Jewish history

According to Jewish tradition, Jacob, shown wrestling with the angel in this painting by Rembrandt, was the father of the tribes of Israel.
Part of a series on
Jews and Judaism
Religion
Texts
Tanakh
Talmud
Rabbinic
History
General
Ancient Israel
Second Temple period
Rabbinic period and Middle Ages
Modern era
Communities
Related groups
Population
Land of Israel
Africa
Asia
Europe
Northern America
Latin America and Caribbean
Oceania
Denominations
Culture
Customs
Music
Art
Cuisine
Literature
Languages
Politics
Jewish political movements
Zionism
Part of a series on
History of religions
Founding figures
Study of religion
Timeline
Prehistoric
Axial Age
Middle Ages
Age of Discovery
Modern day
Religions

Jewish history is the history of the Jews, their nation, religion, and culture, as it developed and interacted with other peoples, religions, and cultures.

Jews originated from the Israelites and Hebrews of historical Israel and Judah, two related kingdoms that emerged in the Levant during the Iron Age.[1][2] Although the earliest mention of Israel is inscribed on the Merneptah Stele around 1213–1203 BCE, religious literature tells the story of Israelites going back at least as far as c. 1500 BCE. The Kingdom of Israel fell to the Neo-Assyrian Empire in around 720 BCE,[3] and the Kingdom of Judah to the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 586 BCE.[4] Part of the Judean population was exiled to Babylon. The Assyrian and Babylonian captivities are regarded as representing the start of the Jewish diaspora.

After the Persian Achaemenid Empire conquered the region, the exiled Jews were allowed to return and rebuild the temple; these events mark the beginning of the Second Temple period.[5][6] After several centuries of foreign rule, the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire led to an independent Hasmonean kingdom,[7] but it was gradually incorporated into Roman rule.[8] The Jewish-Roman wars, a series of unsuccessful revolts against the Romans in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple,[9] and the expulsion of many Jews.[10] The Jewish population in Syria Palaestina gradually decreased during the following centuries, enhancing the role of the Jewish diaspora and shifting the spiritual and demographic centre from the depopulated Judea to Galilee and then to Babylon, with smaller communities spread out across the Roman Empire. During the same period, the Mishnah and the Talmud, central Jewish texts, were composed. In the following millennia, the diaspora communities coalesced into three major ethnic subdivisions according to where their ancestors settled: the Ashkenazim (Central and Eastern Europe), the Sephardim (initially in the Iberian Peninsula), and the Mizrahim (Middle East and North Africa).[11][12]

Byzantine rule over the Levant was lost in the 7th century as the newly established Islamic Caliphate expanded into the Eastern Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, North Africa, and later into the Iberian Peninsula. Jewish culture enjoyed a golden age in Spain, with Jews becoming widely accepted in society and their religious, cultural, and economic life blossomed. However, in 1492 the Jews were forced to leave Spain and migrated in great numbers to the Ottoman Empire and Italy. Between the 12th and 15th centuries, Ashkenazi Jews experienced extreme persecution in Central Europe, which prompted their mass migration to Poland.[13][14] The 18th century saw the rise of the Haskalah intellectual movement. Also starting in the 18th century, Jews began to campaign for Jewish emancipation from restrictive laws and integration into the wider European society.

In the 19th century, when Jews in Western Europe were increasingly granted equality before the law, Jews in the Pale of Settlement faced growing persecution, legal restrictions and widespread pogroms. During the 1870s and 1880s, the Jewish population in Europe began to more actively discuss emigration to Ottoman Syria with the aim of re-establishing a Jewish polity in Palestine. The Zionist movement was officially founded in 1897. The pogroms also triggered a mass exodus of more than two million Jews to the United States between 1881 and 1924.[15] The Jews of Europe and the United States gained success in the fields of science, culture and the economy. Among those generally considered the most famous were Albert Einstein and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Many Nobel Prize winners at this time were Jewish, as is still the case.[16]

In 1933, with the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany, the Jewish situation became severe. Economic crises, racial antisemitic laws, and a fear of an upcoming war led many to flee from Europe to Mandatory Palestine, to the United States and to the Soviet Union. In 1939, World War II began and until 1941 Hitler occupied almost all of Europe. In 1941, following the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Final Solution began, an extensive organized operation on an unprecedented scale, aimed at the annihilation of the Jewish people, and resulting in the persecution and murder of Jews in Europe and North Africa. In Poland, three million were murdered in gas chambers in all concentration camps combined, with one million at the Auschwitz camp complex alone. This genocide, in which approximately six million Jews were methodically exterminated, is known as the Holocaust.

Before and during the Holocaust, enormous numbers of Jews immigrated to Mandatory Palestine. On May 14, 1948, upon the termination of the British Mandate, David Ben-Gurion declared the creation of the State of Israel, a Jewish and democratic state in Eretz Israel (Land of Israel). Immediately afterwards, all neighbouring Arab states invaded, yet the newly formed IDF resisted. In 1949, the war ended and Israel started building the state and absorbing massive waves of Aliyah from all over Europe and Middle Eastern countries. As of 2022, Israel is a parliamentary democracy with a population of 9.6 million people, of whom 7 million are Jewish. The largest Jewish community outside Israel is the United States, while large communities also exist in France, Canada, Argentina, Russia, United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany. For statistics related to modern Jewish demographics, see Jewish population.

  1. ^ Finkelstein, Israel; Silberman, Neil Asher (2001). The Bible unearthed : archaeology's new vision of ancient Israel and the origin of its stories (1st Touchstone ed.). New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-684-86912-4.
  2. ^ The Pitcher Is Broken: Memorial Essays for Gosta W. Ahlstrom, Steven W. Holloway, Lowell K. Handy, Continuum, 1 May 1995 Archived April 9, 2023, at the Wayback Machine Quote: "For Israel, the description of the battle of Qarqar in the Kurkh Monolith of Shalmaneser III (mid-ninth century) and for Judah, a Tiglath-pileser III text mentioning (Jeho-) Ahaz of Judah (IIR67 = K. 3751), dated 734–733, are the earliest published to date."
  3. ^ Broshi, Maguen (2001). Bread, Wine, Walls and Scrolls. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 174. ISBN 978-1-84127-201-6. Archived from the original on February 10, 2023. Retrieved August 19, 2022.
  4. ^ Faust, Avraham (August 29, 2012). Judah in the Neo-Babylonian Period. Society of Biblical Literature. p. 1. doi:10.2307/j.ctt5vjz28. ISBN 978-1-58983-641-9.
  5. ^ Jonathan Stökl, Caroline Waerzegger (2015). Exile and Return: The Babylonian Context. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. pp. 7–11, 30, 226.
  6. ^ Encyclopaedia Judaica. Vol. 3 (2nd ed.). p. 27.
  7. ^ Peter Fibiger Bang; Walter Scheidel (2013). The Oxford Handbook of the State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Oxford University Press. pp. 184–187. ISBN 978-0-19-518831-8. Archived from the original on April 9, 2023. Retrieved January 16, 2023.
  8. ^ Abraham Malamat (1976). A History of the Jewish People. Harvard University Press. pp. 223–239. ISBN 978-0-674-39731-6.
  9. ^ Zissu, Boaz (2018). "Interbellum Judea 70-132 CE: An Archaeological Perspective". Jews and Christians in the First and Second Centuries: The Interbellum 70‒132 CE. Joshua Schwartz, Peter J. Tomson. Leiden, The Netherlands. p. 19. ISBN 978-90-04-34986-5. OCLC 988856967.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  10. ^ Erwin Fahlbusch; Geoffrey William Bromiley (2005). The Encyclopedia of Christianity. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. pp. 15–. ISBN 978-0-8028-2416-5. Archived from the original on April 9, 2023. Retrieved January 16, 2023.
  11. ^ "Heritage: Civilization and the Jews; The Uses of Adversity." Page 87. Eban, Abba Solomon. "Heritage: Civilization and the Jews." Summit Books, A Division of Simon and Schuster, Inc. Syracuse, New York: 1984. Page 87.
  12. ^ Dosick (2007), pp. 59, 60.
  13. ^ Mosk (2013), p. 143. "Encouraged to move out of the Holy Roman Empire as persecution of their communities intensified during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Ashkenazi community increasingly gravitated toward Poland."
  14. ^ Harshav, Benjamin (1999). The Meaning of Yiddish. Stanford: Stanford University Press. p. 6. "From the fourteenth and certainly by the sixteenth century, the centre of European Jewry had shifted to Poland, then ... comprising the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (including today's Byelorussia), Crown Poland, Galicia, the Ukraine and stretching, at times, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, from the approaches to Berlin to a short distance from Moscow."
  15. ^ Lewin, Rhoda G. (1979). "Stereotype and reality in the Jewish immigrant experience in Minneapolis" (PDF). Minnesota History. 46 (7): 259. Archived (PDF) from the original on July 21, 2020. Retrieved August 10, 2020.
  16. ^ "Jewish Nobel Prize Winners". jinfo.org. Archived from the original on December 24, 2018. Retrieved October 7, 2011.