The Indo-European-ness of Ashkenazi Hanukkah, Rosh Hashanah, etc.

I'll get to Christmas and New Year's posting later. For now, to get a new post started, I'll begin with a narrower topic.

Earlier posts this year have reviewed the work of others, and uncovered tons of signs from my own investigations, pointing to Ashkenazi Jews being converts to Talmudic Judaism during the 2nd half of the 1st millennium AD, and coming from mixed Indo-European sources -- one East Slavic, the other East Anatolian / Armenian / Iranian -- that eventually genetically merged into a single-mode genepool, after forming a loose cultural coalition based around controlling trade routes in and around the Khazar Khaganate.

So for the Christmas season, I naturally wondered, "How much of Hanukkah came from Christmas, Nowruz, or even earlier Indo-European holidays of this time of the year?"

Before getting to the main topic of Christmas, my investigation led me to stumble upon another highly distinctive Indo-Euro tradition that Ashkenazi Jews practice, but for Rosh Hashanah -- New Year's. They bake a loaf of challah bread for the occasion, but this isn't any ordinary loaf for any ordinary occasion -- the new year is all about bringing good luck, improving over the bygone year. So for Rosh Hashanah, they bake a key -- yes, a literal metal key -- into the loaf. This is meant to be a magic charm that will bring good luck in the new year.

Recall an earlier post that surveyed this very same ritual from Ireland to Iran, including a good luck charm in the dessert for the New Year's holiday. In some of those cultures, it is tied to Christmas, like the "king cake" from Spain and France (and places influenced by them, like New Orleans in America). They bake a figurine into a cake, and whoever gets the piece with the good luck charm will have good luck in the new year!

Well, the Ashkenazi "shlissel challah" (after the Yiddish word for "key" and the Hebraized word for "loaf of bread") is not fully identical to the Indo-Euro tradition, since there's no practice of dividing up the loaf and whoever gets the portion with the metal key has good luck. Apparently, the good luck belongs to the baker of the loaf, regardless of who finds it when eating the loaf. Also, the food item is not specifically dessert.

And yet, it's impossible to ignore the striking similarities. The "baking a key into a loaf of bread" seems to go back several centuries, although perhaps not much further. I think there must be an earlier form that this ritual took, where it was a sweet baked good and not just a typical loaf of bread, and where the good luck only belonged to the individual lucky enough to get that portion of the dessert that contained the charm -- not the preparer of the food.

But somewhere along the way, this ritual was lost, and a diluted form remained in the newer shlissel challah tradition. Needless to say, Jews from the Saharo-Arabian sphere, such as Moroccan Jews, do not practice this tradition -- it's a distinctly Indo-Euro thing. And the fact that Ashkenazi shlissel challah is 90% identical to Irish Christmas pudding and Iranian samanu for Nowruz, is a powerful testament to the Indo-European-ness, rather than Saharo-Arabian-ness, of their culture.

Moving on now to Hanukkah, two of the major features of contemporary Ashkenazi Hanukkah -- gelt and the dreidel -- are fairly recent, going back maybe a few centuries in Europe, so it's hard to infer anything about Ashkenazi roots from them. Maybe they just picked it up from their European hosts, like they did with the dreidel (teetotum). Maybe they invented it themselves, but long after Ashkenazi ethnogenesis had taken mature form (like the gelt).

However, the most prominent symbol and practice -- lighting the menorah -- is more revealing, since it goes back further.

Here is a good review of the earliest Hanukkah menorahs, whether surviving examples of them, visual depictions of them in old sources, or written accounts.

The earliest accounts of them date to circa 1000 AD in Europe, followed centuries later by illustrated depictions and surviving examples. They do not trace back to Classical times, or Bronze Age times, or anything related to Second Temple Judaism and its account of the past. They're absent for most of the Dark Ages, for that matter.

That is just after the collapse of the Khazar Khaganate, though, when the Jewish converts who controlled the trade routes would have had to migrate further westward into Europe to earn a new living. 14th-century Jewish cemeteries, like the one in Erfurt, Germany, show that they had developed a culture of their own, having their own section of a cemetery, although their genepool was still bi-modal at that point.

But sometime between the fall of the Khazar Khaganate and these 14th-C. cemeteries in Germany, Ashkenazi ethnogenesis had taken off.

The lack of menorahs during most of the Dark Ages shows that, yet again, there is no evidence showing a cultural continuity from Second Temple-period Judaeans and the Ashkenazi Jews. Most notably, the Ashkenazis have never been documented as speaking a Semitic language (until some of them began LARP-ing as neo-Judaeans, moving to Palestine and reviving Hebrew), or any other member from the Saharo-Arabian family broadly. Only Indo-European ones, like Yiddish.

Moreover, the menorahs from the earliest depictions do not resemble the Temple menorah from the Classical period, which had 7 branches, with 1 in the center, and 3 pairs of symmetrical branches leading out from the center. This verbal description and visual depiction is widely attested in Classical times themselves, e.g. in the Arch of Titus from roughly 80 AD that shows the Roman removal of the Temple menorah after destroying the Temple 10 years earlier.

Re-shaping the Hanukkah menorah to take this form, but with 4 pairs of branches plus a central branch, is pretty recent, perhaps from the 19th C or so, and maybe connected to or pre-figuring the Romantic nationalist movement of Zionism.

At any rate, the early Hanukkah menorahs don't resemble the Temple menorah whatsoever. They don't have a single branch and pairs of symmetrical branches. And the structure is not a pedestal or base, with the light-bearing elements being held aloft by the branching section. Rather, the light-bearing elements were all resting flat on a single horizontal surface, like a shelf or fireplace mantle, with no branching or supporting elements underneath the shelf.

More tellingly, the earliest depictions show candles as the light-bearing element -- a practice that continues to this day, even after the change in the shape of the main supporting structure, from a shelf to a Temple-esque design.

The original Temple menorah did not use candles at all -- the end of each branch held a cup for oil, in which a wick was dipped. Even further back, in the narrative that motivates the holiday of Hanukkah, there is a miracle of oil -- which continued to burn for 8 days and nights, when supposedly there was only enough oil to burn for one. It's not a miracle of a candle that continued to burn longer than it should have -- there's no mention of candles, only oil lamps.

Throughout the Medieval period in the Saharo-Arabian sphere, including our Western contempo depiction of it, oil lamps were the defining way of portable artificial lighting.

In fact, to this day, Moroccan Jews -- who *do* come from the Saharo-Arabian sphere, and *are* documented as speaking a Semitic language historically -- use an oil lamp form of a menorah for Hanukkah, unlike the candle-based form that the Ashkenazis use.

Did anyone in the Middle East adopt candles as much as the Europeans did? Yes -- the Persians! And the Indian groups further to their east. Candles are not so ancient, but they're ancient enough -- going back to the Romans. And yet, their spread seems to have been confined to the Indo-European sphere, with Greeks and Persians and Indians adopting them, but not so much the Arabians or North Africans.

See the article on candles from the Encyclopedia Iranica for the full history of candles in Iranian culture, but the fact that it has its own entry testifies to how central they are to Iranian culture.

And -- wait, what's this? -- Iranians light candles to place on the main table during Nowruz, along with the Half-Seen items. And like the early Ashkenazi menorahs, they are not held on a branching symmetrical candelabra, just on top of the table top. Nowruz and Christmas overlap a lot due to them being "end of the year" holidays, although over the centuries, Iranian New Year's has stayed in the arrival of springtime (when the Proto-Indo-European New Year's holiday was likely held), while the Indo-Euros who adopted Christianity moved it back toward the new central holiday of Christmas, nearly at the end of their calendar year.

Candles have been central to European Christmas traditions for centuries, including placing them on the Christmas tree in the Modern era, until there were electric lights. Or the Lutheran practice of Advent candles, which are similar to the Hanukkah menorah in keeping track of the time during the late December holiday. Candlemas, in early February, is the end of Christmas / Epiphany season, transitioning into the New Year.

Candles on a Hanukkah menorah places the Ashkenazi holiday within the Indo-Euro, rather than Saharo-Arabian, traditions. But maybe it's just the Ashkenazi adopting or assimilating to practices of their Euro hosts? How do we know it goes back further and may originate outside of Europe?

Back to those Nowruz candles! Some practitioners of Nowruz include one candle for every child in the household, making the number of candles variable -- a multiple of the number of children in the home.

Wouldn't you know it? -- the Ashkenazis also tend to increase the number of candles, as a multiple of the number of children in the home! They give everyone their own individual menorah, each of which has 9 candles.

So it's not exactly the same as Nowruz, where each child only gets one candle. But the Ashkenazi child getting 9 candles is due to the invariable nature of 9 in the Hanukkah holiday -- it celebrates the 8 nights of the miracle of the oil, plus the 1 candle to help light the others. Each child must get 9 candles, not just 1, otherwise it wouldn't commemorate the 8 nights.

However, the number of candles does increase as a multiple of the number of children in the home, for both Nowruz and Ashkenazi Hanukkah. I don't know of a similar "certain number of candles per child at home" tradition in other Indo-Euro cultures during Christmas or New Year's. If it exists, it must be fairly marginal, whereas the practice is widespread enough to this day for Nowruz that it's mentioned in reviews of the holiday rituals.

And the good ol' Moroccan Jews seal up the other side of the argument -- they don't have one menorah per child, or anything that varies with the number of children at home. They only use one menorah for the entire household, no matter how many people live there.

So, Ashkenazi Hanukkah rituals more closely resemble Iranian Nowruz than Moroccan Jewish Hanukkah, aside from the indisposable elements like commemorating the number 8, artificial light-bearing things, etc.

Those Late Medieval depictions of menorahs in Europe only show them lighting 8 candles in a place that is probably a synagogue. And in that context, there's no family living there -- so they can't, in principle, vary the number of menorahs with the number of residents. Perhaps as Hanukkah became a popular holiday within the domestic setting, it met an older ritual that involved "increasing the number of lights according to the number of children". And that older ritual came from the Iranian sphere.

This is yet another sign that the source populations for that coalition that would eventually become the Ashkenazi Jews definitely included one in or around Iran.

But more than that -- I think most of their religious and sacred traditions were carried over from that Iranian source, and not from the East Slavic source that also held sway in their coalition.

I've mentioned the divide between Germanic-surnamed Ashkenazis, who seem to have a higher proportion of genetic and/or cultural background in the Iranian source, vs. the Slavic-surnamed Ashkenazis, who have less of it and more of the Slavic source.

The Iranian source seems to have been more cultured, elite, prestigious, sophisticated, with a long history of being administrators, bureaucrats, scientists, artists... and perhaps also priests. Not merely "religious officials," but priests as an elevated specialist elite stratum in society, propped up by the material surplus of a large sedentary agrarian economy.

East Slavs in the Dark Ages simply did not have that kind of economy, nor did the West Slavs for that matter. Only the South Slavs did -- namely, the Bulgarian Empire, who sponsored and spread the Cyrllic Alphabet among the previously illiterate Slavs, adopted and codified Christianity for the Slavs (including the use of Old Bulgarian, AKA "Old Church Slavonic," as the liturgical language, even for other Orthodox Slavs to this day), founded the Orthodox Slav style of churches through their proximity to the Byzantine Empire, and so on and so forth.

East Slavs were semi-nomadic, mainly peasants, no large or powerful central state ever in their history, illiterate, with a folk culture but not much of a high culture, etc. They represented the brusque, pushy, materialistic trader type. That type also exists in a civilized culture like Iran, but there's also the spiritual specialist type, who fill a permanent role of "priest".

So when it came time to come up with rituals for the new converts to Judaism, the Ashkenazis all looked at each other and decided, "Well, you Iranian types seem to know what you're doing with the whole priestly role -- why don't you handle that part of our culture-to-be? As long as we East Slavs don't find anything too fishy about it, we'll just take your civilized word for it."

This ties into the genetic data on Ashkenazi Jews, where there are certain genetic markers for the so-called "priestly bloodline" AKA the kohanim (such as those with the surname Cohen). They are supposedly descended from the temple priests of the Second Temple era, who, after the temple was destroyed in 70 AD, continued to play some kind of new priestly-ish role in society, just not the same was as tending to the now-destroyed temple. And they supposedly kept that role within their bloodline, only marrying into other priestly families.

Well, the "keeping our bloodlines priestly" I can buy -- but not them tracing back to the Second Temple Judaeans. We know from all the other evidence that they have no genetic or cultural connection to them, not even religiously -- the Ashkenazis are only documented as practicing Judaism from the Talmudic era, not Second Temple Judaism.

However, if the kohanim within the Ashkenazis were more likely to come from the Iranian rather than the Slavic sub-population of their founders, then they'll at least pass as "Middle Eastern", which is always a weasel-word in genetic studies. Middle Eastern meaning an Indo-European-speaking "fire worshiper"? -- or a Semitic-speaking monotheist? Very different cultures!

And who knows? Maybe there was one actual Judaean priest who wandered into Persia in order to help train the new converts, and he left some of his kohanim bloodline there, where it got preserved through priestly caste endogamy. I highly doubt that, but even if true, it only says there was that one ancestor who was Judaean, vs. 99% of Ashkenazi "Middle Eastern" ancestors being Iranian / Armenian / East Anatolian.

That suggests that, like Iranian bureaucrats, Iranian priests are mainly based on their role in society, not on the specific institution it serves. They were priests under Zoroastrianism, then mullahs under Islam, and some of them as kohanim within the Iranian-derived portion of the Ashkenazi Jews.

That makes me wonder about when Christianity used to be a big deal in Persia and further east ("Nestorians"). That was during the Dark Ages, when Zoroastrianism, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism were all vying with each other for influence. There were certainly Iranian Christian priests in those days.

Maybe there's a common priestly genetic sub-population that they all came from, no matter which religion they performed the priestly role within. At that narrower level, I'm sure there are genetic differences -- Zoroastrian priests wouldn't have married into Christian priest families (knowingly), or with Muslim clerics (knowingly), and so on.

Maybe take the Parsis in India as a convenient example of Zoroastrian priests, although DNA from actual Late Classical / Medieval Zoroastrian priests would be ideal. Muslim clerics in Iran are still around, with some families or bloodlines being well known already, I'm sure. And then use Ashkenazi kohanim as the other comparison.

I'll bet, at a certain level, they all came from the same priestly genepool in Iran! Just like Iranian bureaucrats who were famously adept at serving one empire, or another, or another still. It's the specialized role, not the master, that they preserved. Iran is not an anarchic, tribal, nomadic culture of honor like it used to be way back in the Bronze Age, or like many of its neighbors have been (Turkic, Mongol, Arabian). It's one of the most thoroughly and thorough-going civilized cultures on Earth, for better or worse.

Where else would new converts to Judaism recruit their priests from, if Iranians were an option? For the Ashkenazis, it was -- and they did.