AHC: Make Ashkenazi Jews be considered part of the Germanic Race

What needs to happen for the Ashkenazi Jews to be seen as a sort of "sub-race" of Germanic peoples (like Scandinavians/Nordic, Rhenish, Anglo-Saxons, etc) by the so-called "scientific racism" of XIX century Europe?

They have, after all, similar ethnic and linguistic backgrounds (Ashkenazi Jews have Near East linneages, yes, but also strong Central European ancestry, and speak Yiddish, which is a Germanic language despite being written in Hebrew script).
 
Scientific racism/anti-semitism came out of centuries of medieval christian based anti-judaism.

Have a less anti-semitic christianity take hold in Europe post the fall of Rome and that would have gone a long way.
 
A good first step would be not having part of the First Crusade get wildly diverted and rampage through Germany, killing and robbing Jews and anyone who tries to protect them (even local nobility and associated forces, or the church).
 
What you really want is to advance Jewish emancipation without advancing romantic nationalism. Jewish emancipation in Europe started with Napoleon, and in Germany was substantially achieved by the 1860s, which was too late. But note that by the 1920s, there was enough Jewish assimilation in Germany that Jews could believe the same racist things about the Poles that the Christian Germans believed; the right was still anti-Semitic, but there was already a liberalism that on the one hand still believed in nationalistic tropes but on the other hand was not anti-Semitic.

So the question is whether it's possible to advance Jewish emancipation. One argument that it's not is that it came out of the Enlightenment's propagation through Central Europe. Of note, British and Dutch Jews were already fairly well-assimilated and fully emancipated in the 18c, which does not mean there wasn't any anti-Semitism (the Dutch were enthusiastic collaborators in WW2), but does mean that it wasn't anything like what went on in France, Austria, Poland, Russia, and Germany. But trying to do that in Germany early may be harder, since Germany did lag the UK and Netherlands in industrialization. Emancipation is really about the formation of a large middle class, which requires industrialization.

The flip side is that Germany adopted nationalism early. Already in the 16c, there was a notion of Germany as a nation with its standard language; nobody spoke it, but people wrote in it. Italy became nationalist even earlier, through opposition to France and the Avignon papacy and Italian cardinals' unwillingness to back French popes (Louis XII tried with Georges d'Amboise, he just couldn't get Italian support). France, a more developed country than Germany, took until the 17c and state centralization.

So what you want in your POD, unless you want to go back to Martin Luther, is to get Germany to have a middle class earlier. Keep nationalism on schedule, just figure out how to get the Germans to a) develop a local middle class, and b) have some measure of political liberalism earlier. It doesn't have to be much earlier - 50 years might do the trick. You don't want to keep the far right from being anti-Semitic - it's enough to just have your average romantic define Germany in purely linguistic terms and not care toooooo much if you're Jewish or Catholic or Protestant, provided you speak standard German.
 
Maybe if there was a widespread myth that the Ashkenazim were almost entirely the descendants of converts and that German Jews in particular were simply Germans who had long ago converted to Judaism with little to no Levantine ancestry.

This would do nothing to protect Jews from religious-based persecution, but might spare them from being the victims of Nazi racial theories and fit the AHC.
 
Maybe if there was a widespread myth that the Ashkenazim were almost entirely the descendants of converts and that German Jews in particular were simply Germans who had long ago converted to Judaism with little to no Levantine ancestry.

This would do nothing to protect Jews from religious-based persecution, but might spare them from being the victims of Nazi racial theories and fit the AHC.

Or perhaps a racialist argument that the infusion of Germanic ancestry into Ashkenazi bloodlines made them superior to other Jewish populations.
 
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