TheJews orJewish people are an ethnic and religious group whose religion isJudaism.[3] A Jew is someone who is of Jewishheritage or who has converted to theJewish religion.[3] Jewish people typically consider themselves not only as adherents of a religion, therefore a Jew is not only one that practices the religion ofJudaism, but it is also one who is of Jewish ethnic heritage. Jews originated as an ethnoreligious group in the Middle East.[3]
According to traditional Jewish law, calledHalakha, someone is Jewish if their mother was a Jew or if they have converted to Judaism.[4] Judaism has been described as a religion, a race, an ethnic group, a culture, a nation, and an extended family.[5]
Israel is the only modern country with a Jewish majority, but there are Jewishminorities in many places in the world. Most of them live in large cities in theUnited States,Argentina,Europe andAustralia. BothIsrael and theU.S. have over five million Jews.[6] In theSoviet Union there were more than two million Jews, but many of them moved to Israel, the U.S. and other Western countries since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Jews have been victims of variouspersecutions. The most well known happened during theSecond World War, when at least 6,000,000 Jews were killed by theNazis. The event is known asthe Holocaust.
All ethnic (non-convert) Jews have genetic heritage from the Levant (the region now known asIsrael and/orPalestine).[7] Within all of the world's Jews, there are Jewishethnic groups. The two biggest are calledAshkenazi (who have historically lived in Central and Eastern Europe) andSephardic (who have historically lived in lands around theMediterranean Sea, particularly Spain and Portugal). Jews from the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Central Asia are calledMizrahi Jews. There are also Ethiopian Jews, Indian Jews (Bene Israel) and Chinese Jews (Kaifeng Jews). Many of these groups have moved from one place to another. For example, many Ashkenazi Jews live in the United States, and many Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews live in France.[8]
Jews speak the languages of the countries where they live.Hebrew is the language of Judaism because it is the language in which the Bible was written. It is still used for prayers. In Israel, Ivrit, which is the name for the new Hebrew language, is the common language. There are also other Jewish languages such asYiddish andLadino which are still spoken and written by some Jews.
Judaism began with aman namedAbram who lived in thecity ofUr in modern-dayIraq. As per theMidrash, Abram strongly believed that the people in Ur were wrong to pray to differentgods and statues. He believed that there was really only onegod who was not a statue. TheTorah tells that God spoke to Abram and told him to leave Ur with his family and move toCanaan, where he started a newreligion. God told him that his name would be changed toAbraham. The Midrash also says thatangels taught Abraham a new holy language, which Jews believe is the language today known asHebrew. Hebrew continues to be the language of Judaism. Abraham's grandsonJacob is said to be the one who first had the name of "Israel".[9][10]
The Bible says that the people of Israel were slaves in Egypt.God helpedMoses to set them free. After this, Moses met God onMount Sinai and received theTorah from God.[9][10]
The Hebrews, orIsraelites, began a country called Israel in Canaan. They fought many wars against other peoples in the area. One of them were thePhilistines. After the death of KingSolomon who was the son of KingDavid, the Israelite kingdom split into two: ten tribes in a new kingdom ofIsrael and the other two tribes in a newKingdom of Judah.[9][10] Judah continued the monarchy of the old Israel. The 2 tribes that made Judah were Judah and Benjamin. The nameJew comes from the name of one of these tribes,Judah.[9][10]
A country calledAssyria later conquered the Northern Kingdom, and most of the 10 tribes would be deported and exiled, and to this day it is not known where they are. Some stayed and mixed with foreigners and became theSamaritans. Others fled to Judah where they adopted the everyday life of those who lived in Judah. Judah was subsequently conquered byBabylonia and its people were taken captive toBabylon.[9][10] This is called the Babylonian exile, because they were exiled (taken away) from Judah. They were allowed to go back to Judah again when Babylon was conquered by thePersian Empire. The Israelites that were in the exile then became known as Jews because their religion and culture went through some changes that were suited to Judahites. Some Jewish people stayed in Babylon (now Iraq) and others also lived in other countries.[9][10]
By 50 BC, Judah (then called Judea) was ruled by theRoman Empire. During this time, the main language of Judea wasAramaic. The Jews did not like the Roman government or customs, and often made trouble for the Romans. In 70 AD, after a revolt against the government by the Jewish community, the Romans destroyed Judea's capital city,Jerusalem, and its temple, which was made when the Jews returned from Exile. In 135 AD, a man called Simon Bar Kokhba leads another revolt against the Romans. The Romans then decided the Jews were too much trouble. The Romans destroyed all of Judea and killed many Jews. They destroyed Jerusalem and renamed it to Aelia Capitolina. And they renamed Judea to Syria Palaestina in order to offend them. Palaestina means the land of Philistines. They were the enemy of the Israelites. They sent the remaining Jews into exile in the rest of the Empire. The Jews weren't allowed to return.
TheJewish people lost their country. They became a small minority in almost every place they lived. This time is called theDiaspora, whenJews spread around the world. They lived in many other countries.Jews living inSpain andPortugal used the languageLadino (also calledJudeo-Spanish). Jews living inGermany,Poland,Russia, and other countries in Central-EasternEurope spoke the languageYiddish. Jews living in North Africa spoke Judeo-Arabic orHaketia, the local name for Ladino. Jews have lived in most, but not all, places in the world, including India, China, Yemen, and Ethiopia. Even today, Jews who do not live in Israel are often said to live "in the Diaspora". In some places, likeIndiaArchived 2023-12-17 at theWayback Machine, Jews lived without any problems. In other places, like most of Europe and Islamic countries, there wasbigotry or evenhatred against Jews and they lived under discriminatory laws. Sometimes Jews suffered from outright persecution (that is: systematic hatred and violence), sometimes they were forced to dress in special, ugly clothes, pay higher taxes than others, not build higher houses than others, not to ride a ][Horse]] orDonkey, wear certain badges etc. A lot ofChristians especially inEurope in theMiddle Ages thought thatJews were responsible for the death ofJesus. TheChristians persecuted theJews en masse. TheRoman Catholic Church also forbadeChristians from lending money against interest, someJews worked as bankers and money-lenders, and became known as skillful bankers.:.
Onenomad nation, theKhazars, converted to Judaism in the 8th or 9th century. The Khazar khanate, which was in the modernUkraine andsouthern Russia, was the only independentJewish state before modern dayIsrael. The Khazar state was destroyed by the KievanRussians' in 969. TheJewish people have always believed that they have a special mission from God. They do things in their own ways, such as having special rules aboutfood and eating, not working onShabbat, keeping their own holidays, and not marrying people from otherreligions. Because of this, people in many different times and countries have thought that the Jews were strange, and maybe dangerous. Many countries made laws that theJews could not work in some jobs or live in some places. SometimesJewish people were killed because of their religion. The word "antisemitism" means the hatred forJews.:.
During the 1930s and 1940s, theNazi, orNational Socialist government ofGermany conquered most ofEurope. They did terrible things to the Jewish people. The Nazi government killed more than six million Jewish people.[11][12] Before they were killed, often by means of a gas chamber, many of the Jews were made to be forced workers, and some of them were forced to help in the killing and capturing of the others.
In 1948, afterWorld War II, theUnited Nations made the country ofIsrael for the Jews inPalestine, which is in the same place as the original Israel, in theMiddle East. The land had been part of theOttoman Empire beforeWorld War I.Britain then controlled the area under the oversight of theUnited Nations. Many Jews moved back to Israel, then called Palestine, starting in the late 1800s. When the country of Israel was made in 1948, there were about 600,000 Jews in it. Today there are about7,181,000 Jews in Israel. When Jews moved back to Palestine, there were some people living there now. Most of them did not want to live in a Jewish country. This was the beginning of the Israeli-Arab or Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which continues today. Jews have come to Israel from all over the world, bringing different languages, music, food, and history to create a unique culture. Israel is the only country in the world where most people are Jews and where Hebrew is the main language.
Jewish history continues today in bothIsrael and the Diaspora. Outside ofIsrael, there are many Jews in theUnited States;Great Britain;France,Germany,Russia,Ukraine,Argentina,Brazil, andAustralia. There are smaller numbers of Jews living in other parts of the world. Some of the major problems faced by the Jewish people today include resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and dealing with high rates of assimilation (loss of Jewish identity) in some countries, like theUnited States.:.
Kedar-Barnes, Inbal; Paul, Rozen (2004). "The Jewish people: their ethnic history, genetic disorders and specific cancer susceptibility".Familial Cancer.3 (3–4):193–199.doi:10.1007/s10689-004-9544-0.PMID15516841.
↑"Judaism 101: What is Judaism?".JewFAQ.org. Judaism 101. Retrieved18 December 2014.• Judaism has been described as a religion, a race, a culture, and a nation • All of these descriptions have some validity • The Jewish people are best described as an extended family
↑Annual Assessment, Jewish People Policy Planning Institute (Jewish Agency for Israel), 2007, p.15, archived fromthe original(PDF) on 2017-11-07, retrieved2010-05-03, based onAmerican Jewish Year Book. Vol.106. American Jewish Committee (AJC). 2006. Archived fromthe original on 2019-05-05. Retrieved2010-05-03.
↑Bauer, Yehuda; Rozett, Robert (1990). "Appendix". In Gutman, Israel (ed.).Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. New York: Macmillan Library Reference. pp.1797–1802.ISBN0-02-896090-4.
