashkenazi Jewish as well. Bill Finger's father immigrated to the US from Austria in 1907 while his mother was an American-born Jew. His other creator, Bob Kane (born Robert Kahn), was similarly a first-generation American of Ashkenazi Jewish descent.

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