Judaism

Jewish tradition begins with Abraham, who left Mesopotamia for the land of Canaan at God’s call and received the promise of a covenant for his descendants. Generations later, the Bible tells, Moses led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, and at Mount Sinai they received the Torah. Historians cannot confirm these early stories, but they agree that a people called Israel lived in the hill country of Canaan by about 1200 BCE.

In the 10th century BCE, according to the Bible, King David made Jerusalem his capital and his son Solomon built the Temple there. In 586 BCE the Babylonians destroyed the Temple and exiled many Judeans. In exile, and after the return, the Torah took its final shape and became the centre of Jewish life. A second Temple stood from about 516 BCE until the Romans burned it in 70 CE.

After that loss, the rabbis rebuilt Judaism around the synagogue, prayer, study and the home. Jewish communities spread across the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Europe, and later the Americas. Jews from Dutch Brazil reached New Amsterdam, later New York, in 1654. In the Holocaust, Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered about six million Jews. In 1948 the State of Israel was founded, and today it is home to the largest Jewish population.

The fall of the Second Temple in 70 CE closed one era and opened another. A last great revolt against Rome, led by Simon bar Kokhba in 132–135, was crushed; Jerusalem was rebuilt as a Roman city, Aelia Capitolina, and Jews were barred from entering it. Leadership passed to the rabbis. In Galilee the patriarch Judah ha-Nasi edited the Mishnah around 200 CE, while in Babylonia, under Persian rule, the academies of Sura and Pumbedita produced the Talmud that would guide Jewish life for the next millennium and more.

From the 7th century most of the world’s Jews lived under Muslim rule. As dhimmis, “protected” non-Muslims, they paid a special tax and faced restrictions, but ran their own communal affairs. The heads of the Babylonian academies, the geonim, answered legal questions sent from Spain to Yemen, and Saadia Gaon (882–942) translated the Bible into Arabic. In al-Andalus, Muslim Spain, Hebrew poetry and philosophy flourished from the 10th to the 12th century, an age often called golden, though historians note that the image is partly idealised. Its greatest figure, Maimonides (1138–1204), left Córdoba during Almohad persecution and settled in Egypt, where he wrote the law code Mishneh Torah and the Guide for the Perplexed.

In Christian Europe, Ashkenazi communities grew along the Rhine and in northern France, where Rashi (1040–1105) wrote the commentaries on the Bible and Talmud still printed beside the text today. Their position worsened from the First Crusade of 1096, when mobs massacred the Jews of Speyer, Worms and Mainz. Accusations such as the blood libel spread, and Jews were expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1306 and from many German towns, while the Black Death of 1348–1349 brought further massacres. Many moved east to Poland and Lithuania, whose rulers granted them charters. In Iberia, riots in 1391 led to mass conversions, followed by the Inquisition and the expulsion from Spain in 1492. Sephardi exiles rebuilt their lives in the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, Italy and, later, Amsterdam.

The centuries after the expulsion were rich in mysticism. The Zohar, the classic work of Kabbalah, had appeared in Castile in the late 13th century; tradition ascribes it to the 2nd-century sage Shimon bar Yochai, while most scholars attribute it to Moses de León. In 16th-century Safed, in Galilee, Isaac Luria taught a new mystical system, and Joseph Karo compiled the Shulchan Aruch (printed 1565), which became the standard code of Jewish law. In 1665–1666 many Jews hailed Shabbetai Tzvi as the messiah, until he converted to Islam under Ottoman pressure. In 18th-century Eastern Europe, Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, inspired Hasidism, which met fierce opposition from rabbis led by the Vilna Gaon.

Modern times brought both emancipation and new dangers. In Berlin, Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) championed the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. France granted Jews full citizenship in 1791, and most of Western and Central Europe followed during the 19th century, prompting debates over how far to adapt that produced the modern movements. In the Russian Empire, where most Jews were confined to the Pale of Settlement, pogroms from 1881 helped drive about two million Jews to emigrate, chiefly to the United States, before 1914. Others turned to Zionism, the movement for a Jewish homeland in the Land of Israel; Theodor Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897.

The 20th century transformed Jewish life. The Holocaust destroyed the great centres of Ashkenazi life in Eastern Europe. After the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, most Jews of the Middle East and North Africa left their homelands over the following decades, many of them for Israel, ending communities that had existed for well over a thousand years. From the 1970s, and above all after 1989, large numbers of Soviet Jews emigrated. By the end of the century Jewish life was concentrated in two great centres, Israel and the United States, with smaller communities across Europe, Latin America and beyond.

The heart of Jewish belief is in one God, creator and ruler of the world, proclaimed in the prayer called the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.” God made a covenant with the people of Israel, who are called to live by God’s teaching, the TorahTorah The five books of Moses; more broadly, the whole of Jewish teaching. Glossary.

Jewish tradition counts 613 commandments (mitzvotmitzvot The commandments of the Torah; traditionally 613. A single commandment, or a good deed, is a mitzvah. Glossary) in the Torah, covering worship, ethics, food, family and justice. The Ten Commandments are the best known. The rabbis taught that the written Torah came with an oral Torah that explains it, later written down in the Mishnah and Talmud.

Judaism puts more weight on deeds than on creeds. Medieval thinkers such as Maimonides drew up principles of faith, but what binds Jews together is above all a shared law, history and hope: the coming of a messianic age of peace and justice.

Jewish practice follows the rhythm of the week and the year. Every Sabbath (ShabbatShabbat The Sabbath, the day of rest from Friday sunset to Saturday nightfall. Glossary), from Friday sunset to Saturday night, observant Jews rest from work, light candles, bless wine and bread, and gather for meals and prayer.

Daily prayer and the reading of the Torah in the synagogue bind the community together, while study of Torah and Talmud is considered a form of worship in itself. The home is a holy place too: a mezuzah is fixed to the doorpost, and many families keep kosher food laws.

Life-cycle rites mark the path of a Jewish life: circumcision of boys at eight days, bar or bat mitzvah at the age of religious adulthood, marriage under a canopy (chuppah), and burial with mourning rites.

The Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, has three parts: the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings. In the synagogue the Torah is read from a handwritten scroll, completing the whole cycle once a year.

Alongside the Bible stands the oral tradition. The Mishnah, edited around 200 CE, and the vast Talmud built around it record the debates of generations of rabbis. Jewish law (halakha) and much of Jewish thought grew from these texts and the commentaries on them.