lations of the medieval Jewish diaspora are thus seen to derive both from the religious center in Land of Israel/Palestine and from the one in Babylonia. Against this mainstream view, a persistent maverick strain, often polemical, postulates non-Jewish origins for both Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews, claiming that these communi- ties consist mostly or entirely of converts from other faiths or ethnicities, most outlandishly the long-lost Turkish Khazars (for Spain, see Wexler 1996; for the Khazar theory, Sand 2009; for evenhanded accounts on the latter, see Golden et al. 2007). There is little probability and no evidence at all to support such notions. On the contrary, recent genetic studies have signiicantly strengthened the traditional view of a Jewish diaspora derived from an ancestral homeland. Some studies found the paternal gene pools of Jews in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East to have descended from a common Middle Eastern ancestral population (Hammer et al. 2000; Behar et al. 2010). Another observed an extremely close afinity of Diaspora Jews and non-Jewish Middle Eastern popula- tions (Skorecki et al. 1997). Yet another study asserts for Ashkenazic Jewry a signiicant female-founder ancestry deriving again from the Middle East (Behar et al. 2006). As for the inexhaustible red herring of a “Khazar” origin of Ashkenazic Jewry, the studies of Behar and colleagues (2004) and Atsmon and colleagues (2010) have refuted large-scale genetic contri- butions from Central and Eastern European and Slavic populations. Even so, Judaism was (and remains) a largely cultural category open to pop- ulation drift between majority society and minor- ity, by proselytism, conversion, and assimilation. This essay will attempt to outline the more signiicant migration movements and the motivations behind them, the pull of mainly economic opportunity and the push of anti- Jewish sentiments and policies. The former should be located in the processes of growth undergone by the European economies, which Jewish migration, medieval era Michael Toch Introduction In the Middle Ages (500–1500 ce) as in Antiquity and in the modern age, the history of the Jewish people was to a large degree shaped by migration (see DellaPergola 1997, for an overview). Each period knew different patterns of migration and each related to this existential condition in contrasting ways, be it as diaspora, the Greek word usually used for voluntary dispersion, or as Galut (“exile” in Hebrew) for forced scattering. The period covered here saw the foundation by migration of the three major divisions that make up the Jewish people today: Ashkenazim of Central and Eastern European extraction; Sephardim of Spanish/Portuguese origin and later resi- dents of the Ottoman empire from the Balkans to North Africa; and an Oriental Jewry encompassing both Middle Eastern and North African communities. There are also groupings whose arrival predates the Middle Ages: parts of Italian Jewry, the Yemenites, the Jews of the Caucasus area; and numerically and culturally dominant into the Middle Ages, the Jewish populations throughout the Middle East, most notably in Israel/Palestine, Babylo- nia (Iraq), and Egypt. The Jews living in all these regions deined themselves religiously, culturally, and linguisti- cally as parts of the broader entity of a Jewish people historically anchored in the Middle East. Indeed, most of them can be followed back to the mid-Eastern Jewish populations of Antiquity, although nowhere by direct evidence for actual migration but rather by tenuous traces of ritual and literary tradi- tions that must have been carried abroad by migrants and were often reworked into myth (see Fishbane 1993). The culture and popu- The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, Edited by Immanuel Ness. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781444351071.wbeghm328