Judaism is the world’s oldest monotheistic religion, dating back nearly 4,000 years.
Although it is hard to align all its texts with historical evidence, the best source
for Ancient Biblical Jewish history is the Jewish bible with its famous narratives about
Noah’s ark, the exodus and the rule of David and Solomon over Israel.
According to it, Judaism is the expression of the covenant that God, established with
Abraham and his descendants through his grandson Jacob who is also called Israel (which means
the one who struggles with god).
The people of Israel were chosen to be an exemplar nation and promised the land of Israel
by God under the condition they lived in accordance
with God’s law, revealed to Moses (on Mount
Sinai) in the Torah, also called the 5 books of Moses.
Along with the Nevi’im and Ketuvim, they constitute the 3 divisions of the Hebrew bible
or the Tanakh, also called the Old Testament by Christians.
According to current historical view, Canaanite kingdoms were All polytheistic but had each
a national deity.
For the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, it was Yahweh.
Following the integration of the region into the Assyrian empire, Israel rebelled and was
destroyed c. 722 BCE: its refugees fled to Judah where Yahwism, the monotheistic worship
of Yahweh gradually became distinct from Canaanite polytheism.
The Babylonians (587 BCE) conquered Judah, exiled its people the Judeans (aka Jews) and
destroyed their first Temple dedicated to the monotheistic worship of Yahweh.
The Persians who later invaded Babylonia allowed the Jews to return to Judah where they rebuilt
the Second Temple and assembled much of the Hebrew Bible.
After Alexander the Great’s conquests, Jewish religious tradition gradually combined with
elements of Greek culture to form Hellenistic
Judaism which spread to the new city of Alexandria.
The 2 cultures however gradually developed friction until traditional Jews regained a
short-lived sovereignty in Jerusalem in 164 BCE.
The conquest of Jerusalem by Pompey of Rome spelled the end of Jewish sovereignty for
2000 years as the region became a Roman client kingdom.
The 2 main Jewish revolts were crushed by the Romans who destroyed the 2nd temple in
Jerusalem and then exiled the Jews out of the region of Judea (2nd Jewish diaspora).
The Romans also renamed the region “Syria Palaestina” after its historic inhabitance
by the Philistines, traditional enemies of the Jews who were originally from Crete.
Meanwhile, Christianity, which initially began as a Jewish movement gradually developed into
a distinct religion by Paul, partly because Christian Jews did not support the Jewish
revolts against the Romans.
It was opened to Romans and non-Jewish converts (29) and became the official religion of the
whole Roman empire by the 4th century.
To fill the Jewish leadership vacuum, Rabbinic ideology emerged as it was not dependent on
political independence and combined the interests of the Jews and the Romans.
Judaism became decentralized as Jews migrated
to Galilee and across the empire (Jewish diaspora):
they flourished and incorporated many of their moral teachings by thousands of rabbis into
the Mishnah which became the center of the Talmud.
Medieval Jewish history saw the spread of the Jewish diaspora beyond the Middle East,
throughout North Africa and Europe as Jews
gradually coalesced into two major geographical/cultural
groups: The Ashkenazi and the Sephardic Jews.
In Christian Medieval Europe, Jews became involved in especially 2 main areas: international
commerce, thanks to connections in a widespread diaspora and money lending with interest,
a profession forbidden in Christianity.
Following the birth of Islam, the Jewish community which had been persecuted by the Byzantine
empire became more tolerated by the expanding Muslim Arabs, with whom they had cultural
similarities.
Important Jewish philosophers (Maimonides) rose during the Jewish golden age of culture
in the Muslim-ruled Iberian Peninsula (Andalus), which uniquely witnessed the relatively peaceful
coexistence of Muslims, Christians and Jews, especially between the 9th and 13th century.
Over the centuries, periods of Jewish persecution swept across Europe like tidal waves, time
and again, including:
1.
The massacre of Jewish communities along the way of the Crusades expeditions to the holy
city, as they were considered a deicide people who killed Jesus Christ
2.
European Medieval antisemitism derived from Christian theological views about Judaism
3.
The scapegoating of the Jews as the cause of black death, the disease that killed half
the European population in 5 years 4.
Many Jews had to leave Spain for the more
welcoming Ottoman Empire following the Reconquista:
The expulsion of Arab Muslims by the Spanish Catholic kings
By the 17th century, half the Jews of the world lived in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
which had become a haven for Jews from Western Europe.
A Ukrainian rebellion against the Catholic Polish domination was accompanied by atrocities
against the Jews, seen as leaseholders oppressing peasants.
The Russian empire which then took over the region saw mass anti-Jewish rioting (Pogroms),
which led the Jews to emigrate to the US and
Western Europe: places where the Age of Enlightenment
pushed towards Jewish emancipation, which is the granting of equal rights and the repeal
of isolation and ghettoization of Jews.
Jewish modernity is characterized by the end of a passive waiting for the messiah as a
moment of divine redemption, and the beginning of an active pursuit of personal or national
fulfillment.
Still the persistence
of instances of anti-Semitism (Dreyfus affair) motivated Herzl to found
the Zionist movement, contemplating the creation of a Jewish sovereign state in Palestine.
WW1 was marked by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the promise of a Jewish homeland by
Britain and the redrawing of the map of the Middle east.
Then, WW2 claimed 6M Jewish lives in the Holocaust genocide and was followed by the establishment
of the state of Israel which hosts today 40% of the 14M Jews of the world.
Traditionally, a person is considered Jewish if their mother is Jewish and if their ancestry
traces back to Abraham through his grandson Jacob, regardless of personal beliefs and
faith.
Judaism is therefore technically Not a religion but primarily a matter of ethnicity, ancestry,
identity and culture.
Although the Jewish nation possessed no territory, sovereignty nor armies for 1800 years following
the Roman exile, it endured and did not fade into history like Ancient Egypt or Rome, probably
because of its remarkable adaptability and its contributions to human civilization, including
influences over Christianity and Islam.