The origins of the Ashkenazi Jews are indigenous Israelite tribes of Canaan in the Middle East. It is also thought that the Ashkenazi Jews likely began settling along the Rhine in Germany.
A relatively small community of Jews, mostly men, came north of the Alps in late Roman times, settling as far west as Paris, but concentrated in the Rhineland. They apparently took converts as wives, and prospered, developing Yiddish language from Hebrew, old French, and lots of German. When the first Crusade was organized in northern France, one of the first things the Crusaders did was slaughter local Jewish communities, driving Jewish refugees east into Poland. The Polish kings of the era encouraged Jewish settlement because it would be good for the economy (it was), and Poland remained a refuge for Jews until the late 17th century. Russia ended up annexing large parts of Poland, gaining a huge Jewish population as a result. In Poland and Russia, Yiddish picked up lots of Slavic loan words. There's plenty of historical and archeological evidence for the history outlined above.
There is a competing theory, very popular in white nationalist and anti-Israeli circles, that Ashkenazic Jews are descended from the Khazars, a Turkic kingdom in western Asia. There is a tiny bit of historical evidence that at least the leadership of the Khazar kingdom converted to Judaism some time in the 8th century. There's ample evidence that Jewish merchants in that era had made their way along the silk road all the way to China, so central Asian kingdoms certainly had at least some contact with Jews. There's no reason to believe that Jewish refugees from Khazaria made up more than a tiny fraction of the Ashkenazi community of later years. The Khazaria hypothesis completely fails to explain why Yiddish is built on German grammar and how it came to incorporate a scattering of loan words from old French. The Khazaria hypothesis also fails to explain why there were so many Jews in the Rhineland at the time of the First Crusade.
The Ashkenazi Jews are most known for their origins from the original Israelites in Biblical citimes. Many of these people eventually migrated to Eastern Europe and Russia (i.e. Poland, Hungary, Lithuania).
Reform Judaism had its origins in the Ashkenazi community, but there are plenty of Ashkenazi Orthodox Jews and plenty of Reform Jews with Sephardic backgrounds. In Europe, you can find Liberal synagogues (analogous to the Reform movement in the United States) that are dominated by Sephardic Jews, predominantly in French speaking countries that welcomed many Algerian Jews after the collapse of French North Africa.
Yes, but Ashkenazi Jews are stricter than Sephardi Jews.
An Ashkenazi is an alternative term for an Ashkenazi Jew, a group of Jews of German and Eastern European origin.
Ashkenazi Jews
Ashkenazi Jews are Jews from Europe. Over the centuries, many European pagans and Christians converted to Judaism, and their descendants are referred to as Ashkenazi Jews. Of course, there had always been some Jews in Europe who were descendants from the original immigrants from Judea. Apart from those who fled to Spain to avoid persecution, their descendants are also called Ashkenazi Jews.
Ashkenazi Jews
of course
Yes, they are.
Ashkenazi Jews are an ethnic group comprised of Jews who went to Europe after the expulsion. Ashkenaz was the word for Germany in the Middle Ages, but it generally applies to Jews with a European ancestry.
Ashkenazi Jews live all over the world and speak the languages of their countries. The most common languages spoken by Ashkenazi Jews are:EnglishHebrewFrenchRussianSpanishYiddish**Yiddish was once the main daily language of Ashkenazi Jews, but today less than 1 million can speak it fluently, and most of these speakers are elderly. Fluent Yiddish speakers mainly live in Belarus, Israel, and Argentina.
Ashkenazi or Sephardic Jews