Discussion Main / AllJewsAreAshkenazi

Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: Distinguishing which examples qualify, started by Jordan on Oct 15th 2011 at 6:13:44 PM

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Does the Glee entry make sense? As I read it, it says that a Sephardic Jew knows about (and warns a couple about) Tay-Sachs. But plenty of people know about it who are not Ashkenazi, or even Jewish. If the Sephardic character isn't a possible parent, how is this in any way relevant to the trope? Am I missing something?

Deleted a section about the show Archer that suggested a black Jew would "most likely" be either a convert or an Ethiopian Jew. There are plenty of born black Ashkenazi Jews—Drake is a pretty famous example!

Removed a list of "aversions" on the examples list. From the Averted Trope page, "Even though There Is No Such Thing As Notability, averting is generally not an example for mentioning on a trope page, except for tropes that are so common that the list of aversions is actually shorter." The mere presence of a Jewish character who is or isn't Ashkenazi is not really worth mentioning, as stated in the trope description.

Here is a list of removed examples.

• Avoided in an issue of the Marvel G.I. Joe Special Missions comics. Some Sephardi Mossad agents are masquerading as South American bandits in order to capture a Nazi war criminal. Recondo sees right through their cover.
• Most characters in Ephraim Kishon's stories are Ashkenazim (as the author, who immigrated from Hungary), but there are exceptions, like the Yemenite Jew Sa'adya Shabatai.
• Inverted mightily in Eric Flint's alternate-history novel 1632 and the Ring of Fire shared universe: Rebecca Abrabanel, the main viewpoint character from the year 1632, is a Sephardic Jew. Unusually well-educated (for the era), she gives the readers a quick infodump on the cultural basis of Sephardim mannerisms during her first appearance in the book.
• Sofia in Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow is Sephardic.
• In Faye Kellerman's Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus mysteries, Peter's son-in-law (introduced in Street Dreams) is an Ethopian Jew.

Edited by 70.33.253.43 Hide / Show Replies

"This was not always so, however. In 1850, the considerable majority of Jews living in English-speaking countries were Sephardim, which can make works from this period with Jewish characters a bit confusing (even leaving aside the near-constant antisemitism). It was only in the late 19th and early 20th century that a great deal of Ashkenazi Jews immigrated to the United States to flee from persecution in eastern Europe."

Is there an article on the Internet anywhere chronicling these now forgotten Sephardim stereotypes? Since I have lately been reading allot of French 18th Century Novels I'd like to know the warning signs that I might be seeing an Ambiguously Saphardic character. Interestingly The Black Coats has a possibly Ambitiously Asheknazim character (J.B. Schwarz) even though it predates them becoming the Standard.

Is NCIS an Aversion? I don't recall any Yiddish or Ashkenazi based references with either Ziva, her Father or the other Mossad officers we've seen.

Now I see that that's cause their Badass Israeli, the most common aversion of this trope.

Edited by MithrandirOlorin

Another over-bullet-pointed and overgrown Real Life section culled. If someone can find a way of integrating some useful bits of information without causing a nattery Signal To Noise Trainwreck, then they're free to try.

• In decades past, this trope used to be more played straight among Ashkenazim in both Israel and the United States, where non-Ashkenazi Jewish culture and traditions (particularly those not groomed in the Western World) were seen as un-modern, if they were acknowledged to exist at all. This changed with a cultural renaissance in the 1980s.
  • In some cases, non-Ashkenazi immigrants to America would change their names to "more American" Ashkenazi ones—thus, it's perfectly possible to meet American Jews of, say, Iranian descent who have a last name like "Goldberg". By contrast, Ashkenazi Jews who immigrate to Israel often change their names to be more Hebraic (for example, the father of a prime minister of Israel was born with the name "Mileikowsky", but changed it to "Netanyahu").
    • American Jews get even more difficult to tell apart on this basis because many Ashkenazi Jews who migrated from Central and Eastern Europe had adopted Slavic (or Hungarian) surnames, which didn't go over too well in the early 20th century when Poles and Russians were amongst the most reviled immigrant groups. Thus, they ALSO often adopted more Germanic names such as those ending in -berg or -stein.
      • The ethnic divisions between American Jews are also starting to break down because of intermarriage - many communities consider it preferable to marry another Jewish person, even if they aren't from the same division as yourself, than to marry outside the faith.

Here's another original version of a real life section I trimmed back, in case anyone thinks I was out of line in doing so; or for future reference. Fringe theories, while interesting, are somewhat tangential to the topic and only likely to attract more discussion, which is not what we want on the main page.

• In decades past, this trope used to be more played straight among Ashkenazim in both Israel and the United States, where non-Ashkenazi Jewish culture and traditions (particularly those not groomed in the Western World) were seen as un-modern, if they were acknowledged to exist at all. This has been especially painful for non-Ashkenazim who arrived in Israel as refugees from Arab countries after 1948, as they found their culture dismissed as backwards and irrelevant until well into the 1980s when they experienced a cultural renaissance.
  • Additionally, the large number of Mizrahi with roots in Muslim Spain has resulted in "Sephardim" becoming a catchall for all non-Ashkenazim.
    • Amusingly, most bona-fide Sephardim, particularly those hailing from southeastern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean (so, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria) are often hard to visually distinguish from Ashkenazim. This even includes Sephardi Jews of Palestinian descent (they came to Palestine in the centuries following 1492), whom today are still mostly fair-skinned. "True" Sephardis spoke Ladino (Spanish-Hebrew hybrid) — and reputably avoided interbreeding with the natives of the countries where they lived, leading some scholars to believe that Iberian Jews had to also have been somewhat fair-skinned. This of course stands in contrast to the working assumption that the Israelites of pre-Christian times were darker-skinned, like today's Mizrahim. The contradiction has lead to the theory that many Iberian Jews interbred with Visigoths during the first 1500 years or so of their Diaspora - meaning that even a thousand years ago, most Jews in the world were white. For bonus points, it's then also likely that when medieval European authors wrote about Jews, they would've made the mistake of assuming that All Jews Are Sephardi.
• Inverted by the Khazar theory of Ashkenazi origin, a fringe theory that claims that most Ashkenazi Jews are actually descendants of Khazar Turkic-speaking converts to Judaism, not of the ancient Hebrews. The theory is often used to argue that the Ashkenazim are not "real Jews" and therefore cannot lay claim to the Holy Land.
  • There are counter-theories to this that suggest that the Khazars themselves might've been descendants of Persian/Babylonian Jews, who were all Mizrahi. If both these theories were true, that would mean that in fact most Jews are Mizrahi. Of course, both theories are nonsense, as studies cited in The Other Wiki link above showed that Khazar presence in the Jewish bloodline and vice versa was, if at all, quite minimal.

Corrected "Occupied Territories" at the bottom to "the Levant". Whether someone considers Tel-Aviv, Ashdod, and the Galilee occupied by Israel or sovereign territory of Israel is a political matter somewhat outside the jurisdiction of this wiki to decide. Besides, it would bring about a gigantic Internet Backlash (which I felt sorely tempted to start myself). Let's just use a strictly geographical designation and avoid the drama.

I have met the Kwisatz Hadouchebag. Hide / Show Replies

Wanted to finally clean up/clarify an example I'd previously added (and maybe I should add the time period the novel is set). I kind of assume, could be wrong, that non-Jewish Dutch people using Yiddish phrases is a more modern thing and wouldn't have been the case in the early 1800s (the time period the novel is set). Basically,the character is technically Sephardic but nothing in his portrayal really shows it.

Hodor