History Main / AllJewsAreAshkenazi

[[folder:Film]]

* Averted in ''Animation/MK22'', though since it's an Israeli series, it's a given. Out of the show's four main Jewish characters, two (Shukrun and Chanuka) are Mizrahi, and two (Shulman and Levinstein) are Ashkenazi.

In historical works, this can sometimes be a case of TranslationConvention.[[note]]For example, the Jewish innkeeper in ''Series/IClaudius'' presumably spoke Latin with a recognizably Jewish accent of that era (based on his native Aramaic or Koine Greek); arguably, having the character speak with a cliche Yiddish accent was a simple way to depict this to a predominantly Anglo-American audience, in the same vein as giving the working-class Roman characters Cockney accents.[[/note]]

Compare ChristianityIsCatholic, AllMuslimsAreArab and LatinoIsBrown for other cases of diverse groups being reduced to a single ethnicity and/or culture.

* About 80% of Jews worldwide are Ashkenazi, most of whom live in the United States and Israel.

* Inverted in Israel, where about half of the Jews follow the Sephardic rites (with the majority of them technically being Mizrahim). Israeli Hebrew pronunciation (which is a Sephardi pronunciation with Ashkenazi influences[[note]]Historical Sephardis largely lived in Arabic-speaking societies and would not have merged Ayin with Aleph or Qoph with Kaf, and would have pronounced Resh as a coronal trill (like the "r" sounds in Arabic and Spanish) rather than a uvular one (like French and German); these shifts are prevalent in Israeli Hebrew, largely because they were prevalent among Ashkenazis.[[/note]]) is becoming standard outside of Orthodox circles, even among American Jews.

Compare AllMuslimsAreArab and LatinoIsBrown for other cases of diverse groups being reduced to a single ethnicity and/or culture.

* ''Film/EveryTimeWeSayGoodbye'' features an American RAF pilot played by Tom Hanks being stationed in Jerusalem, who meets and falls in love with a Sephardic girl and has to deal with her disapproving and large family. The film is notable for being partially in Ladino aka Judeo-Spanish, the language of Sephardic Jews.

* Creator/PearlSBuck wrote Peony, a novel about the history of the Kaifeng Jews, a nearly extinct division of Jews that lived in China before being largely assimilated into Han society.

This means that the Jew will be apparently of Central or Eastern European descent, will probably eat gefilte fish and bagels with lox, and [[YiddishAsASecondLanguage may frequently drop Yiddish words into their speech]] (Yiddish being a Germanic language traditionally spoken almost entirely in Central Europe, especially Poland). They will never observe the customs of Jews of other backgrounds, or, indeed, even acknowledge their existence in the first place. The family names of Jews will almost always have "berg(er)", "man", "stein", "eis(er)", "baum", "feld", "bach", "-witz/vitz/wicz" or "-sky/ski". These "Jewish names" are actually Germanic or Polish names adopted by Ashkenazi Jews. The trope is so pervasive that viewers from outside East-Central Europe tend to think ''only'' Jews have these names.

This means that the Jew will be apparently of Central or Eastern European descent, will probably eat gefilte fish and bagels with lox, and [[YiddishAsASecondLanguage may frequently drop Yiddish words into their speech]] (Yiddish being a Germanic language traditionally spoken almost entirely in Central Europe, especially Poland). They will never observe the customs of Jews of other backgrounds, or, indeed, even acknowledge their existence in the first place. The names of Jews will almost always have "berg(er)", "man", "stein", "eis(er)", "baum", "feld", "bach", "-witz/vitz/wicz" or "-sky/ski". These "Jewish names" are actually Germanic or Polish names adopted by Ashkenazi Jews. The trope is so pervasive that viewers from outside East-Central Europe tend to think ''only'' Jews have these names.