Claim: Ashkenaz is Scythia not Germany

Forward.com: The Origins of Ashkenaz.

"As for Ashkenaz, it is almost certainly the Hebrew name of the land of the people known to the Assyrians as the Ishkuza and to the Greeks as the Skythoi or Scythians. The Scythians were a powerful confederation of Indo-European tribes who spoke a language of the Iranian family; their original home was the steppe-lands north of the Black Sea, in what today would be southern Ukraine, from where, in the mid-first millennium BCE, their armies spread southwestward into western Asia Minor and southeastward into the Assyrian and Babylonian empires. Jeremiah, vengefully predicting the downfall of the Babylonians in the early sixth-century BCE, after their destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, proclaims: “Blow the trumpet among the nations, prepare the nations against her [Babylon], call together against her the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni [both in Armenia], and Ashkenaz."