Ashkenazi traces 1,100 years of Ashkenazi Jewish history — from the ninth-century Rhine Valley communities of Mainz, Worms, and Speyer to the founding of Israel in 1948. Across 12 episodes: the Crusades, the golden age of Yiddish Poland, the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi, the birth of Hasidism, Moses Mendelssohn, Theodor Herzl and Zionism, the Balfour Declaration, the Holocaust, and 1948.
A deep dive into Jewish history, Yiddish culture, antisemitism, and the origins of modern Israel.
1948 — From the Ashes of the Holocaust to the Birth of Israel (1945–1948) | Ep. 12
The final chapter: Holocaust survivors in the Displaced Persons camps, the 1946 Kielce pogrom in Poland, the Brichah escape network, the British interception of the refugee ship Exodus, and the 1947 UN Partition Plan.
On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion declares the independence of the State of Israel — followed immediately by the War of Independence and the Palestinian Nakba. We close the series with the Nuremberg Trials, the long postwar silence of survivors, and the 1961 Eichmann trial that finally broke it.
Eleven hundred years of Ashkenazi Jewish history — this is where the series ends, and where a new chapter begins.
8 Aug 2026
The Holocaust — Ghettos, Einsatzgruppen, and the Final Solution (1939–1945) | Ep. 11
The full story of the Shoah: the Warsaw Ghetto and its 1943 uprising, the Einsatzgruppen mass shootings at Babi Yar, the Wannsee Conference, and the industrial extermination machinery of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec.
This episode also covers Jewish resistance — the Sobibor escape, partisan fighters, and Emanuel Ringelblum's secret Oyneg Shabbes archive — and what the Allies knew, and when.
Six million Jews. Two-thirds of European Jewry. An entire Yiddish-speaking civilization erased.
8 Aug 2026
The Rise of Nazi Germany — Nuremberg Laws to Kristallnacht (1933–1939) | Ep. 10
How did Nazi persecution of Jews escalate from boycotts to genocide in just six years? This episode traces the 1933 Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, the 1935 Nuremberg Laws that defined Jews by blood, the 1938 Évian Conference's failure to help refugees, and the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom.
We examine why so many German and Polish Jews believed persecution "would pass" — and how the world's refusal to open its doors sealed the fate of millions before World War Two even began.
8 Aug 2026
The Golden Age of Yiddish Culture — Between the World Wars (1918–1933) | Ep. 9
Between the trauma of the Russian Civil War pogroms and the rise of Nazism, Ashkenazi Jewish culture experiences an extraordinary flowering. This episode covers the founding of YIVO, Soviet Yiddish culture and the Birobidzhan experiment, Weimar Germany's Jewish intellectuals (Einstein, Freud, Kafka), and the birth of Jewish Hollywood in America.
We also trace the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the 1929 Hebron massacre — and Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in January 1933, the moment everything begins to change.
8 Aug 2026
The Balfour Declaration — World War I and the Russian Revolutions (1914–1921) | Ep. 8
World War One forced Ashkenazi Jews onto opposite sides of the trenches — while a chemist named Chaim Weizmann was quietly negotiating one of the most consequential documents of the twentieth century: the Balfour Declaration.
This episode covers Jewish soldiers in the German, French, and Russian armies, the Judenzählung controversy, the two Russian Revolutions of 1917, and the November 1917 Balfour Declaration promising a Jewish national home in Palestine.
8 Aug 2026
Theodor Herzl and the Birth of Zionism — Pogroms, Dreyfus, and the First Zionist Congress (1860–1917) | Ep. 7
How did a secular Viennese journalist become the father of modern Zionism? This episode covers the Russian pogroms of the 1880s and 1903 Kishinev massacre, the mass Jewish emigration to America, the Dreyfus Affair in France, and Theodor Herzl's founding of the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897.
We also explore the Bund's competing vision of Jewish socialism and Yiddish cultural autonomy — the great ideological debate that would define twentieth-century Jewish politics.
8 Aug 2026
Moses Mendelssohn and the Haskalah — The Jewish Enlightenment (1780–1880) | Ep. 6
Can you be fully Jewish and fully modern at the same time? This episode follows Moses Mendelssohn, the Berlin philosopher who beat Kant to a major Prussian Academy prize, and the Haskalah movement he inspired — Jewish emancipation, Reform Judaism, and the rise of Jewish participation in European intellectual life.
We trace the price of assimilation through Mendelssohn's own descendants — including composer Felix Mendelssohn — and the emergence of Jewish Orthodoxy as a reaction to religious reform.
8 Aug 2026
The Baal Shem Tov and the Birth of Hasidism — Joy as Resistance (1700–1795) | Ep. 5
After the trauma of 1648 and the failed messiah Sabbatai Zevi, a new spiritual movement emerges from the forests of Ukraine: Hasidism. This episode tells the story of the Baal Shem Tov, the doctrine of joy (simcha) over asceticism, and the rise of the Tzaddik as spiritual leader.
We also cover the fierce opposition led by the Vilna Gaon and the Mitnagdim, the historic 1772 herem (excommunication), and the lasting cultural split between Hasidic and Litvak Jewish communities that persists today.
8 Aug 2026
Sabbatai Zevi — The False Messiah Who Shook the Jewish World (1648–1720) | Ep. 4
One of the strangest episodes in Jewish history: the rise and fall of Sabbatai Zevi, the seventeenth-century mystic who convinced Jewish communities across Europe and the Middle East that the Messiah had arrived — until his forced conversion to Islam shattered the movement.
This episode covers the Sabbatean movement, the prophet Nathan of Gaza, the Dönmeh community, and historian Gershom Scholem's landmark reassessment of Jewish messianism and mysticism.
8 Aug 2026
Poland and the Yiddish World — Inside the Shtetl (1350–1648) | Ep. 3
Why did Poland become "a paradise for the Jews"? This episode explores the Statute of Kalisz, the rise of the shtetl as the center of Ashkenazi Jewish life, and the extraordinary self-governing Council of Four Lands. We trace the golden age of Yiddish civilization in Poland-Lithuania — its yeshivot, its scholars like the Rema and the Maharal of Prague — up to the catastrophic Khmelnytsky massacres of 1648.
8 Aug 2026
Blood and the Cross — The Crusades and the Massacres of 1096 | Ep. 2
In 1096, the First Crusade turned the Rhine Valley — cradle of Ashkenazi Jewish civilization — into a killing field. This episode covers the massacres of Mainz, Worms, and Speyer, the concept of Kiddush Hashem (martyrdom rather than forced conversion), and how medieval antisemitism reshaped Jewish life in Western Europe for centuries.
We also follow the golden age of Rashi's Talmudic scholarship, the Black Death pogroms of 1348–49, and the beginning of the great Ashkenazi migration eastward into Poland and Lithuania.
How did Ashkenazi Jewish civilization begin? This episode traces the origins of the Ashkenazi Jews to the ninth-century Rhine Valley, where Jewish merchant networks known as the Radhanites laid the foundation for the great communities of Mainz, Worms, and Speyer — together known as SHUM, the intellectual capital of medieval European Judaism.
We explore the origins debate (Rhineland vs. the Khazar theory popularized by Arthur Koestler), the birth of Yiddish, and the towering legacy of Rabbenu Gershom, "the Light of the Exile," whose reforms shaped Ashkenazi family law for a thousand years.
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