Yosippon and the Kalonymides: the birth of Ashkenazi learning

While Babylonia answered the whole world, a second and less conspicuous centre was forming in southern Italy—under Byzantium but living its own life. About 950 an unknown author wrote there the Sefer Yosippon: a retelling of Josephus and the Latin chronicles in sound biblical Hebrew. For a thousand years this was for Jews the chief book on the history of the Second Temple—Josephus himself went unread, being counted a deserter, while Yosippon was copied, translated into Arabic and Ethiopic, and quoted as one's own.

In the same years the movement northward begins. The Kalonymus family of Lucca settles at Mainz—tradition puts the move in the days of Charlemagne, historians at the end of the tenth century—and brings the Italian inheritance with it: piyyut, the reckoning of the calendar, methods of interpretation. From this school will come Rabbeinu Gershom, Light of the Exile, and his pupils, under whom Rashi would study.

So Ashkenaz is laid down. From the start it has a face of its own: less philosophy than Spain, more attention to the text and to the custom of the community, and a particular severity in piety out of which, two centuries later, the Hasidei Ashkenaz would grow.