Judaism is the original Abrahamic religion that spawned both Christianity and Islam. The term Judaism, however, means more than just that, encompassing not only the religion but also the ethnicity, philosophy and way of life of the Jewish people. Understanding Judaism can be a pretty confusing topic to the outside observer (indeed, failure to do so has led to centuries of resentment and mistrust), so strap in and we’ll try to get to grips with it.

First, the basics: Judaism, like Christianity and Islam, is a monotheistic religion (worshipping one all-powerful God). The Torah is Judaism’s foundational text, itself part of a larger text known as the Hebrew Bible (or Tanakh). These ancient texts are supplemented by a long oral tradition (which are themselves represented by later texts such as the Mishnah and Talmud), and all of this together is considered by Jews to be an expression of the special relationship that God established with the Jewish people in ancient times.

History of Judaism: To understand where Judaism truly began, one has to go back through the mists of time to an era before reliable historical dating existed and where reliance on myth and legend are all that remains possible. Long before ‘Judaism’ as a term of either ethnic or religious self-determination came to be used, a whole range of Semitic tribes lived in an area of the Middle East later referred to as the Fertile Crescent or Cradle of Civilisation – an area roughly encompassing modern-day Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Yes – shock – Arabs are Semitic people too.

The Hebrews were one such Semitic tribe, a nomadic people moving from place to place within the wider region. Much of our information about the history of the Hebrews comes from the Tanakh – a very old, self-determined account of the history of the Hebrews (whose descendants became known as both Israelites and Jews) and that tribe’s relationship with their God – from the story of their creation and earliest history up to the building of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in the 6th Century BCE. Christians later adopted the Jewish Tanakh as the ‘Old Testament’ of the Christian Bible.

According to the Tanakh, in ancient times the God Yaweh (later translated as Jehovah but generally referred to as ‘The Lord’) promised the Semitic patriarch Abraham that his descendants had been chosen for a special purpose and that they would inherit the lands of Israel (then known as Canaan) in return for their belief and faith in Yaweh as the one true God – belief in many gods was the norm at the time. Abraham’s many descendants included his grandson Jacob (renamed Israel by God) and great-grandson Judah (the terms Israelite and Jew emerging from this one branch of the Abrahamic family tree).

God foretold to Abraham that his descendants would be enslaved in Egypt – that enslavement came to pass when Jacob and his twelve sons (spawning the Twelve Tribes of Israel) were forced to leave Canaan during a severe famine and fell into the captivity of the Egyptian Pharaoh. After around 400 years of slavery and oppression, the Tanakh tells that the prophet Moses (of the Israelite tribe of Levi) was instructed by God to liberate all the Israelites (including the tribe of Judah) from Egypt and return them to their ancestral homeland of Canaan in a mass migration that became known as the Exodus.

During this Exodus, the story tells that Moses received ‘Ten Commandments’ directly from God setting out how the Israelites should live and worship. Moses is said to have written the Torah (the first five books of the Tanakh) during the Exodus, setting out history from God’s creation of the world (as communicated directly to Moses by God) right up until Moses himself liberates the Israelites. After forty years of leading his people through the desert, Moses is said to have died within sight of Canaan.

Upon their return to the Promised Land (which the twelve tribes now called ‘the land of Israel’), the Israelites settled in Shiloh in modern Palestine and carved up the surrounding land between them. They lived there for several hundred years until a rival Semitic tribe known as the Philistines destroyed the Israelites’ tabernacle (holiest place of worship). This attack led the Israelites to determine that they needed a permanent king to unite them, and God is said to have communicated via the prophet Samuel his selection of first Saul (of the tribe of Benjamin) and then David (of the tribe of Judah) to rule over all the Israelites. King David announced his intention to build a permanent temple and God told David that, as a reward, David’s descendants would forever hold the throne of Israel – thus the tribe of Judah came to dominate the other Israelites.

These events can now start to be roughly historically placed at around the 10th Century BCE. David and his son Solomon established the city of Jerusalem as the capital of the United Kingdom of Israel and built the First Temple there. There was later a split between the Kingdom of Israel in the north and the Kingdom of Judah in the south, and when Israel was attacked and conquered by the Assyrians in the 8th Century BCE, the tribe of Judah for all intents and purposes became the one remaining tribe of Israel.

Judah held out against invaders for a while longer, but eventually Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians in the 6th Century BCE and the First Temple was destroyed. The Jews (as the Judeans became known) were exiled to Babylon for around 100 years before the Persians conquered the Babylonians and allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem and build the Second Temple. It was during this period of exile and return that that many historians believe the present form of the Tanakh was largely compiled. It is the existence of the Tanakh – and the customs which grew up around protecting it – which helped the Jewish people preserve their history and customs and has helped ensure their survival ever since.

The Jews defended themselves for hundreds of years in numerous local battles until the Roman Empire extended its influence to the region in the 1st Century BCE, taking control of Jerusalem and renaming the wider region the Province of Judea. The controversial Jewish prophet Jesus Christ came and went, spawning the cult of Christianity which would go on to eclipse Judaism as a worldwide religion. Various Jewish revolts against the Romans were crushed over the next couple of centuries, the Second Temple was destroyed, study of the Torah was banned, and the Jews were eventually exiled from Jerusalem, becoming scattered far and wide and surviving only in small communities led by local rabbis (teachers/ community leaders).

These scattered Jewish communities were often repressed as Christianity gained more of a foothold and anti-Semitism – the hatred or mistrust of Jews – became rife (we’ll read more about the misnomer of anti-Semitism shortly). This oppression, understandably, caused many Jewish communities to become more and more inward-looking and wary of outsiders – a reaction which had the further effect of making those outsiders perceive Jewish communities as secretive and mysterious, thus increasing the suspicion they came to be held in. Because Judaism became so scattered and its practices so diverse, there are a wide variety of strains of Judaism which exist today.

Judaism Today: There are around 14 million Jews worldwide today, much less than 1% of the world’s population. About 40% of those Jews live in Israel, about 40% in the U.S. and Canada, the remainder in smaller communities throughout Europe, South America, Asia, Africa, and Australia. There are a variety of movements within modern Judaism, including Orthodox Judaism, Conservative Judaism and Liberal or Reform Judaism.

Sources of difference between these groups include their approaches to Jewish law, the authority of the Rabbinic tradition and the significance of the State of Israel. Orthodox Judaism, for example, maintains that the Torah and Jewish law are divine in origin, eternal and unalterable, and that they should be very strictly followed (even though comparatively few of the laws set out in the Tanakh remain relevant in modern society). Elsewhere, the extent of traditional practices of Jewish rituals and customs (for example prayers, attending temple, observance of holy days, Torah readings, dress codes and ‘kosher’ dietary laws) varies between Jewish communities. A typical Reform position, for example, is that Jewish law should be viewed as a set of general guidelines rather than restrictions and obligations whose observance is required.

While the majority of modern Jews remain religious, more liberal movements such as Humanistic Judaism are often non-theistic, and many Jews believe that observance of Jewish law and traditions is more important to maintaining their cultural identity than a strict belief in God. Authority on Jewish theological and legal matters is not vested in any one person or organization, but within the sacred texts and the rabbis and scholars who interpret them, which again has led to this wide variety in interpretation and observance.

Despite their comparatively small numbers and the outright hostility they have faced throughout their history, Judaism has been hugely influential to human development. The Hebrew God depicted in the Torah, unlike other ancient gods worshipped in the Near East, was uniquely solitary and concerned with the actions of humans as opposed to interacting with other gods. This is often cited by academics as beginning the concept of ethical monotheism – the belief in a God that actively guides human behaviour and shows us the way. But in addition to spawning Christianity and Islam, many aspects of Judaism have also directly or indirectly influenced secular western ethics and law and continue to do so to this day.

So how did a private covenant between a small nomadic tribe and their God in ancient times come to affect so many people and lead to more than half the world’s population following one of the Abrahamic religions? To learn more about what binds and separates these religions, jump to Chapter 69: Abrahamic Religions

To learn more about the sacred texts of the Tanakh, also known to Christians as The Old Testament, jump to Chapter 70: Hebrew Bible

Finally, and with respect, it can be strongly argued that religious legend and factual history have been muddled up for far too long in far too many people’s minds. To try to impartially separate fact from fiction, jump to Chapter 71: History of the World