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For the Jewish religion, see Judaism. For other uses, see Jew (disambiguation).
A Jew (Hebrew: יְהוּדִי, Yehudi (sl.); יְהוּדִים, Yehudim (pl.); Ladino: ג׳ודיו, Djudio (sl.); ג׳ודיוס, Djudios (pl.); Yiddish: ייִד, Yid (sl.); ייִדן, Yidn (pl.))According to the The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition (2000): "It is widely recognized that the attributive use of the noun Jew, in phrases such as Jew lawyer or Jew ethics, is both vulgar and highly offensive. In such contexts Jewish is the only acceptable possibility. Some people, however, have become so wary of this construction that they have extended the stigma to any use of Jew as a noun, a practice that carries risks of its own. In a sentence such as There are now several Jews on the council, which is unobjectionable, the substitution of a circumlocution like Jewish people or persons of Jewish background may in itself cause offense for seeming to imply that Jew has a negative connotation when used as a noun. "Jew", The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition (2000). is a member of the Jewish people, an ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the ancient Middle East. The ethnicity and the religion of Judaism, the traditional faith of the Jewish nation, are strongly interrelated, and converts to Judaism are both included and have been absorbed within the Jewish people throughout the millennia.
The Jews have experienced a long history of persecution in many different lands, resulting in a population that has fluctuated both in numbers and distribution over the centuries. Today, most authorities place the number of Jews between 13 and 14 million, representing 0.2% of the current estimated world population. According to the Jewish Agency, for the year 2007 there are 13.2 million Jews worldwide; 5.4 million (40.9%) in Israel, 5.3 million (40.2%) in the United States, and the remainder distributed in communities of varying sizes around the world.Pfeffer, Anshel. Jewish Agency: 13.2 million Jews worldwide on eve of Rosh Hashanah, 5768. Haaretz Daily Newspaper Israel. Retrieved on 2007-09-13. These numbers include all those who consider themselves Jews whether or not affiliated, and, with the exception of Israel\'s Jewish population, do not include those who do not consider themselves Jews or who are not Jewish by halakha. The total world Jewish population, however, is difficult to measure. In addition to halakhic considerations, there are secular, political, and ancestral identification factors in defining who is a Jew that increase the figure considerably.
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The origin of the Jews is traditionally dated to around the second millennium BCE to the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
The Merneptah Stele, dated to 1200 BCE, is one of the earliest archaeological records of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel, where Judaism, possibly the first monotheistic religion, developed over a period of thousands of years. According to Biblical accounts, the Jews enjoyed periods of self-determination first under the Biblical judges from Othniel Ben Kenaz through Samson, then circa 1000 BCE King David established Jerusalem as the capital of the United Kingdom of Israel and Judah, also known as the United Monarchy, and from there ruled the Twelve Tribes of Israel.
Early elaborated reconstruction of the Temple of Solomon.
In 970 BCE, David\'s son Solomon became king of Israel.Michael, E.; Sharon O. Rusten, Philip Comfort, and Walter A. Elwell (2005-02-28). The Complete Book of When and Where: In The Bible And Throughout History. Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 20-1, 67. ISBN 0842355081. Within a decade, Solomon began to build the Holy Temple known as the First Temple. Upon Solomon\'s death (c. 930 BCE), the ten northern tribes split off to form the Kingdom of Israel. In 722 BCE the Assyrians conquered the Kingdom of Israel and exiled its Jews, starting a Jewish diaspora. At a time of limited mobility and travel, Jews became some of the first and most visible immigrants. Then as now, immigrants were treated with suspicion.
The First Temple period ended around 586 BCE as the Babylonians conquered the Kingdom of Judah and destroyed the Jewish Temple. In 538 BCE, after fifty years of Babylonian captivity, Persian King Cyrus the Great permitted the Jews to return to rebuild Jerusalem and the holy temple. Construction of the Second Temple, was completed in 516 BCE during the reign of Darius the Great seventy years after the destruction of the First Temple.Sicker, Martin (2001-01-30). Between Rome and Jerusalem: 300 Years of Roman-Judaean Relations. Praeger Publishers, 2. ISBN 0275971406. Zank, Michael. Center of the Persian Satrapy of Judah (539-323). Boston University. Retrieved on 2007-01-22. When Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire, the Land of Israel fell under Hellenistic Greek control, eventually falling to the Ptolemaic dynasty who lost it to the Seleucids. The Seleucid attempt to recast Jerusalem as a Hellenized polis came to a head in 168 BCE with the successful Maccabean revolt of Mattathias the High Priest and his five sons against Antiochus Epiphanes, and their establishment of the Hasmonean Kingdom in 152 BCE with Jerusalem again as its capital.Schiffman, Lawrence H. (1991). From Text to Tradition: A History of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism. Ktav Publishing House, 60-79. ISBN 0-88125-371-5. The Hasmonean Kingdom lasted over one hundred years, but then as Rome became stronger it installed Herod as a Jewish client king. The Herodian Kingdom also lasted over a hundred years. Defeats by the Jews in the First revolt in 70 CE, the first of the Jewish-Roman Wars and the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE notably contributed to the numbers and geography of the diaspora, as significant numbers of the Jewish population of the Land of Israel were expelled and sold into slavery throughout the Roman Empire. Since then, Jews have lived in almost every country of the world, primarily in Europe and the greater Middle East, surviving discrimination, oppression, poverty, and even genocide (see: anti-Semitism, The Holocaust), with occasional periods of cultural, economic, and individual prosperity in various locations (such as Islamic Spain and Portugal, Emancipating Germany and Poland, or the contemporary Liberal Democracies of the United States, Australia or United Kingdom).
Until the late 18th century, the terms Jews and adherents of Judaism were practically synonymous, and Judaism was the prime binding factor of the Jewish people, regardless of the degree of adherence. Following the Age of Enlightenment and its Jewish counterpart Haskalah, a gradual transformation occurred during which many Jews came to view being a member of the Jewish nation as separate from adhering to the Jewish faith.
The Hebrew noun "Yehudi" (plural Yehudim) originally referred to the tribe of Judah. Later, when the Northern Kingdom of Israel split from the Southern Kingdom of Israel, the Southern Kingdom of Israel began to refer to itself by the name of its predominant tribe, or as the Kingdom of Judah . The term originally referred to the people of the southern kingdom, although the term B\'nei Yisrael (Israelites) was still used for both groups. After the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom leaving the southern kingdom as the only Israelite state, the word Yehudim gradually came to refer to people of the Jewish faith as a whole, rather than those specifically from the tribe or Kingdom of Judah. The English word Jew is ultimately derived from Yehudi (see Etymology). Its first use in the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) to refer to the Jewish people as a whole is in the Book of Esther.
There are many different views as to the origin of the English language word Jew. The most common view is that the Middle English word Jew is from the Old French giu, earlier juieu, from the Latin iudeus from the Greek Ioudaios (Ἰουδαῖος). The Latin simply means Judaean, from the land of Judaea. The Hebrew word for Jew, יהודי , is pronounced ye-hoo-DEE.
The etymological equivalent is in use in other languages, e.g., "Jude" in German, "juif" in French, "jøde," in Danish, etc., but derivations of the word "Hebrew" are also in use to describe a Jewish person, e.g., in Spanish (hebreo), in Italian (Ebreo), and Russian: Еврей, (Yevrey). The German word "Jude" is pronounced yoodeh and is the origin of the word Yiddish. (See Jewish ethnonyms for a full overview.)
Ashkenazi Jews of late 19th century Eastern Europe portrayed in Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur (1878), by Maurycy Gottlieb.
Judaism shares some of the characteristics of a nation, an ethnicity, a religion, and a culture, making the definition of who is a Jew vary slightly depending on whether a religious or national approach to identity is used.Weiner, Rebecca (2007). Who is a Jew?. Jewish Virtual Library. Retrieved on 2007-10-06.
Generally, in modern secular usage, Jews include three groups: people who were born to a Jewish family, regardless of whether or not they follow the religion, those who have some Jewish ancestral background or lineage (sometimes including those who do not have strictly matrilineal descent), and people without any Jewish ancestral background or lineage who have formally converted to Judaism, and therefore are followers of the religion.Fowler, Jeaneane D. (1997). World Religions: An Introduction for Students. Sussex Academic Press, 7. ISBN 1898723486. At times conversion has accounted for a substantial part of Jewish population growth. In the first century of the Christian era, for example, population more than doubled, from 4 to 8-10 million within the confines of the Roman Empire, in good part as a result of a wave of conversionBauer, Yehuda. "Problems of Contemporary Anti-Semitism", 2003, p.2 retrieved February 24, 2008.
Historical definitions of Jewish identity have traditionally been based on halakhic definitions of matrilineal descent, and halakhic conversions. Historical definitions of who is a Jew date back to the codification of the oral tradition into the Babylonian Talmud. Interpretations of sections of the Tanach, such as Deuteronomy 7:1-5, by learned Jewish sages, are used as a warning against intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews because "[the non-Jewish male spouse] will cause your child to turn away from Me and they will worship the gods of others." Leviticus 24:10 says that the son in a marriage between a Hebrew woman and an Egyptian man is "of the community of Israel." This contrasts with Ezra 10:2-3, where Israelites returning from Babylon, vow to put aside their gentile wives and their children. Since the Haskalah, these halakhic interpretations of Jewish identity have been challenged.
A Bar Mitzvah in the Western Wall Tunnel in Jerusalem, Israel.
Within the world\'s Jewish population, which is considered a single self-identifying ethnic group, there are distinct ethnic divisions, most of which are primarily the result of geographic branching from an originating Israelite population, and subsequent independent evolutions.
An array of Jewish communities were established by Jewish settlers in various places around the Old World, often at great distances from one another resulting in practical, sometimes permanent, isolation from other Jewish communities. During the millennia of the Jewish diaspora the communities would evolve under the influence of their local environments; political, cultural, natural and populational. Today, manifestation of these differences among the Jewish ethnic division can be observed in Jewish cultural expressions of each community, Jewish linguistic diversity, and admixture among Jewish populations.
Historically, the ethnic divisions among Jews have been dominated by two major groups: the Ashkenazim, or "Germans" (Ashkenaz meaning "Germany" in Medieval Hebrew, denoting their Central European base), and the Sephardim, or "Spaniards" (Sefarad meaning "Spain" or "Iberia" in Hebrew, denoting their Spanish and Portuguese base). The Mizrahim, or "Easterners" (Mizrach being "East" in Hebrew), that is Middle Eastern, Central Asian, Caucasusian, and North African Jews, could constitute a third major group.
Smaller Jewish groups include the Indian Jews including the Bene Israel, Bnei Menashe, Cochin Jews and Bene Ephraim; the Romaniotes of Greece; the Italkim or Bené Roma of Italy; the Teimanim from the Yemen and Oman; various African Jews, including most numerously the Beta Israel of Ethiopia; and Chinese Jews, most notably the Kaifeng Jews, as well as various other distinct but now extinct communities.
The division between all these groups are rough and their boundaries aren’t solid. The Mizrahim for example, are a heterogeneous collection of North African, Central Asian, Caucasian and Middle Eastern Jewish communities which are often as unrelated to each other as they are to any of the earlier mentioned Jewish groups. In modern usage, however, the Mizrahim are also termed Sephardi due to similar styles of liturgy, despite independent evolutions from Sephardim proper. Thus, among Mizrahim there are Iraqi Jews, Egyptian Jews, Berber Jews, Lebanese Jews, Kurdish Jews, Libyan Jews, Syrian Jews, Bukharian Jews, Mountain Jews, Georgian Jews and various others. The Teimanim from the Yemen and Oman are sometimes included, although their style of liturgy is unique and they differ in respect to the admixture found among them to that found in Mizrahim. Additionally, there is a differentiation made between the pre-existing Middle Eastern and North African Jewish communities as distinct from the descendants of those Sephardi migrants who established themselves in the Middle East and North Africa after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain by the Catholic Monarchs in 1492, and a few years later from the expulsion decreed in Portugal.
Despite this diversity, Ashkenazi Jews represent the bulk of modern Jewry, with at least 70% of Jews worldwide (and up to 90% prior to World War II and the Holocaust). As a result of their emigration from Europe during the wartime periods, Ashkenazim also represent the overwhelming majority of Jews in the New World continents and in countries previously without native Jewish communities, such as the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Argentina, Australia, Brazil and South Africa. In France, emigration of Mizrahim from North Africa has led them to outnumber pre-existing European Jews. Only in Israel is the Jewish population representative of all groups, a melting pot independent of each group\'s proportion within the overall world Jewish population.
There are an estimated 13 million Jews worldwide.Data based on a study by Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI): "World Jewry was estimated at 13,085,000 at the beginning of 2006, an overall increase of 0.4% over 2005." See Jewish people near zero growth by Tovah Lazaroff, Jerusalem Post, June 24, 2004. The table below lists countries with significant populations. Please note that these populations represent low-end estimates of the worldwide Jewish population, accounting for around 0.2% of the world\'s population.
| Country or Region | Jewish population | Total Population | % Jewish | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 5,300,000 to 6,155,000 | 301,469,000 | 1.8%-2.0 | (est.)For the 5.3 million figure, data based on official 2001 survey as told in the Jerusalem Post. See [1] (Updated to May 2, 2006 ).The authors of this study wrote that,"While we believe that the Jewish population of Israel will eventually overtake the Jewish population of the U.S.. that is unlikely to have happened as of 2006."The 6.155 million total is based on a 2003 US census compilation of estimates from local Jewish federations. | |
| Israel | 5,393,400 | 7,116,700 | 75.8% | Population, by religion. Israeli central bureau of statistics (2007). Retrieved on 2007-11-13. | |
| Europe | 2,000,000 | 710,000,000 | 0.3% | (less than) | |
| Belgium | 30,000 | 10,419,000 | 0.3% | (est.) | |
| France | 494,000 | 64,102,140 | 0.8% | (est.) | |
| Russia | 228,000 | 142,400,000 | 0.15% | (Territory of the former Soviet Union. (est.) Some estimates are much higher.)The US State Department Religious Freedom Report [2] estimates the number of Jews in Russia alone at 600,000 to 1 million. | |
| United Kingdom | 267,000 | 60,609,153 | 0.4% | (2001 census) | |
| Germany | 220,000 | 82,310,000 | 0.3% | (2004 est.), over 100,000 who are members of a synagogue | |
| Ukraine | 103,591 | 46,481,000 | 0.2% | (2001 Census)MacIsaac, Daniel. "Ukraine’s Jews say fear led to low numbers in recent census", ACROSS THE FORMER SOVIET UNION, JTA, 2003-02-06. Retrieved on 2007-01-10. (English) 250,000 to 500,000 (Local Jewish agency estimate) | |
| Hungary | 80,000 to 100,000 | 10,053,000 | 0.8-1% | Jewish community in Hungary Hungarian Neolog Jews are part of the Hungarian nation. | |
| Italy | 30,000 | 58,883,958 | 0.05% | (Jewish communities est.) | |
| Canada | 371,000 | 32,874,400 | 1.1% | (est.) | |
| Turkey | 30,000 | 72,600,000 | 0.04% | (2001 census) | |
| Argentina | 250,000 | 39,921,833 | 0.6% | (est.)Jewish Virtual Library, JewFAQ | |
| Brazil | 130,000 | 188,078,261 | 0.07% | (est.) | |
| South Africa | 106,000 | 47,432,000 | 0.2% | (est.) | |
| Peru | 2,200 | 28,674,757 | 0.008% | (est.) | |
| Australia | 126,000 | 20,788,357 | 0.6% | (est.)Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIMA), 1996 Census | |
| Asia (excl. Israel) | 50,000 | 3,900,000,000 | 0.001% | (est.) | |
| Iran | 20,405 | 68,467,413 | 0.03% | (est.) | |
| Mexico | 40,000–50,000 | 108,700,000 | 0.04% | (est.) | |
| Total | 15,871,000 | 6,453,628,000 | 0.25% | (est.) |
David Ben Gurion (First Prime Minister of Israel) publicly pronouncing the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948
Israel, the Jewish nation-state, is the only country in which Jews make up a majority of the citizens. Israel was established as an independent democratic state on May 14, 1948.Israel. The World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency (2007-06-19). Retrieved on 2007-07-20. Of the 120 members in its parliament, the Knesset,The Electoral System in Israel. The Knesset. Retrieved on 2007-08-08. currently, 12 members of the Knesset are Arab citizens of Israel, most representing Arab political parties and one of Israel\'s Supreme Court judges is a Palestinian Arab.Country\'s Report Israel. Freedom House. Between 1948 and 1958, the Jewish population rose from 800,000 to two million.Population, by Religion and Population Group. Israel Central Bureau of Statistics (2006). Retrieved on 2007-08-07. Currently, Jews account for 76.4% of the Israeli population, or 5,600,000 of the citizens. The early years of the state of Israel, were marked by the mass immigration of Holocaust survivors and Jews fleeing Arab lands.Dekmejian 1975, p. 247. "And most [Oriental-Sephardic Jews] came... because of Arab persecution resulting from the very attempt to establish a Jewish state in Palestine." Israel also has a large population of Ethiopian Jews, many of whom were airlifted to Israel in the late 1980s and early 1990s.airlifted tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews. Retrieved on July 7, 2005. Between 1974 and 1979 nearly 227,258 immigrants arrived in Israel about half from the Soviet Union.History of Dissident Movement in the USSR by Ludmila Alekseyeva. Vilnius, 1992 (in Russian) This period also saw an increase in immigration to Israel from Western Europe, Latin America, and the United StatesGoldstein (1995) p. 24 A trickle of immigrants from other communities has also arrived, including Indian Jews and others, as well as some descendants of Ashkenazi Holocaust survivors who had settled in countries such as the United States, Argentina and South Africa. Some Jews have emigrated from Israel elsewhere, due to economic problems or disillusionment with political conditions and the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict. Jewish Israeli emigrants are known as yordim.
The waves of immigration to the United States and elsewhere at the turn of the nineteenth century and later due to various causes, including the pogroms in Russia, the massacre of European Jewry during the Holocaust, and the foundation of the state of Israel (and subsequent Jewish exodus from Arab lands), all resulted in substantial shifts in the population centers of world Jewry by the end the twentieth century.
In this Rosh Hashana greeting card from the early 1900s, Russian Jews, packs in hand, gaze at the American relatives beckoning them to the United States. Over two million Jews would flee the pogroms of the Russian Empire to the safety of the US from 1881-1924.
Currently, the largest Jewish community in the world is located in the United States, with almost 5.7 million Jews. Elsewhere in the Americas, there are also large Jewish populations in Canada, Argentina and Brazil, and smaller populations in Mexico(45,0002000 Tabulados de Religión), Uruguay, Venezuela, Chile, and several other countries (see History of the Jews in Latin America).
Western Europe\'s largest Jewish community can be found in France, home to 600,000 Jews, the majority of whom are immigrants or refugees from North African Arab countries such as Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia (or their descendants). There are over 265,000 Jews in the United Kingdom. In Eastern Europe, there are anywhere from 500,000 to over two million Jews living in the former Soviet Union, but exact figures are difficult to establish. The fastest-growing Jewish community in the world, outside Israel, is the one in Germany, especially in Berlin, its capital. Tens of thousands of Jews from the former Eastern Bloc have settled in Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The Arab countries of North Africa and the Middle East were home to around 900,000 Jews in 1945. Fueled by anti-ZionismThe Ingathering of the Exiles. Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. after the founding of Israel, systematic persecution caused almost all of these Jews to flee to Israel, North America, and Europe in the 1950s (see Jewish exodus from Arab lands). Today, around 8,000 Jews remain in Arab nations. Iran is home to around 25,000 Jews, down from a population of 100,000 Jews before the 1979 revolution. After the revolution some of the Iranian Jews emigrated to Israel or Europe but most of them emigrated (with their non-Jewish Iranian compatriots) to the United States (especially Los Angeles).Littman (1979), p. 5.
Outside Europe, Asia and the Americas, significant Jewish populations exist in Australia and South Africa.
Since at least the time of the ancient Greeks, a proportion of Jews have assimilated into the wider non-Jewish society around them, by either choice or force, ceasing to practice Judaism and losing their Jewish identity. Some Jewish communities, for example the Kaifeng Jews of China, have disappeared entirely, but assimilation has remained relatively low over much of the past millennium, as Jews were often not allowed to integrate with the wider communities in which they lived. The advent of the Jewish Enlightenment (see Haskalah) of the 1700s and the subsequent emancipation of the Jewish populations of Europe and America in the 1800s, changed the situation, allowing Jews to increasingly participate in, and become part of, secular society. The result has been a growing trend of assimilation, as Jews marry non-Jewish spouses and stop participating in the Jewish community. Rates of interreligious marriage vary widely: In the United States, they are just under 50%,NJPS: Intermarriage: Defining and Calculating Intermarriage. Retrieved on July 7, 2005. in the United Kingdom, around 50%, and in Australia and Mexico, as low as 10%,World Jewish Congress Online. Retrieved on July 7, 2005.The Virtual Jewish History Tour - Mexico. Retrieved on July 7, 2005. and in France, they may be as high as 75%. In the United States, only about a third of children from intermarriages affiliate themselves with Jewish religious practice. The result is that most countries in the Diaspora have steady or slightly declining religiously Jewish populations as Jews continue to assimilate into the countries in which they live.
Jews (identifiable by the distinctive hats that they were required to wear) being killed by Christian knights. French Bible illustration from 1255.
Throughout history, many rulers, empires and nations have oppressed their Jewish populations or sought to eliminate them entirely. Methods employed ranged from expulsion to outright genocide; within nations, often the threat of these extreme methods was sufficient to silence dissent. The history of antisemitism includes the First Crusade which resulted in the massacre of Jews; the Spanish Inquisition (led by Torquemada) and the Portuguese Inquisition, with their persecution and Auto de fé against the New Christians and Marrano Jews; the Bohdan Chmielnicki Cossack massacres in Ukraine; the Pogroms backed by the Russian Tsars; as well as expulsions from Spain, Portugal, England, France, Germany, and other countries in which the Jews had settled. The persecution reached a peak in Adolf Hitler\'s Final Solution, which led to the Holocaust and the slaughter of approximately 6 million Jews from 1942 to 1945.
According to James Carroll, "Jews accounted for 10% of the total population of the Roman Empire. By that ratio, if other factors had not intervened, there would be 200 million Jews in the world today, instead of something like 13 million."Carroll, James. Constantine\'s Sword (Houghton Mifflin, 2001) ISBN 0-395-77927-8 p.26 Of course, there are many other complex demographic factors involved; the rate of population growth, migration, assimilation, and conversion could all have played major roles in the current size of the global Jewish population.
Israel is the only country with a consistently growing Jewish population due to natural population increase, though the Jewish populations of other countries in Europe and North America have recently increased due to immigration. In the Diaspora, in almost every country the Jewish population in general is either declining or steady, but Orthodox and Haredi Jewish communities, whose members often shun birth control for religious reasons, have experienced rapid population growth, with rates near 4% per year for Haredi Jews in Israel, and similar rates in other countries[citation needed].
Orthodox and Conservative Judaism discourage proselytization to non-Jews, but many Jewish groups have tried to reach out to the assimilated Jewish communities of the Diaspora in order to increase the number of Jews. Additionally, while in principle Reform Judaism favors seeking new members for the faith, this position has not translated into active proselytism, instead taking the form of an effort to reach out to non-Jewish spouses of intermarried couples. There is also a trend of Orthodox movements pursuing secular Jews in order to give them a stronger Jewish identity so there is less chance of intermarriage. As a result of the efforts by these and other Jewish groups over the past twenty-five years, there has been a trend of secular Jews becoming more religiously observant, known as the Baal Teshuva movement, though the demographic implications of the trend are unknown. Additionally, there is also a growing movement of Jews by Choice by gentiles who make the decision to head in the direction of becoming Jews.
Hebrew is the liturgical language of Judaism (termed lashon ha-kodesh, "the holy tongue"), the language in which the Hebrew scriptures (Tanakh) were composed, and the daily speech of the Jewish people for centuries. By the fifth century BCE, Aramaic, a closely related tongue, joined Hebrew as the spoken language in Judea.Grintz, Jehoshua M. "Hebrew as the Spoken and Written Language in the Last Days of the Second Temple." Journal of Biblical Literature. March, 1960. By the third century BCE, Jews of the diaspora were speaking Greek. Modern Hebrew is now one of the two official languages of the State of Israel along with Arabic.
Hebrew was revived as a spoken language by Eliezer ben Yehuda, who arrived in Palestine in 1881. It hadn\'t been used as a mother tongue since Tannaic times. For over sixteen centuries Hebrew was used almost exclusively as a liturgical language, and as the language in which most books had been written on Judaism, with a few speaking only Hebrew on the Sabbath.Parfitt, T. V. "The Use of Hebrew in Palestine 1800–1822." Journal of Semitic Studies , 1972. For centuries, Jews worldwide have spoken the local or dominant languages of the regions they migrated to, often developing distinctive dialectal forms or branching off as independent languages. Yiddish is the Judæo-German language developed by Ashkenazi Jews who migrated to Central Europe, and Ladino is the Judæo-Spanish language developed by Sephardic Jews who migrated to the Iberian peninsula. Due to many factors, including the impact of the Holocaust on European Jewry, the Jewish exodus from Arab lands, and widespread emigration from other Jewish communities around the world, ancient and distinct Jewish languages of several communities, including Gruzinic, Judæo-Arabic, Judæo-Berber, Krymchak, Judæo-Malayalam and many others, have largely fallen out of use.
The three most commonly spoken languages among Jews today are English, modern Hebrew, and Russian. Some Romance languages, such as French and Spanish, are also widely used.
Judaism guides its adherents in both practice and belief, and has been called not only a religion, but also a "way of life," Neusner (1991) p. 64 which has made drawing a clear distinction between Judaism, Jewish culture, and Jewish identity rather difficult.
Throughout history, in eras and places as diverse as the ancient Hellenic world, in Europe before and after The Age of Enlightenment (see Haskalah), in Islamic Spain and Portugal, in North Africa and the Middle East, India and China, or the contemporary United States and Israel, cultural phenomena have developed that are in some sense characteristically Jewish without being at all specifically religious. Some factors in this come from within Judaism, others from the interaction of Jews or specific communities of Jews with their surroundings, others from the inner social and cultural dynamics of the community, as opposed to from the religion itself. This phenomenon has led to considerably different Jewish cultures unique to their own communities, each as authentically Jewish as the next.
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