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JewJews are followers of Judaism or, more generally, members of the Jewish people , an ethno- religious group descended from the ancient Israelites and from converts who joined their religion. The term also includes those who have undergone an officially recognized formal process of religious conversion to Judaism. The current Jewish population is over 14.5 million, the majority of whom live in the United States and Israel.
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Timeline
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537 BC Jews transported to Babylon are allowed to return to Jerusalem, bringing to a close the Babylonian captivity; They had been exiled 70 years before hand, according to the prophecy of the Biblical Prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah 25: 8-12)
38 Apion heads a deputation to Caligula to complain about the Jews in Alexandria.
72 First Jewish-Roman War - The Romans lay siege to Masada, a desert fortress held by Jewish victims of the Sicarii.
115 Jews in Egypt and Cyrene ignite a revolt against the rule of the Roman Empire, which spreads to Cyprus, Judea, and the Roman province of Mesopotamia.
200 Jewish Eretz Yisraeli scholar Judah ha-Nasi compiles tracts of the Mishnah, beginning the creation of Talmudic law.
386 John Chrysostom becomes a presbyter; he also writes eight homilies ''"adversus iudaeos"'', "against the Jews".
415 The Jews are expelled from Alexandria.
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429 Theodosius II orders all funds raised by Jews to support schools be turned over to his treasury.
451 Sassanid ruler Yazdegerd II's decree abolishes the Sabbath and orders executions of Jewish leaders, including the Exilarch Mar Nuna.
570 The Jews of Clermont-Ferrand are forced to convert to Christianity.
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Encyclopedia
- This article describes some ethnic, historic, and cultural aspects of the Jewish identity
... ; for a consideration of the Jewish religion, refer to the article Judaism. Jews are followers of Judaism or, more generally, members of the Jewish people , an ethno- religious group descended from the ancient Israelites and from converts who joined their religion. The term also includes those who have undergone an officially recognized formal process of religious conversion to Judaism. The current Jewish population is over 14.5 million, the majority of whom live in the United States and Israel. Jews and JudaismThe origin of the Jews is traditionally dated to around 1800 BCE with the biblical account of the birth of Judaism. The Merneptah Stele, dated at 1200 BCE, is one of the earliest archaeological records of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel, where they further developed a monotheistic religion, Judaism, and enjoyed periods of self-determination. As a result of foreign conquests and expulsions starting in the 8th century BCE, a Jewish diaspora was formed. Defeats in the Jewish-Roman Wars in the years 70 CE and 135 notably contributed to the numbers and geography of the diaspora, as significant numbers of the Jewish population of the Land of Israel were expelled and sold to slavery throughout the empire. Since then, Jews lived throughout Europe, the greater Middle East and even in the Indian subcontinent, surviving discrimination, oppression, poverty, and even genocide , with occasional periods of cultural, economic, and individual prosperity in various locations . Until the late 18th century, the terms Jews and adherents of Judaism were practically synonymous, and Judaism was the prime binding factor among the Jews, although it was not strictly required to be followed in order to belong to the Jewish people. Following the Age of Enlightenment and its Jewish counterpart Haskalah, a gradual transformation occurred where many Jews came to view being a member of the Jewish nation as separate from adhering to the Jewish faith. The Hebrew name Yehudi came into being when the Kingdom of Israel was split between the northern Kingdom of Israel and the southern Kingdom of Judah. The term originally referred to the people of the southern kingdom, although the term B'nei Yisrael was still used for both groups. After the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom leaving the southern kingdom as the only Israelite state, the word Yehudim gradually came to refer to people of the Jewish faith as a whole, rather than those specifically from Judah. The English word Jew is ultimately derived from Yehudi . Its first use in the Bible to refer to the Jewish people as a whole is in the Book of Esther. EtymologyThere are many different views as to the origin of the English language word Jew. The most common view is that the Middle English word Jew is from the Old French giu, earlier juieu, from the Latin iudeus from the Greek Ioudaios . The Latin simply means Judaean, from the land of Judaea. The Hebrew for Jew, ????? , is pronounced ye-hoo-DEE. The Hebrew letter Yodh , ?, used as a 'y' in the Hebrew language , becomes a 'j' in languages using the Latin-based alphabet when the Yodh is used as a consonant rather than as a vowel. Therefore, a rough transliteration of ????? in English would be Jew. The etymological equivalent is in use in other languages, e.g., "Jude" in German, "juif" in French, "jøde," in Danish, etc., but derivations of the word "Hebrew" are also in use to describe a Jewish person, e.g., in Italian and , . Who is a Jew?Judaism shares some of the characteristics of a nation, an ethnicity, a religion, and a culture, making the definition of who is a Jew vary slightly depending on whether a religious or national approach to identity is used. For discussions of the religious views on who is a Jew and how these views differ from each other, please see Who is a Jew?. Generally, in modern secular usage, Jews include three groups: people who practice Judaism and have a Jewish ethnic background , people without Jewish parents who have converted to Judaism; and those Jews who, while not practicing Judaism as a religion, still identify themselves as Jewish by virtue of their family's Jewish descent and their own cultural and historical identification with the Jewish people. Historical definitions of Jewish identity have traditionally been based on Halakhic definitions of matrilineal descent, and halachic conversions. Historical definitions of who is a Jew date back to the codification of the oral tradition into the Babylonian Talmud. Biblical interpretations of sections in the Tanach, such as Deuteronomy 7:1-5, by learned Jewish sages, is used as a warning against intermarriage between Jews and non Jews because "[the non-Jewish male spouse] will cause your child to turn away from Me and they will worship the gods of others." Leviticus 24:10 speaks of the son in a marriage between a Hebrew woman and an Egyptian man to be "of the community of Israel.", which contrasts with Ezra 10:2-3, where Israelites returning from Egypt, vowed to put aside their gentile wives and their children. Since the Haskalah, these halakhic interpretations of Jewish identity have been challenged. Jewish cultureJudaism guides its adherents in both practice and belief, and has been called not only a religion, but also a "way of life," which has made drawing a clear distinction between Judaism, Jewish culture, and Jewish nationality rather difficult. In many times and places, such as in the ancient Hellenic world, in Europe before and after the Enlightenment , and in contemporary United States and Israel, cultural phenomena have developed that are in some sense characteristically Jewish without being at all specifically religious. Some factors in this come from within Judaism, others from the interaction of Jews with others around them, others from the inner social and cultural dynamics of the community, as opposed to religion itself. Ethnic divisionsThe most commonly used terms to describe ethnic divisions among Jews currently are: Ashkenazi ; and Sephardi . They refer to both religious and ethnic divisions. Other Jewish ethnic groups include Mizrahi Jews ; Teimanim ; and such smaller groups as the Gruzim and Juhurim from the Caucasus, the Bene Israel, Bnei Menashe, Cochin and Telugu Jews of India, the Romaniotes of Greece, the Italkim of Italy, various African Jews , the Bukharan Jews of Central Asia, Kaifeng Jews from China, and the Persian Jews of Iran. PopulationPrior to World War II the world population of Jews was approximately 18 million. The Holocaust reduced this number to approximately 12 million. Today, there are an estimated 13 million to 14.6 million Jews worldwide in over 134 countries. Significant geographic populationsPlease note that these populations represent low-end estimates of the worldwide Jewish population, accounting for around 0.2% of the world's population. >!Country or Region
!Jewish population
!Notes
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|United States
|style="text-align: right"|5,671,000
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|Europe
|style="text-align: right"|2,000,000
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|-
|style="text-indent: 2em"|France
|style="text-align: right"|600,000
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|-
|style="text-indent: 2em"|United Kingdom
|style="text-align: right"|267,000
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|-
|style="text-indent: 2em"|Germany
|style="text-align: right"|220,000
|, over 100,000 who are members of a synagogue
|-
|style="text-indent: 2em"|Turkey
|style="text-align: right"|30,000
|
|-
|style="text-indent: 2em"|Italy
|style="text-align: right"|30,000
|
|-
|Canada
|style="text-align: right"|371,000
|
The conquest of much of the Byzantine Empire and Babylonia by Islamic armies generally improved the life of the Jews, though they were still considered second-class citizens. In response to these Islamic conquests, the First Crusade of 1096 attempted to reconquer Jerusalem, resulting in the destruction of many of the remaining Jewish communities in the area. The Jews were among the most vigorous defenders of Jerusalem against the Crusaders. When the city fell, the Crusaders gathered the Jews in a synagogue and burned them. The Jews almost single-handedly defended Haifa against the Crusaders, holding out in the besieged town for a whole month . At this time, a full thousand years after the fall of the Jewish state, there were Jewish communities all over the country. Fifty of them are known to us; they include Jerusalem, Tiberias, Ramleh, Ashkelon, Caesarea, and Gaza.
Middle Ages: EuropeJews settled in Europe during the time of the Roman Empire, but the rise of the Catholic Church resulted in frequent expulsions and persecutions. The Crusades routinely attacked Jewish communities, and increasingly harsh laws restricted them from most economic activity and land ownership, leaving open only moneylending and a few other trades. Jews were subject to expulsions from England, France, and the Holy Roman Empire throughout the Middle Ages, with most of the population moving to Eastern Europe and especially Poland, which was uniquely tolerant of the Jews through the 1700s. The final mass expulsion of the Jews, and the largest, occurred after the Christian conquest of Spain in 1492 . Even after the end of the expulsions in the 17th century, individual conditions varied from country to country and time to time, but, as rule, Jews in Western Europe generally were forced, by decree or by informal pressure, to live in highly segregated ghettos and shtetls.
Middle Ages: Islamic Europe, North Africa and Asia
During the Middle Ages, Jews in Islamic lands generally had more rights than under Christian rule, with a Golden Age of coexistence in Islamic Spain from about 900 to 1200, when Spain became the center of the richest, most populous, and most influential Jewish community of the time. The rise of more radical Muslim regimes, such as that of the Almohades ended this period by the thirteenth century, and Jews were soon expelled from Spain after the Christian reconquest. Many of these Jews found refuge in the Ottoman Empire, which remained tolerant of its Jewish population for much of its history. In the Islamic lands Jews at times were driven by necessity to engage in despised occupations, becoming dancing boys or tavernkeepers.
Enlightenment and emancipation
During the Age of Enlightenment, significant changes occurred within the Jewish community. The Haskalah movement paralleled the wider Enlightenment, as Jews began in the 1700s to campaign for emancipation from restrictive laws and integration into the wider European society. Secular and scientific education was added to the traditional religious instruction received by students, and interest in a national Jewish identity, including a revival in the study of Jewish history and Hebrew, started to grow.
The Haskalah movement influenced the birth of all the modern Jewish denominations, and planted the seeds of Zionism. At the same time, it contributed to encouraging cultural assimilation into the countries in which Jews resided. At around the same time another movement was born, one preaching almost the opposite of Haskalah, Hasidic Judaism. Hasidic Judaism began in the 1700s by Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, and quickly gained a following with its exuberant, mystical approach to religion. These two movements, and the traditional orthodox approach to Judaism from which they spring, formed the basis for the modern divisions within Jewish observance.
At the same time, the outside world was changing. France was the first country to emancipate its Jewish population in 1796, granting them equal rights under the law. Napoleon further spread emancipation, inviting Jews to leave the Jewish ghettos in Europe and seek refuge in the newly created tolerant political regimes . Other countries such as Denmark, England, and Sweden also adopted liberal policies toward Jews during the period of Enlightenment, with some resulting immigration. By the mid-19th century, almost all Western European countries had emancipated their Jewish populations, with the notable exception of the Papal States, but persecution continued in Eastern Europe including massive pogroms at the end of the 19th century and throughout the Pale of Settlement. The persistence of anti-semitism, both violently in the east and socially in the west, led to a number of Jewish political movements, culminating in Zionism.
Zionism and immigration
Many of the newly secular Jews who had embraced Haskalah found themselves deeply troubled by the continuing virulent anti-semitism of the late 1800s, especially the massive pogroms of the 1880s in Russia and the Dreyfus Affair, which occurred in France in 1894, a country many Jews had previously thought of as particularly accepting. Many Jews in Eastern Europe embraced socialism as a potential escape from persecution, but another group, the Zionists, led by Theodor Herzl, viewed the only solution as the creation of a Jewish state. The interplay between Jewish national and religious identities was evident in Zionism, which was initially an entirely secular movement, but drew inspiration and support from the religious connection between Jews and the Land of Israel. Zionism contributed to the growth of the Jewish population there, which at the time was the Palestine province of the Ottoman Empire, and later the British Mandate of Palestine. Zionism, initially one out of a number of competing Jewish political movements, gained nearly universal support from the world Jewish population following the near-complete destruction of the Jews of Europe in the Holocaust, and led to the foundation of the State of Israel.
In addition to responding politically, during the late 19th century, Jews began to flee the persecutions of Eastern Europe in large numbers, mostly by heading to the United States, but also to Canada and Western Europe. By 1924, almost two million Jews had emigrated to the US alone, creating a large community in a nation relatively free of the persecutions of rising European anti-Semitism .
The Holocaust
This anti-Semitism reached its most destructive form in the policies of Nazi Germany, which made the destruction of the Jews a priority, culminating in the killing of approximately six million Jews during the Holocaust from 1941 to 1945. Originally, the Nazis used death squads, the Einsatzgruppen, to conduct massive open-air killings of Jews in territory they conquered. By 1942, the Nazi leadership decided to implement the Final Solution, the genocide of the Jews of Europe, and to increase the pace of the Holocaust by establishing extermination camps specifically to kill Jews. This was an industrial method of genocide. Millions of Jews who had been confined to diseased and massively overcrowded Ghettos were transported to "Death-camps" where some were herded into a specific location , then either gassed or shot. Afterwards, their remains were buried or burned. Others were interned in the camps were they given little food and disease was common. Many Jews tried to escape Europe before or during the Holocaust, but were unable to find refuge, giving new urgency to the Zionist goal of establishing a Jewish homeland.
IsraelIn 1948, the Jewish state of Israel was founded, creating the first Jewish nation since the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. After a series of wars with neighboring Arab countries, almost all of the 900,000 Jews previously living in North Africa and the Middle East fled to the Jewish state, joining an increasing number of immigrants from post-War Europe. By the end of the 20th century, Jewish population centers had shifted dramatically, with the United States and Israel being the centers of Jewish secular and religious life.
Persecution- Related articles: Anti-Semitism, History of anti-Semitism, New anti-Semitism
The Jewish people and Judaism have experienced various persecutions throughout Jewish history. In medieval Europe, many persecutions of Jews in the name of Christianity occurred, notably during the Crusades—when Jews all over Germany were massacred—and a series of expulsions from England, Germany, France, and, in the largest expulsion of all, Spain. In the Papal States, which existed until 1870, Jews were required to live only in specified neighborhoods called ghettos. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Roman Catholic church adhered to a distinction between "good anti-Semitism" and "bad anti-Semitism". The "bad" kind promoted hatred of Jews because of their descent. This was considered un-Christian because the Christian message was intended for all of humanity regardless of ethnicity; anyone could become a Christian. The "good" kind criticized alleged Jewish conspiracies to control newspapers, banks, and other institutions, to care only about accumulation of wealth, etc.
Islam and Judaism have a complex relationship. The political conflict between Muhammad and the Jews of Medina in the 7th century left ample ideological fuel for Islam and anti-Semitism through the centuries. During the Middle Ages, Jews typically had a better status in the Muslim world than in Christendom. As the Muslim empire expanded during the centuries, the status of the non-Muslim communities was at times precarious, and they were generally subject to dhimmi laws. These laws freed them from military service and paying zakah, but placed additional jizyah and land taxes on them.
The most notable modern day persecution of Jews remains the Holocaust — the state-led systematic persecution and genocide of the Jews and other minority groups of Europe and North Africa during World War II by Nazi Germany and its collaborators During the Holocaust, the Middle East was in turmoil. Britain prohibited Jewish immigration to the British Mandate of Palestine. While the Allies and the Axis were fighting for the oil-rich region, the Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husayni staged a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq and organized the Farhud pogrom which marked the turning point for about 150,000 Iraqi Jews who, following this event and the hostilities generated by the war with Israel in 1948, were targeted for violence, persecution, boycotts, confiscations, and near complete expulsion in 1951. In the French Vichy territories of Algeria and Syria plans were drawn up for the liquidation of their Jewish populations were the Axis powers to triumph.
The tensions of the Arab-Israeli conflict were also a factor in the rise of animosity to Jews all over the Middle East, as hundreds of thousands of Jews fled as refugees, the main waves being soon after the 1948 and 1956 wars. In reaction to the Suez Crisis of 1956, the Egyptian government expelled almost 25,000 Egyptian Jews and confiscated their property, and sent approximately 1,000 more Jews to prisons and detention camps. The population of Jewish communities of Muslim Middle East and North Africa was reduced from about 900,000 in 1948 to less than 8,000 today.
Jewish leadership
There is no single governing body for the Jewish community, nor a single authority with responsibility for religious doctrine. Instead, a variety of secular and religious institutions at the local, national, and international levels lead various parts of the Jewish community on a variety of issues.
Famous Jews
Jews have made contributions in a broad range of human endeavors, including the sciences, arts, politics, business, etc. The Jewish people have the largest concentration of Nobel prize winners of any ethnic or religious group.
See alsoA full guide to topics related to the Jews is available from the . Additional topics of interest include:
- Judaism, for information on the Jewish religion
- Europe
- Americas
- Western Asia and Africa
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