Judaism: A People, a Covenant and a Conversation Across 3,000 Years

Follows: The World's Religions, One Page Each and How the Sacred Texts Were Written. Companion pieces: the Religions long reads on Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Islam, and the Histories long read on Israel, which tells the story of the modern state.

Open a page of the Babylonian Talmud in almost any edition printed in the last five hundred years and you are looking at a conversation laid out in space. In the middle sits a short passage of the Mishnah, a law code edited around 200 CE. Wrapped around it is the Gemara, the record of rabbis arguing about that passage over the following three centuries, in Aramaic, often without reaching a verdict. In the margins sit the comments of Rashi, who lived in 11th-century France, and of the Tosafot, French scholars of the following generations, who argue with him. Around those, in later editions, are cross-references and glosses from the 16th century and after. The layout was fixed by a Christian printer, Daniel Bomberg, in Venice between 1520 and 1523, and almost every edition since has kept his page numbers, so a student in Jerusalem, Brooklyn or Buenos Aires can say "Bava Metzia 59b" and everyone at the table opens to the same page.

That page is the best single picture of Judaism there is. It is a tradition in which the questions are kept, the minority opinions are written down next to the majority, and a reader is expected to join in.

This long read follows that conversation from its beginnings to 2026: the Hebrew Bible as the tradition reads it and as historians date it; the two Temples and the exile; the rabbis who rebuilt Judaism after Rome destroyed Jerusalem; the medieval worlds of Babylon, Spain, France and Poland; Kabbalah; persecution and refuge; Hasidism and the Enlightenment; the modern movements; the Holocaust; Zionism as a religious and secular question; what a Jewish day, week, year and life look like; what Jews have thought about God, law and ethics; antisemitism as a historical phenomenon; and the numbers and open questions of today.

A note on approach: this piece describes Judaism as its own traditions understand it and sets that beside what historians and archaeologists say, keeping the two distinct and treating both with respect. Jews disagree among themselves about almost every question here, and the main positions are described as their holders would describe them. The modern State of Israel's politics and its conflict with the Palestinians belong to the Histories long read on Israel; this piece touches the state only where it bears on Jewish religion and peoplehood.

In this long read

1. The story the tradition tells
2. What historians and archaeologists say
3. Kings, the First Temple and exile (c. 1000–539 BCE)
4. The Second Temple and its sects (539 BCE–70 CE)
5. After the fall: the rabbis, the Mishnah and the Talmud (70–c. 600 CE)
6. Medieval worlds: Babylon, Spain, France and the codes (c. 600–1600)
7. Kabbalah: the hidden Torah
8. Persecution, expulsion and refuge (1096–1903)
9. Hasidim, their opponents, and the Enlightenment (1700–1900)
10. The modern movements
11. The Holocaust (1933–1945)
12. Zionism: a religious and a secular question
13. Living it: the day, the week, the year, a life
14. Thinking it: God, law and ethics
15. Antisemitism: what it is and how it has changed
16. Judaism today: numbers and open questions

Part 1 — The story the tradition tells

Jewish tradition begins its own story with a man told to leave home. "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto the land that I will show thee. And I will make of thee a great nation" (Genesis 12:1–2, JPS 1917). Abraham obeys, and God makes a covenant, a binding agreement, with him and his descendants, marked in the flesh by circumcision on the eighth day (Genesis 17:10–12).

His grandson Jacob wrestles through a night with a mysterious stranger and receives a new name: "Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel; for thou hast striven with God and with men, and hast prevailed" (Genesis 32:29). The people are named after him, the children of Israel, and many Jews have found it fitting that their name means something like "one who struggles with God".

Jacob's twelve sons become twelve tribes. Famine takes them to Egypt, where their descendants are enslaved. God calls Moses, reveals the divine name ("I AM THAT I AM", Exodus 3:14), and through plagues and the parting of the sea brings the people out. At Mount Sinai, God offers the covenant to the whole nation: "ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation" (Exodus 19:6). There, the tradition holds, God gave the Torah: the Ten Commandments and the whole body of law and teaching contained in the five books of Moses. After forty years in the wilderness, the people enter the land of Canaan under Joshua.

Two Torahs

Rabbinic Judaism adds a crucial idea: at Sinai Moses received not one Torah but two. The Written Torah is the five books. The Oral Torah is the body of explanation needed to live them out: what counts as "work" on the Sabbath, how to write a divorce document, what "an eye for an eye" means in practice (the rabbis said: monetary compensation). The Mishnah opens its tractate of ethical teachings with a chain of transmission: "Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly" (Pirkei Avot 1:1), and from them to the rabbis. On this view, the rabbis' debates are not inventions but the unfolding of what Sinai always contained.

The Hebrew Bible

The Jewish scripture is the Tanakh, an acronym of its three parts:

Jews count these as 24 books. Christians call the same Hebrew books, ordered differently, the Old Testament; Catholic and Orthodox Bibles add others. In Jewish life the Torah is supreme: it is handwritten on parchment scrolls by trained scribes, kept in an ark in every synagogue, and read aloud in full in a yearly cycle.

In Jewish tradition, Sinai is not only an event in the past. Every generation is meant to stand there again.

Part 2 — What historians and archaeologists say

Modern scholarship asks a different question: not where did this text come from? but how did it reach the form we have? Its answers are not the tradition's, and it is worth being clear about which claims are evidence and which are debates.

Who wrote the Torah?

From the 18th century, scholars noticed doublets (two creation stories, two versions of the flood woven together), different names for God, and shifts in style. In 1878 the German scholar Julius Wellhausen gave the classic form of the documentary hypothesis: the Torah combines four once-separate sources, known by letters:

That model was almost universally accepted for most of the 20th century. Since the 1970s it has broken apart. Scholars such as John Van Seters, Hans Heinrich Schmid and Rolf Rendtorff argued that "J" is much later, from the exile or after, and that "E" barely exists. Many European scholars now prefer supplementary or fragmentary models, in which the Torah grew by expansion and editing of smaller units. A revised neo-documentary school, especially in North America and Israel, defends continuous sources. Most scholars now agree on one point: the Torah reached its final form in the Persian period, roughly 539–333 BCE, built from older material.

What the ground shows

Archaeology gives some fixed points.

The live debates

The Exodus. Most mainstream scholars do not accept the Exodus account as a historical record: Egyptian sources do not mention it, and the Sinai desert has yielded no trace of a large population wandering for forty years. Many think the story preserves a memory of something smaller, perhaps a group that escaped Egypt and later joined the people of Canaan, and that most Israelites emerged from the population of Canaan itself.

David and Solomon. Here the arguments are fiercest. "Minimalists" (such as the so-called Copenhagen School) doubt that much of the Bible's account of the united kingdom is historical. Israel Finkelstein argues for a "low chronology" in which David ruled a modest chiefdom and the great buildings attributed to Solomon came later. Others, such as William Dever and the excavators of Khirbet Qeiyafa, a fortified town dated around 1000 BCE, argue that the evidence fits an early state in Judah. Few scholars now defend the Bible's picture of a vast Solomonic empire, and few deny that David's dynasty existed.

How believers relate to all this

Jews respond in different ways, and each response has a long intellectual history.

• Most Orthodox Jews hold that the Torah was given by God to Moses, word for word (one of Maimonides' thirteen principles). Many Orthodox scholars engage archaeology closely and reject the source theories, or hold that historical questions do not touch the Torah's authority.
• Conservative/Masorti Judaism has generally accepted critical scholarship while holding that the Torah, however it was written, carries divine authority through the covenant and the community's interpretation of it.
• Reform and Reconstructionist Jews generally accept the scholarly picture and understand the Torah as a human response to the divine, inspired rather than dictated.

Scholarship can tell you how a text was assembled. It cannot tell you whether God speaks through it. Jews have argued about the second question for a very long time, and do not need the first one settled to do so.

Part 3 — Kings, the First Temple and exile (c. 1000–539 BCE)

The Bible describes a united monarchy under Saul, David and Solomon, with Solomon building the First Temple in Jerusalem. After Solomon, the kingdom split in two: Israel in the north, with its capital at Samaria, and Judah in the south, with Jerusalem and the Temple. Historians accept the two kingdoms as real; the north is attested in Assyrian and Moabite records, and from the 9th century BCE onwards the biblical and external sources increasingly agree.

The prophets

This was the age of the great prophets: Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah. Their message mixed warning and hope. They denounced idolatry, but just as fiercely they denounced the rich who cheated the poor, the courts that took bribes, and the worship of people who oppressed their neighbours. Micah's summary has never been bettered: "It hath been told thee, O man, what is good, and what the LORD doth require of thee: only to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God" (Micah 6:8, JPS 1917). Isaiah imagined a time when nations "shall beat their swords into plowshares" (Isaiah 2:4).

Two catastrophes

The northern kingdom fell to Assyria around 720 BCE; many of its people were deported, and the "ten lost tribes" entered legend. Judah survived as a small kingdom. In the late 7th century, King Josiah carried out a sweeping religious reform after, according to 2 Kings 22, a "book of the law" was found in the Temple; he centralised all worship in Jerusalem. Many scholars connect that book with an early form of Deuteronomy.

Then Babylon rose. Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem in 597 BCE and deported the king and many of the elite; in 587 or 586 BCE he destroyed the city and the Temple and deported more. The Bible's poetry of grief comes from here:

"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion… How shall we sing the LORD's song in a foreign land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning." (Psalm 137:1–5, JPS 1917)

Why the exile mattered

The exile could have ended the people, as it ended many others. Instead, many historians think, it was the crucible in which Judaism as a religion of a book took shape. Without the Temple, the exiles gathered their traditions, edited and collected their texts, and kept the Sabbath, circumcision and the dietary laws as signs of who they were. A God who could be worshipped in Babylon was not the god of one hill but, as the later chapters of Isaiah insist, the God of all the earth.

When Cyrus of Persia conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, he let the exiles return. The Book of Ezra quotes his decree: "All the kingdoms of the earth hath the LORD, the God of heaven, given me; and He hath charged me to build Him a house in Jerusalem" (Ezra 1:2, JPS 1917). Cyrus's own clay cylinder, found in Babylon, credits Marduk, Babylon's god, and speaks of restoring Mesopotamian sanctuaries without mentioning Judeans; most historians read both texts as Cyrus's general policy of restoring local cults, seen by each people in its own terms. Isaiah 45:1 goes further and calls this Persian king God's "anointed".

Part 4 — The Second Temple and its sects (539 BCE–70 CE)

Many exiles stayed in Babylon, which remained a great centre of Jewish life for well over a thousand years. Those who returned rebuilt the Second Temple, which by the Bible's account was ready for consecration around 516 BCE. Under the leaders Ezra and Nehemiah, the Torah was read publicly and accepted as the law of the community.

Greeks, Maccabees and Romans

Alexander the Great conquered the region in 332 BCE, and Greek culture flowed in. In Alexandria, the largest Jewish community outside the land translated the Torah into Greek in the 3rd century BCE: the Septuagint, through which most of the ancient world would come to know the Bible.

In 168–167 BCE the Seleucid king Antiochus IV tried to suppress Jewish practice in Judea and set up pagan worship in the Temple. A priestly family, the Maccabees, led a revolt; in 164 BCE they recaptured Jerusalem and rededicated the Temple, the event remembered at Hanukkah. Their descendants, the Hasmoneans, ruled an independent kingdom until Rome took control in 63 BCE. Rome's client king Herod the Great rebuilt the Temple on a vast scale; its western retaining wall survives as the Western Wall.

The sects

Second Temple Judaism was strikingly diverse. The historian Josephus, a Jewish priest who later wrote in Rome, described it as divided into schools of philosophy: "The Jews had for a great while had three sects of philosophy peculiar to themselves; the sect of the Essens, and the sect of the Sadducees, and the third sort of opinions was that of those called Pharisees" (Antiquities 18.1.2, Whiston translation).

Two other movements came out of this world. A Jewish preacher from Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth, gathered followers in the 1st century; after his death, the movement in his name would, over the following centuries, become a separate religion, Christianity (see the Religions long read on Christianity). And in Alexandria, the philosopher Philo read the Torah through Greek philosophy, the first great attempt to join Athens and Jerusalem.

The Pharisaic teachers of this age included Hillel and Shammai, whose schools disagreed on hundreds of points. The Talmud remembers a non-Jew who asked each to teach him the whole Torah while he stood on one foot. Shammai drove him off. Hillel said: "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and learn" (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a).

70 CE

In 66 CE Judea rose against Rome. The Roman general Titus, son of the new emperor Vespasian, besieged Jerusalem, and in the summer of 70 CE, in the month of Av, his forces captured the Temple Mount and destroyed the Second Temple. Jews still mourn it, and the First Temple's destruction, on the fast of Tisha B'Av. A second revolt, led by Simon bar Kokhba in 132–136 CE, ended with the fall of the fortress of Betar in 135; Hadrian refounded Jerusalem as a Roman city, Aelia Capitolina.

The Sadducees, whose world was the Temple, disappeared. The Essenes vanished. The movement that survived, and rebuilt Judaism, was the Pharisees' heirs: the rabbis.

Part 5 — After the fall: the rabbis, the Mishnah and the Talmud (70–c. 600 CE)

How do you keep a religion centred on a Temple when the Temple is gone? The rabbis' answer was one of the great creative acts in religious history.

Yavneh

Talmudic tradition tells that during the siege, the sage Yohanan ben Zakkai, who argued for peace, was smuggled out of Jerusalem in a coffin and asked Vespasian for one small thing: Yavneh and its sages. In the coastal town of Yavneh, the rabbis began to rebuild. (Historians treat the story as legend shaped later, and the "Council of Jamnia" that 19th-century scholars imagined fixing the biblical canon there is now widely doubted. But Yavneh became a real centre of rabbinic learning.)

The rabbis moved the centre of Jewish life from the altar to three places that did not need a Temple:

• Prayer replaced sacrifice: the daily services were set at the times of the old Temple offerings.
• Study of Torah became itself a form of worship, perhaps the highest.
• The home, with its table, Sabbath candles and Passover meal, took on the holiness of the Temple.

The Mishnah

Around the end of the 2nd century or the beginning of the 3rd, Judah ha-Nasi ("the Prince") edited the Mishnah, the first written code of the Oral Torah, in Hebrew. It is organised in six "orders" (sedarim) and 63 tractates: on blessings and agriculture, festivals, women and marriage, damages and civil law, Temple offerings, and purity. It records disagreements and attaches names to opinions, so that the losing side is preserved alongside the winning one.

The Talmuds

The Mishnah in turn became the subject of commentary. Two great collections grew from it:

• The Jerusalem Talmud, compiled in the Galilee and completed by the early 5th century CE.
• The Babylonian Talmud (Bavli), compiled in the academies of Babylonia under Persian Sasanian rule, traditionally by Rav Ashi and Ravina around 500 CE, though many scholars think its final editing ran into the mid-6th century or later. It runs to 2,711 double-sided folios and became the central text of Jewish learning.

A culture of argument

The Talmud is not a law book in the ordinary sense. It is a record of reasoning, full of questions, objections, counter-examples, stories and jokes. Two passages explain its spirit.

When the schools of Hillel and Shammai had disagreed for three years, says the Talmud, a heavenly voice declared: "These and these are the words of the living God, but the law follows the school of Hillel" (Eruvin 13b). Why Hillel? Because, the passage explains, they were kind and humble, and they taught their opponents' views as well as their own, and before their own.

The second is the story of the oven of Akhnai (Bava Metzia 59a–b). Rabbi Eliezer, outvoted on a point of purity law, calls on miracles to prove him right: a carob tree uproots itself, a stream flows backwards, the walls of the study house bend. Finally a heavenly voice declares that the law follows Rabbi Eliezer. Rabbi Joshua stands and quotes Deuteronomy: "It is not in heaven" (Deuteronomy 30:12). The Torah, once given, belongs to human interpreters, who decide by majority. Later, the story goes, a rabbi met the prophet Elijah and asked what God did at that moment. Elijah answered that God smiled and said: "My children have triumphed over Me."

A religion in which God laughs at being outvoted by His students has a very particular idea of authority.

The same story has a harder ending, often left out: the rabbis burned the items Rabbi Eliezer had declared pure and excommunicated him, and his grief brought disaster. The conversation has rules, and those who break them can pay dearly. Both halves are part of the tradition.

Part 6 — Medieval worlds: Babylon, Spain, France and the codes (c. 600–1600)

The Geonim and Saadia

After the rise of Islam in the 7th century, most of the world's Jews lived under Muslim rule. The heads of the Babylonian academies, the Geonim, answered legal questions sent from as far as Spain and North Africa, spreading the Babylonian Talmud's authority everywhere. The greatest of them, Saadia Gaon (882–942), born in Egypt and head of the academy of Sura, translated the Bible into Arabic and wrote The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, a founding work of medieval Jewish philosophy, along with a prayer book, a Hebrew dictionary and liturgical poems.

He was also fighting a schism. The Karaites, a movement that arose in this period, rejected the Oral Torah and the rabbis' authority and accepted the written Bible alone. Karaite communities survive today, a small reminder that the rabbinic path was not the only one taken.

Three great families

Medieval Jewry developed into three great cultural families whose names are still used:

There were others besides: the Romaniote Jews of Greece, the Beta Israel of Ethiopia, who kept a Bible-based tradition for centuries largely cut off from rabbinic Judaism, the Bene Israel and Cochin Jews of India, and the community of Kaifeng in China, formed most probably in the Song dynasty (960–1279).

Al-Andalus and Maimonides

Muslim Spain produced a remarkable flowering of Jewish poetry, philosophy and science, the so-called golden age. The poet and philosopher Judah Halevi wrote the Kuzari, a dialogue defending Judaism against philosophy, Christianity and Islam. In 1140 he set out for the land of Israel; he sailed from Alexandria in May 1141 and died that year, and whether he ever arrived is not known.

The greatest figure of the age was Moses Maimonides (the Rambam), born in Córdoba in 1138. When the Almohads, a strict Berber dynasty, conquered Córdoba in 1148 and ended the protected status of Jews and Christians, his family fled. After years of wandering, including a stay in Fez, he reached Egypt in 1166, settled in Fustat (Old Cairo), became a celebrated court physician in the Egypt of Saladin, and died there in 1204. He wrote three works that shaped everything after:

• The Commentary on the Mishnah (completed 1168), which includes his Thirteen Principles of faith: among them the existence and unity of God, God's incorporeality, the prophecy of Moses, the divine origin of the Torah, reward and punishment, the coming of the Messiah and the resurrection of the dead. Poetic versions, Yigdal and Ani Ma'amin, entered the prayer book.
• The Mishneh Torah, a complete code of Jewish law in fourteen books, in clear Hebrew, organised so that a reader would not need the Talmud to know the law. Critics feared exactly that.
• The Guide of the Perplexed (completed 1190), written for a student torn between philosophy and faith, which reads the Bible's descriptions of God's hands, anger or throne as metaphors and argues that we can say only what God is not.

The Guide was so controversial that French rabbis banned it and copies were burned in Montpellier. Today Maimonides is honoured by every branch of Judaism, a nice example of the tradition absorbing its own arguments.

Ashkenaz and Rashi

In the Christian north, a different style grew up. Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, 1040–1105) of Troyes in Champagne wrote running commentaries on almost the entire Bible and Talmud, so clear and economical that they are still printed beside both texts. Every Jewish child who studies the Torah meets Rashi. The Tosafists, the French and German scholars who came after him, argued with him in the margins, as the Talmud's page shows.

The great code

In 1563, in Safed in the Galilee, the Sephardi scholar Joseph Karo completed the Shulchan Aruch ("Set Table"), a concise code of practical law, printed in Venice two years later. It followed Sephardi custom; in Kraków, Moses Isserles added glosses, called the Mappah ("Tablecloth"), noting where Ashkenazi practice differed. Printed together, the two became the standard code of Jewish law for Orthodox Jews to this day: a single book that holds two traditions on one page.

Part 7 — Kabbalah: the hidden Torah

Alongside the legal and philosophical tradition ran a mystical one. Kabbalah ("received tradition") seeks the hidden inner meaning of the Torah, the commandments and the cosmos.

The Zohar

Its central text, the Zohar ("Radiance"), is a vast commentary on the Torah in Aramaic, presented as the teachings of the 2nd-century sage Shimon bar Yochai and his circle. It first circulated in Castile in the 1280s through Moses de León. Traditional Kabbalists accept its ancient authorship; modern scholars, following Gershom Scholem, overwhelmingly hold that de León and his circle composed it in the late 13th century, drawing on older traditions. Some traditional writers grant that much is medieval while defending an ancient core.

The Zohar describes God as Ein Sof, "the Infinite", utterly beyond knowing, who becomes manifest through ten sefirot, divine attributes or emanations such as wisdom, understanding, lovingkindness, judgement and beauty, the last of which is often identified with the Shekhinah, God's indwelling presence, imagined as a feminine aspect of the divine that has gone into exile with her people. Human actions, especially the commandments performed with right intention, help to unite the divine attributes and heal a fractured world.

Safed and Isaac Luria

After the expulsion from Spain, Kabbalists gathered in Safed in the Galilee, then part of the Ottoman Empire. There Isaac Luria (1534–1572), the "Ari", taught a new myth of creation in only a few years before his early death:

1. Tzimtzum (contraction): to make room for a world, the Infinite withdrew into itself.
2. Shevirat ha-kelim (the breaking of the vessels): the divine light poured into vessels that could not hold it; they shattered, and sparks of holiness fell and were trapped in the material world.
3. Tikkun (repair): every human act of holiness lifts a spark and helps restore the world. When the repair is complete, redemption comes.

This idea of tikkun, repair, travelled a long way; in modern times, the phrase tikkun olam, "repairing the world", has become a watchword for Jewish social action, a meaning broader than its older sources.

The false messiah

Lurianic hopes of imminent redemption fed the most dramatic episode in early modern Jewish history. In 1665 Shabbetai Tzvi, a charismatic and troubled Kabbalist from Smyrna, was proclaimed the Messiah, and much of the Jewish world, from Amsterdam to Yemen, believed. In 1666 the Ottoman authorities arrested him and offered him death or conversion. He converted to Islam. Most followers fell away in shock; a minority kept believing in secret. The trauma made rabbinic authorities wary of mysticism and messianism for generations.

Part 8 — Persecution, expulsion and refuge (1096–1903)

Jewish history is not a story of suffering only; it is also one of creativity, communal life and long periods of peace. But the medieval and early modern record contains a repeating pattern of violence and expulsion, and it shaped Jewish memory deeply.

Under Christendom and Islam

Under Islam, Jews were generally dhimmi, protected non-Muslims who paid a poll tax and accepted restrictions. That status was humiliating and occasionally broke down into persecution, as under the Almohads, but it usually allowed stable community life. In Latin Christendom, Jews' position was more precarious. Church teaching held Jews responsible for the death of Jesus, while also, in the Augustinian tradition, protecting their existence as witnesses; mob violence and royal greed often overrode the protection.

1492

The Spanish expulsion was the defining catastrophe of Sephardi history. In the century before it, waves of riots and pressure had driven many Spanish Jews to convert; of a Jewish-origin population estimated at around 300,000, more than 200,000 had become Catholic by the time of the expulsion, and somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 who remained Jewish were expelled. Converts, called conversos (and, abusively, marranos), were hunted by the Inquisition for secretly keeping Jewish practices. The exiles scattered to North Africa, Italy, the Netherlands and, above all, the Ottoman Empire, where Salonika, Istanbul and Safed became great Sephardi centres and Ladino flourished for four more centuries.

1648

For the Jews of Poland-Lithuania, the uprising of the Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky in 1648 was remembered as the worst catastrophe since the Temple. Older histories gave death tolls of 100,000 or more; recent research puts it much lower. One 1996 estimate counts 15,000 to 30,000 Jews killed or taken captive and some 300 communities destroyed; a 2014 estimate puts Jewish deaths in 1648–49 at 18,000 to 20,000.

Refuge

The same centuries were also an age of refuge and growth. Poland-Lithuania gave its Jews a large measure of self-government through the Council of Four Lands, an autonomous Jewish body that sat from the second half of the 16th century until 1764, and became the centre of the Ashkenazi world. The Ottoman Empire took in Sephardi exiles, and Amsterdam's Portuguese-Jewish community grew rich and learned. In September 1791 revolutionary France granted its Jews full citizenship, and emancipation spread, slowly and unevenly, across the 19th century.

The repeated lesson Jews drew from these centuries was double: that no refuge is permanent, and that a portable religion of book, home and community could survive the loss of almost anything else.

Part 9 — Hasidim, their opponents, and the Enlightenment (1700–1900)

In 18th-century Eastern Europe, two movements pulled Jewish life in opposite directions.

Hasidism

In the villages of Podolia, a healer and mystic named Israel ben Eliezer (c. 1700–1760), known as the Baal Shem Tov ("Master of the Good Name"), taught that God could be served not only through learned study but through joy, song, storytelling and fervent prayer, and that the divine is present in everything. His followers, the Hasidim ("the pious"), spread rapidly. They gathered around charismatic leaders, the rebbes or tzaddikim, who became heads of hereditary dynasties, many named after their towns of origin: Belz, Ger, Satmar, Bobov, and Lubavitch, home of the Chabad movement.

The Hasidim brought Kabbalah into everyday piety and gave ordinary Jews a sense that their prayer and joy mattered cosmically. They also faced fierce opposition.

The Mitnagdim

The opponents, the Mitnagdim, were led by the towering Talmudist Elijah ben Solomon, the Vilna Gaon (1720–1797), whose signature appeared on the Vilna community's ban of excommunication against the Hasidim in 1772. They feared a new Sabbatean heresy, objected to changes in the prayer rite, and saw the cult of the rebbe as a threat to the authority of learning. Out of their tradition came the great Lithuanian yeshivas, academies of intense Talmud study. Within a century the two camps had largely made peace, united against a new challenge: modernity.

The Haskalah

In Berlin, the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), a traditionally observant Jew who became a celebrated figure of the German Enlightenment, argued in Jerusalem (1783) that Judaism was a religion of revealed law, not of dogmas imposed by force, and that Jews could be loyal citizens of a modern state while remaining Jews. His circle began the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, whose followers, the maskilim, promoted secular education, the study of European languages and a revived Hebrew.

The Haskalah opened the door to two very different futures. For some, it led to the modernisation of Jewish religion; for others, out of religion altogether. As the walls of the ghetto fell, Jews had to answer a question they had never faced: what does it mean to be Jewish when you are free not to be?

Part 10 — The modern movements

The 19th and 20th centuries produced the denominations that still organise much of Jewish life, especially outside Israel. Each was an answer to emancipation and modern thought.

Reform

In 1810 Israel Jacobson opened a reformed synagogue in Seesen in Westphalia; in 1818 the Hamburg Temple introduced prayers in German, an organ and a sermon. Its leading thinker, Abraham Geiger (1810–1874), saw Judaism as an evolving religion whose ethical core, "ethical monotheism", could be separated from rituals belonging to past ages. In America, Reform rabbis meeting in 1885 adopted the Pittsburgh Platform, which declared: "We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship… nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state." Over the 20th century, Reform moved back towards tradition and peoplehood; its 1937 Columbus Platform supported building a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Reform was the first movement to ordain women (in America, Sally Priesand in 1972) and, from 1990, openly gay and lesbian rabbis, and in 1983 its American rabbis accepted descent through either parent.

Orthodoxy

"Orthodox" was at first a label applied by others to those who rejected reform. Two responses emerged. In Frankfurt, Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–1888) championed Torah im Derech Eretz, "Torah with the way of the world": full observance of the law combined with secular education and citizenship. He is an ancestor of today's Modern Orthodoxy. In Hungary, Moses Sofer, the Hatam Sofer, coined the slogan "the new is forbidden by the Torah", turning a rule about new grain into a rule of life: change itself was the danger. He is an ancestor of the Haredi world.

Conservative/Masorti

In 1845 Zecharias Frankel walked out of a German rabbinical conference that voted to downgrade Hebrew in worship. He championed "positive-historical Judaism": freedom of historical research combined with loyalty to traditional law and practice. In America, the Jewish Theological Seminary, founded in 1886, became the centre of what was called Conservative Judaism, and outside North America it is called Masorti ("traditional"). Its motto since the 1950s has been "tradition and change". It voted in 1983 to ordain women as rabbis.

Reconstructionism

Mordecai Kaplan, a JTS professor, argued in Judaism as a Civilization (1934) that Judaism is not only a religion but the evolving civilisation of a people, and that God is best understood not as a supernatural person but as the power in the world that makes for goodness. In 1922 his daughter Judith celebrated the first public bat mitzvah in America. His followers became a separate movement when the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College opened in 1968.

Haredi Judaism

Haredim ("those who tremble" before God, often translated "ultra-Orthodox") are the communities most determined to preserve traditional life against modern culture: Hasidic dynasties and the heirs of the Lithuanian yeshivas. They study Torah intensively, many men full-time; they dress distinctively; they have large families, and their numbers are growing very fast; in Israel, by about 4 percent a year.

At a glance

The first woman ordained as a rabbi was Regina Jonas in Berlin in 1935; she was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944.

Every modern movement is an answer to the same question: if the tradition is a conversation, who gets to speak in it now, and how much can they say?

Part 11 — The Holocaust (1933–1945)

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines the Holocaust as "the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by the Nazi German regime and its allies and collaborators" between 1933 and 1945. Nearly two out of every three European Jews were killed.

The stages

The numbers

The USHMM's breakdown of how six million Jews were murdered, compiled from Nazi German documents and pre-war and post-war demographic data:

At Auschwitz alone the Germans killed about 1.1 million people, about one million of them Jews. The Nazis and their collaborators also murdered millions of others, including some 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, about 1.8 million non-Jewish Poles, Roma and Sinti, and people with disabilities.

The world's Jewish population, about 16.5 million on the eve of the war by the demographer Sergio DellaPergola's estimate, fell to about 11 million by 1945; by comparable definitions it has still not fully recovered. Whole civilisations, the Yiddish world of Poland and Lithuania, the Sephardi community of Salonika, the Jewish life of the Hungarian countryside, were destroyed.

Rescue and memory

Some non-Jews risked their lives to save Jews. Israel's Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, has recognised more than 28,000 of them as Righteous Among the Nations (28,707 as of 1 January 2024), while stressing that the numbers reflect the cases brought to it, not the true number of rescuers. Jews themselves resisted in ghetto uprisings, partisan units and countless acts of spiritual defiance, such as secret prayer and study.

What the Holocaust did to Jewish thought

The Holocaust posed the oldest question in religion, how a just God could allow such suffering, in its most terrible form. Jewish thinkers have answered in very different ways.

• Richard Rubenstein, in After Auschwitz (1966), argued that the traditional God of history, who rewards and punishes, could no longer be believed in: the covenant, as traditionally understood, had died.
• Emil Fackenheim proposed a "614th commandment", added to the traditional 613: Jews must not hand Hitler a posthumous victory by abandoning Judaism, God or the Jewish people.
• Eliezer Berkovits, an Orthodox thinker, in Faith After the Holocaust (1973), drew on the biblical idea of hester panim, God "hiding His face": for humans to be truly free, God must sometimes withdraw, and the cost of that freedom can be monstrous.
• Many Haredi thinkers declined to offer any theological explanation, or placed the Holocaust within the long chain of exile and suffering that only the Messiah will end; many survivors simply rebuilt observant life, which was its own answer.
• For many secular Jews, the lesson was not theological but historical and political: Jews must never again be without a refuge.

In the Pew Research Center's 2020 survey of American Jews, remembering the Holocaust was the most widely shared element of Jewish identity: 76 percent called it essential to what being Jewish means to them.

Part 12 — Zionism: a religious and a secular question

Longing for Zion is woven through Jewish prayer. Three times a day the traditional liturgy asks God to return to Jerusalem; the Passover meal ends with "Next year in Jerusalem"; a groom breaks a glass at his wedding in memory of the Temple. For eighteen centuries, though, most rabbis treated the return as something only God, through the Messiah, would bring. The Talmud even speaks of oaths that Israel swore not to "go up as a wall", taken to mean not to return en masse by force before the time (Ketubot 111a).

Political Zionism

Modern Zionism was largely a secular movement. Shaken by pogroms in Russia and by antisemitism in the West, the Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) published Der Judenstaat ("The Jewish State") in 1896 and convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel in August 1897. Many of its leaders were not religious; for them Jews were a nation like others, needing a land and a state of their own. Labour Zionists dreamed of a society of Jewish workers and farmers; cultural Zionists of a revived Hebrew culture. The State of Israel was proclaimed on 14 May 1948. (Its history, and the conflict with the Palestinians, are told in the Histories long read on Israel.)

Religious responses

Religious Jews divided sharply, and still do.

• Religious Zionism. The Mizrachi movement, founded in Vilna in 1902, brought observant Jews into the Zionist movement. Religious Zionism rests on three pillars: the Land of Israel, the People of Israel and the Torah of Israel. Its great thinker, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935), the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine, taught that even secular pioneers were unknowingly doing holy work, and that the return to the land was the beginning of redemption.
• Haredi non-Zionism. Agudat Yisrael, founded in 1912 at Kattowitz, organised Orthodox Jews who opposed the Zionist movement as a secular nationalism that put the nation in place of the Torah. Over time much of the Haredi world came to a practical accommodation with the state, taking part in its politics without granting it religious meaning.
• Haredi anti-Zionism. Some groups, notably the Satmar Hasidim founded by Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, and the small Neturei Karta, reject the state on principle, citing the Talmud's oaths: only the Messiah may restore Jewish sovereignty.
• Reform's reversal. Reform Judaism, which in 1885 renounced any return to Palestine, moved by 1937 to support a Jewish homeland, and today most Reform Jews are Zionists of a liberal kind.

Today, for many Jews in the diaspora, a relationship with Israel, of support, criticism, or both, is part of Jewish identity; for others it is not central. Debates among Jews about Israel's policies are intense, and Jews hold the full range of views. This piece does not adjudicate them.

Part 13 — Living it: the day, the week, the year, a life

Judaism is above all a religion of practice. Its law, halakha ("the way of walking"), shapes ordinary time. The degree to which Jews keep it varies enormously, from Haredi families who observe every detail to secular Jews who light candles at Hanukkah and attend a Passover meal. What follows is the traditional pattern.

A day

An observant Jew wakes with a short prayer of thanks for the return of the soul. Men (and in liberal communities, women too) pray three times daily: Shacharit in the morning, Mincha in the afternoon and Ma'ariv in the evening, ideally with a minyan, a quorum of ten adults (traditionally ten men). At morning prayers they wrap themselves in a tallit, a fringed prayer shawl, and bind tefillin, small leather boxes containing handwritten verses, on the arm and the head, fulfilling the command to bind God's words "for a sign upon thy hand" (Deuteronomy 6:8).

Two prayers anchor every service. The Shema, recited morning and evening, opens: "Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is One" (Deuteronomy 6:4). The Amidah, the "standing prayer" of praise, petition and thanks, is said silently, standing, facing Jerusalem. On the doorpost of a Jewish home hangs a mezuzah, a small case holding a parchment with the Shema, which many touch as they pass.

What to eat

The dietary laws, kashrut, come from the Torah and were developed by the rabbis.

• Land animals must chew the cud and have split hooves (Leviticus 11:3): cattle, sheep and goats, but not pigs or rabbits.
• Fish must have fins and scales (Leviticus 11:9): no shellfish.
• Animals must be slaughtered by a trained shochet in a prescribed way, and the blood removed.
• Meat and dairy are never mixed, an elaboration of a verse repeated three times in the Torah: "Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother's milk" (Exodus 23:19). Observant kitchens keep separate dishes, and people wait hours after meat before eating dairy.

The week: Shabbat

The centre of the week is Shabbat, from just before sunset on Friday until nightfall, when three stars appear, on Saturday. The command is simple: "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour… but the seventh day is a sabbath unto the LORD thy God, in it thou shalt not do any manner of work" (Exodus 20:8–10). The rabbis defined "work" through 39 categories of creative labour, derived from the tasks used to build the Tabernacle in the wilderness: planting, cooking, writing, building, kindling a fire and so on. In modern practice, observant Jews do not drive, use electricity, handle money or use phones on Shabbat.

What it feels like from inside is less a list of prohibitions than an island. Women traditionally light candles; the family blesses wine (kiddush) and two braided loaves (challah); there are long meals with songs and guests, synagogue services, study, walks and sleep. At the end, the Havdalah ceremony, with wine, spices and a braided candle, separates the holy day from the week. The theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, in The Sabbath (1951), argued that Judaism is a religion of time rather than space, and that the Sabbath is its way of making time holy.

The year

The Jewish calendar is lunar, adjusted to the solar year by adding a thirteenth month seven times in nineteen years, so the festivals stay in their seasons.

The Passover Seder may be the most widely kept Jewish ritual of all. Around a table, families retell the Exodus from a book called the Haggadah, eat bitter herbs and unleavened bread, drink four cups of wine, and the youngest child asks four questions beginning "Why is this night different from all other nights?" The Torah itself anticipates the child: "when your children shall say unto you: What mean ye by this service?" (Exodus 12:26). The Seder is a lesson in how Judaism is transmitted: by questions, at home, from one generation to the next.

A life

Who is a Jew?

By traditional law, a Jew is anyone born to a Jewish mother or converted according to halakha. In 1983 the American Reform rabbinate declared that the child of one Jewish parent, mother or father, is presumed Jewish if raised as a Jew; Reconstructionists agree. Orthodox and Conservative Judaism hold to matrilineal descent. Because Judaism is both a religion and a people, many Jews who do not believe in God or keep the law are still fully Jewish in the eyes of the tradition and of themselves.

Part 14 — Thinking it: God, law and ethics

God

At the root is the Shema's insistence that God is One, and that God is not part of nature but its creator. Beyond that, Jewish thought has ranged very widely.

• Maimonides taught a demanding rationalism: God has no body, no emotions, no attributes we can truly name; we come closest by saying what God is not.
• The Kabbalists described the same unknowable God as Ein Sof, overflowing into the sefirot, intimately involved with the world.
• Martin Buber (1878–1965), in I and Thou (1923), described God as the "eternal Thou" met in real, mutual encounter, between people and between a person and the world, rather than as an object of theory.
• Heschel, in books such as The Prophets and God in Search of Man, described the God of the Bible as one who cares about, and is moved by, what humans do: not the unmoved mover of the philosophers but a God who seeks out humanity.
• Mordecai Kaplan reinterpreted God naturalistically, as the power that makes for human fulfilment and goodness.
• Baruch Spinoza (died 1677), excommunicated by the Amsterdam Portuguese community on 27 July 1656, identified God with nature. He is not a Jewish religious thinker in any traditional sense, but every modern Jewish philosophy has had to answer him.

Jewish tradition has generally cared less about precise doctrine than about practice. Maimonides' thirteen principles are the closest thing to a creed, and even they have been debated by Jewish thinkers for eight centuries.

Law

Halakha is the heart of rabbinic Judaism. The rabbis counted 613 commandments in the Torah, 248 positive and 365 negative (a teaching of Rabbi Simlai, Babylonian Talmud Makkot 23b). The law grows by interpretation: the Mishnah, the Talmud, the codes of Maimonides and Karo, and an unbroken stream of responsa, rabbis' written answers to new questions, which today cover organ transplants, electricity on the Sabbath, IVF and artificial intelligence.

Two principles pull against each other, and much of modern Jewish history is about their balance. The Torah warns: "Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish from it" (Deuteronomy 4:2). Yet the Torah also says the law "is not in heaven" (Deuteronomy 30:12), and the rabbis read that as giving human interpreters real authority. Orthodox Judaism stresses continuity and the authority of past codes; Conservative Judaism stresses continuity with historical development; Reform stresses ethical principle and individual conscience.

Ethics

Jewish ethics begins with the claim that every human being is made "in the image of God" (Genesis 1:27). From that come some of the most quoted lines in the world's moral literature:

• "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" (Leviticus 19:18).
• "The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt" (Leviticus 19:34). The Talmud counts thirty-six places, some say forty-six, where the Torah warns against wronging the ger, the stranger or convert (Bava Metzia 59b).
• "Justice, justice shalt thou follow" (Deuteronomy 16:20).
• The Mishnah's teaching that humanity began with a single person to teach that whoever destroys one life is as if they destroyed a whole world, and whoever saves one life as if they saved a whole world (Sanhedrin 4:5). Manuscripts differ on whether the text says "a life" or "a life of Israel"; the universal reading is the one most often quoted today, including by Yad Vashem.
• Hillel: "If I am not for myself, who is for me? But if I am for my own self only, what am I? And if not now, when?" (Pirkei Avot 1:14).
• Rabbi Tarfon: "It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you free to neglect it" (Pirkei Avot 2:16).

Charity in Judaism is tzedakah, a word that means justice: giving to the poor is not generosity but obligation. Maimonides ranked eight levels of giving, the highest being to help someone become self-supporting. In the 20th century, Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995), a French philosopher shaped by the Talmud and by the Holocaust, argued that ethics is "first philosophy": the face of another person makes a claim on us before any theory does.

"Justice, justice shalt thou follow." The rabbis asked why the word is repeated. One answer: even the means of pursuing justice must be just.

Part 15 — Antisemitism: what it is and how it has changed

Antisemitism is, in the simplest definition, hatred of or prejudice against Jews. That is how the USHMM defines it. It has taken different forms in different ages, and historians usually distinguish several layers that build on one another.

Forms through history

The word itself is modern. Antisemitismus first appeared in print in Germany in 1879, a scientific-sounding term for plain Jew-hatred. It was popularised by the German journalist Wilhelm Marr, who that year published a pamphlet claiming that Jews and Germans were locked in a racial struggle and founded a "League of Antisemites". (Many scholars and institutions now prefer the unhyphenated spelling "antisemitism", because there is no "Semitism" for it to oppose.)

The definition debate

How to define antisemitism today, especially in relation to Israel, is itself one of the most contested questions in public life, and fair-minded people disagree.

• The IHRA working definition, a non-legally-binding definition adopted by the plenary of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, an intergovernmental body, on 26 May 2016, pairs a short core definition with eleven illustrative examples, seven of which mention Israel; they include denying the Jewish people's right to self-determination and holding all Jews collectively responsible for the actions of Israel. The European Parliament and many national and other bodies have since adopted it, not all of them with the examples. Supporters argue that it captures how antisemitism actually works today.
• Critics, including legal scholars and Kenneth Stern, who contributed to the original draft, argue that its examples can be used to chill legitimate criticism of Israeli policy. In March 2021 a group of about 200 scholars issued the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which defines antisemitism as "discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish)" and offers its own guidance on where criticism of Israel or Zionism does and does not cross that line. Its critics, in turn, argue that it is too permissive.

Both sides agree that antisemitism is real and that criticism of a government's policies is not in itself antisemitic. They disagree about where the boundary lies and who should draw it. That disagreement is live, and this piece does not settle it.

Part 16 — Judaism today: numbers and open questions

How many Jews?

Counting Jews depends on definitions: by religion or by identity, by mother or by either parent, by self-description or by law. Every number below should be read with its source and date.

The pattern is clear even if the totals differ by a million or two: about four in five of the world's Jews live in Israel or the United States; Europe's share, once the majority of world Jewry, is now small; and almost all of the world's growth comes from Israel and from Orthodox, especially Haredi, communities with high birth rates.

How Jews identify

In the United States, Pew's 2020 survey found that 37 percent of Jewish adults identified with Reform, 17 percent with Conservative, 9 percent with Orthodox and about 4 percent with smaller movements such as Reconstructionist and Humanistic Judaism, while 32 percent identified with no particular branch. The young are more polarised: among Jews aged 18 to 29, 17 percent were Orthodox, compared with 3 percent of those 65 and older.

In Israel, Jews describe themselves differently. Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics reported for 2026 that among Jewish Israelis aged 20 and over, 39.6 percent described themselves as secular or non-religious, 21.8 percent as traditional but not very religious, 14.0 percent as traditional-religious, 12.4 percent as religious and 11.5 percent as Haredi. (Pew's 2016 survey, Israel's Religiously Divided Society, used four categories: 49 percent hiloni or secular, 29 percent masorti or traditional, 13 percent dati or religious, and 9 percent Haredi.)

Open questions

Judaism has never had a pope or a single council, and its great arguments are still open.

• Who is a Jew? Matrilineal or either parent; whose conversions count; and in Israel, where the Orthodox rabbinate controls marriage and conversion for Jews, the question has legal force.
• Women's roles. Liberal movements ordain women as rabbis; Orthodoxy does not, though some Modern Orthodox communities have created new roles for women as scholars and spiritual leaders, a development that is itself debated.
• Sexuality. Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism ordain LGBTQ rabbis; Conservative Judaism admitted openly gay rabbinical students from 2006; Orthodox communities are divided about how to welcome LGBTQ Jews within halakha.
• Intermarriage and continuity. In the diaspora, many Jews marry non-Jews. Some see a threat to continuity; others see a chance to welcome new families.
• The Haredi future. Haredi communities are growing rapidly. How they relate to the wider society, to work, to secular education and, in Israel, to military service is one of the biggest questions for Jewish life in the coming decades.
• Israel and the diaspora. How diaspora Jews relate to Israel, and to arguments over its policies, divides families and communities.
• Belief and belonging. Many Jews are deeply attached to Jewish peoplehood, culture and memory without believing in God. Whether Judaism can remain one people with such different understandings of itself is perhaps the oldest open question of all, and so far the answer has been yes.

The takeaway

Judaism is both a religion and a people. Its tradition tells of a covenant made with Abraham and at Sinai, carried by a Written and an Oral Torah; historians describe a scripture that took its final shape around the Persian period from older sources, and a people whose identity was forged in exile. After Rome destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, the rabbis rebuilt Judaism around prayer, study and the home, and recorded their arguments, minority opinions included, in the Mishnah and Talmud. Over two thousand years, through Babylon, Spain, France and Poland, through expulsions, the Kabbalah, Hasidism and the Enlightenment, the conversation continued and divided into modern movements. The Holocaust murdered six million Jews and changed Jewish thought for ever; Zionism divided Jews religiously as well as politically. Today about fifteen to seventeen million Jews, mostly in Israel and the United States, still keep the Sabbath, eat at the Seder, argue over the law, and disagree about what it means to be Jewish, as their tradition has always encouraged them to do.

Try this: read one page of a Jewish argument. On Sefaria, a free online library of Jewish texts, open Pirkei Avot ("Ethics of the Fathers"), the most widely read tractate of the Mishnah, and read chapter 1. Pick one saying you agree with and one you would argue with. Write down your objection. You will have done what Jewish students have done with the same text for eighteen centuries.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- Biblical quotations: The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text: A New Translation (Jewish Publication Society, 1917), via Sefaria. Rabbinic passages (Shabbat 31a, Eruvin 13b, Bava Metzia 59a–b, Makkot 23b, Ketubot 111a, Pirkei Avot 1:1, 1:14, 2:16, Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5) checked against the texts on Sefaria and given in this piece's own translation.
- Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 18.1.2–6, trans. William Whiston, via the Perseus Digital Library.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on Maimonides, Saadya, Judah Halevi, Moses Mendelssohn, Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas and Spinoza.
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia: "Introduction to the Holocaust", "Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution", "Kristallnacht", "Nuremberg Race Laws", "Wannsee Conference and the 'Final Solution'", "Auschwitz", "Einsatzgruppen" (consulted 31 October 2026).
- Pew Research Center, How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020 (9 June 2025); Jewish Americans in 2020 (11 May 2021); Israel's Religiously Divided Society (8 March 2016).
- Sergio DellaPergola, "World Jewish Population, 2021", American Jewish Year Book, via the Berman Jewish DataBank.
- Jewish Virtual Library, "Vital Statistics: Jewish Population of the World" and "Latest Population Statistics for Israel" (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics figures for Rosh Hashanah 2026); "The Pittsburgh Platform".
- Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021), text of the definition.
- Wikipedia articles consulted as leads, with the scholarship they cite, on the documentary hypothesis, historicity of the Bible, the Merneptah, Tel Dan and Mesha stelae, Khirbet Qeiyafa, the Elephantine papyri, the Cyrus Cylinder, the Babylonian exile, the Second Temple, the Maccabean revolt, the Septuagint, the siege of 70 CE, the Bar Kokhba revolt, Yohanan ben Zakkai, the Mishnah, the Talmud, Daniel Bomberg, Rashi, Maimonides, the Shulchan Aruch, the Zohar, Isaac Luria, Sabbatai Zevi, the Baal Shem Tov, the Vilna Gaon, the Haskalah, Jewish emancipation, the Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Orthodox, Haredi and Humanistic movements, Samson Raphael Hirsch, Moses Sofer, Zecharias Frankel, Abraham Geiger, Mordecai Kaplan, Judith Kaplan Eisenstein, Regina Jonas, Sally Priesand, the Rhineland massacres, the blood libel, Lateran IV, the English and Spanish expulsions, the Venetian Ghetto, the Khmelnytsky uprising, the Kishinev pogrom, Wilhelm Marr, the Protocols, Herzl, the First Zionist Congress, Rabbi Kook, Agudat Yisrael, Satmar, the Three Oaths, Fackenheim, Rubenstein, Berkovits, Heschel, the Righteous Among the Nations, the IHRA definition, and Who is a Jew?.

Go deeper
- 📘 The Story of the Jews (two volumes) — Simon Schama (a vivid, humane narrative history from ancient Egypt to 1900; companion to his BBC series)
- 📘 Judaism: A Very Short Introduction — Norman Solomon (the clearest short account of belief, practice and the modern movements)
- 📘 The Essential Talmud — Adin Steinsaltz (how the Talmud works, by the scholar who translated it for a modern audience)
- 📘 God in Search of Man — Abraham Joshua Heschel (the great modern statement of Jewish theology, written for readers of any faith)
- 📘 The Bible Unearthed — Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman (the archaeological case for a later, smaller history; read it with William Dever's What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? for the counter-argument)
- 🌐 Sefaria (a free library of Jewish texts in Hebrew and English, with the JPS 1917 Bible, the Mishnah and the Talmud)
- 🌐 USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia (authoritative, sourced articles on every aspect of the Holocaust)
- 🌐 Companion pieces in this library: The World's Religions, One Page Each, How the Sacred Texts Were Written, Ritual: Why Humans Can't Quit It, and the Religions long read Zoroastrianism: The Ancient Faith of Iran and the Ideas It Gave the World