Amy Schecter grew up with a question she could not explain: why was her complexion so different from that of her twin siblings? They were fair and burned quickly in the sun, while Amy was regularly read as brown and asked to account for an appearance other people found difficult to place.
Her answer used to be European. Her mother’s family came through Poland and Hungary; her father’s through Russia. Yet that explanation often confused the people asking, and it never fully explained Amy to herself. In seventh grade, her siblings even convinced a teacher that she had been adopted, a family joke that captured the ambiguity she had carried for years.
A more consequential encounter came later in school, when a teacher described Israelis as foreign oppressors and settlers. Amy felt the antisemitism in the claim, but she did not yet possess the historical knowledge to answer it. That helplessness became a turning point: she decided she would learn the history of her people well enough to speak for herself.
Her study led her to distinguish diaspora from origin. Ashkenazi describes a major Jewish diaspora experience in Europe; it does not mean that Jewish people originated there. Amy came to understand her ancestors as part of a Judean people displaced from the Middle East under successive empires, with communities eventually establishing themselves in the lands later associated with Ashkenaz.
Travel gave that history a physical form. In Rome, she encountered art and monuments carrying traces of Jewish history. The Arch of Titus, erected in celebration of Rome’s victory in Judea and the destruction of Jerusalem, made visible the imperial violence that preceded the Jewish presence in Europe.
At the Vatican, Raphael’s depiction of Heliodorus being expelled from the Temple offered another reminder: Jewish civilization, memory and sacred geography were centered in Jerusalem long before European diaspora communities took shape. These were not abstract facts; they reorganized how Amy understood her own family story.
The realization did not make every question about race simple. It did, however, give Amy language for the difference between where her family had lived and where her people began. Her appearance no longer felt like a contradiction inside a supposedly European identity; it became one expression of a diverse people with roots in Judea.
Amy’s reflection is ultimately an argument for historical precision. Ashkenazi Jews can carry European cultural experiences without being reduced to European origins. Diaspora changes language, custom and appearance, but it does not erase peoplehood or the Middle Eastern homeland from which Jewish history emerged.