The Jewish presence in medieval Germany began in the 9th century, when Jews from Italy and France settled in the Rhine Valley and in the adjacent part of the Mosel Valley.

These first Ashkenazi Jews brought their own liturgical reading traditions with them and laid the foundations for a new Jewish spoken language—Yiddish. As time passed, some of these Jews, due to expulsions and voluntary emigration, moved from western to eastern Germany, to the valleys of the Saale and Elbe in the north and the Danube in the south. The cente…