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Jew, Jew

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.

The Jewish people and the religion of Judaism are strongly interrelated, and converts to Judaism have been absorbed into the Jewish community throughout the millennia.

Since the destruction of the First Temple, the diaspora has been the home of most of the world's Jews. Johnson (1987), p. 82.

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.

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.

Since then, Jews have lived in almost every country of the world, primarily in Europe, the greater Middle East, and North America. In the various countries in which they have lived, the Jews have survived discrimination, oppression, poverty, and even genocide (see: Antisemitism, The Holocaust). There have also been periods of cultural, economic, and individual prosperity in various locations (such as Islamic Spain and Portugal, Germany and Poland during Haskalah , or the contemporary liberal democracies of the United States, Australia or United Kingdom).

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.

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 ( ). The Latin simply means Judaean , from the land of Judaea . Judaea is in turn derived from Judah which was the name of the Kingdom of Judah, and one of the Tribes of Israel. The Hebrew word for Jew, , is pronounced.

Interpretations of sections of the Tanakh, such as Deuteronomy 7:1-5, by learned Jewish sages, are used as a warning against intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews because " 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.

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 effective and often long-term isolation from each other. During the millennia of the Jewish diaspora the communities would develop under the influence of their local environments; political, cultural, natural, and populational. Today, manifestation of these differences among the Jews can be observed in Jewish cultural expressions of each community, including Jewish linguistic diversity, culinary preferences, liturgical practices, religious interpretations, as well as degrees and sources of genetic admixture.

The Mizrahim , or "Easterners" (Mizrach being "East" in Hebrew), that is, the diverse collection of Middle Eastern and North African Jews, constitute a third major group, although they are sometimes termed Sephardi for liturgical reasons.

The Mizrahim for example, are a heterogeneous collection of North African, Central Asian, Caucasian, and Middle Eastern Jewish communities that 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 sometimes termed Sephardi due to similar styles of liturgy, despite independent development 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 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. In addition, there is a differentiation made between Sephardi migrants who established themselves in the Middle East and North Africa after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s and the pre-existing Jewish communities in those regions.

Data based on a study by Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI): "World Jewry was estimated at 13,085,000 at thebeginning of 2006, an overall increase of 0.4% over 2005." See Jewish people near zero growth by Tovah Lazaroff, Jerusalem Post, June 24, 2004.

Elsewhere in the Americas, there are also large Jewish populations in Canada, Argentina, and Brazil, and smaller populations in Mexico (45,000), 2000 Tabulados de Religin Uruguay, Venezuela, Chile, and several other countries (see History of the Jews in Latin America).

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.

Fueled by anti-Zionism 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 all Arab nations combined.

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.

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%, in the United Kingdom, around 50%, in Australia and Mexico, as low as 10%, 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.

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 f 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.

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.

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.

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, Judo-Arabic, Judo-Berber, Krymchak, Judo-Malayalam and many others, have largely fallen out of use.

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.

King David conquered Jerusalem (first a Canaanite, then a Jebusite town) and made it his capital. After Solomon's reign, the nation split into two kingdoms, the Kingdom of Israel (in the north) and the Kingdom of Judah (in the south). The Kingdom of Israel was conquered by the Assyrian ruler Shalmaneser V in the 8th century BCE and spread all over the Assyrian empire, where they were assimilated into other cultures and came to be known as the Ten Lost Tribes. The Kingdom of Judah continued as an independent state until it was conquered by a Babylonian army in the early 6th century BCE, destroying the First Temple that was at the centre of Jewish worship. The Judean elite was exiled to Babylonia, but later at least a part of them returned to their homeland after the subsequent conquest of Babylonia by the Persians seventy years later, a period known as the Babylonian Captivity. A new Second Temple was constructed funded by Persian Kings, and old religious practices were resumed.

When the Greeks under Antiochus IV Epiphanes, supported by Hellenized Jews (those who had adopted Greek culture), attempted to convert the Jewish Temple to a temple of Zeus, the Jews revolted under the leadership of the Maccabees. After their victory, the Jews rededicated the Temple to God (hence the origins of Hanukkah ) and created an independent Jewish state known as the Hasmonaean Kingdom, which lasted from 165 BCE to 63 BCE, when it came under influence of the Roman Empire. During the early part of Roman rule, the Hasmonaeans remained in power, until the family was annihilated by Herod the Great. Herod came from a wealthy Idumean family and became a very successful client king under the Romans. He significantly expanded the Temple in Jerusalem.

Rome's attitudes swung from tolerance to hostility against its Jewish subjects, who had since moved throughout the Empire. The Romans, worshiping a large pantheon, could not readily accommodate the exclusive monotheism of Judaism, and the religious Jews could not accept Roman polytheism. (It was in this tumultuous climate that Christianity first emerged, among a small group of Jews.) After a famine and riots in 66 CE, the Jews in Judea began a revolt against Rome. The revolt was smashed by Titus Flavius, the son and successor of the Roman emperor Vespasian. In Rome the Arch of Titus still stands, showing enslaved Judeans and a menorah being brought to Rome. It is customary for Jews to walk around, rather than through, this arch.

In the second century the Roman Emperor Hadrian began to rebuild Jerusalem as a pagan city while restricting some Jewish practices. Angry at this affront, the Jews again revolted led by Simon Bar Kokhba. Hadrian responded with overwhelming force, putting down the revolt and killing as many as half a million Jews. Johnson (1987), p. 142.

In response to these Islamic conquests, the First Crusade of 1096 attempted to reconquer Jerusalem, resulting in the destruction of many of the remaining Jewish communities in the area. The Jews were among the most vigorous defenders of Jerusalem against the Crusaders.

The final mass expulsion of the Jews, and the largest, occurred after the Christian conquest ( Reconquista ) of Iberia in 1492 (see History of the Jews in Spain and History of the Jews in Portugal). After the end of the expulsions in the 17th century, individual conditions varied from country to country and time to time, but, as rule, Jews in Western Europe generally were forced, by decree or by informal pressure, to live in highly segregated ghettos and shtetls. By the beginning of the twentieth century, most European Jews lived in the so-called Pale of Settlement, the Western frontier of the Russian Empire consisting generally of the modern-day countries of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and neighboring regions.

Cowling (2005), p. 265 This era is sometimes referred to as the Golden age of Jewish culture in the Iberian Peninsula. Poliakov (1974), pg.91-6 During early Islam, Leon Poliakov writes, Jews enjoyed great privileges, and their communities prospered. There was no legislation or social barriers preventing them from conducting commercial activities. Many Jews migrated to areas newly conquered by Muslims and established communities there. The vizier of Baghdad entrusted his capital with Jewish bankers. The Jews were put in charge of certain parts of maritime and slave trade. Siraf, the principal port of the caliphate in the 10th century CE, had a Jewish governor. Poliakov (1974), pg.68-71 Throughout history, there have been numerous instances of pogroms against Jews.

Hasidic Judaism began in the 1700s by Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, and quickly gained a following with its exuberant, mystical approach to religion. These two movements, and the traditional orthodox approach to Judaism from which they spring, formed the basis for the modern divisions within Jewish observance.

In 1791, France became the first European country to emancipate its Jewish population, granting them equal rights under the law. Johnson (1987), p. 306.

It continues primarily as support for the state and government of Israel and its continuing status as a homeland for the Jewish people. "An international movement originally for the establishment of a Jewish national or religious community in Palestine and later for the support of modern Israel." ("Zionism," Webster's 11th Collegiate Dictionary). See also "Zionism" , Encyclopedia Britannica , which describes it as a "Jewish nationalist movement that has had as its goal the creation and support of a Jewish national state in Palestine, the ancient homeland of the Jews (Hebrew: Eretz Yisra'el, the Land of Israel)," and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, which defines it as "A Jewish movement that arose in the late 19th century in response to growing anti-Semitism and sought to reestablish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Modern Zionism is concerned with the support and development of the state of Israel." Described as a "diaspora nationalism," Ernest Gellner, 1983. Nations and Nationalism (First edition), p 107-108.

Millions of Jews who had been hitherto confined to diseased and massively overcrowded ghettos were transported (often by train) to "Death-camps" where some were herded into a specific location (often a gas chamber), then either gassed or shot. Afterwards, their remains were buried or burned. Others were interned in the camps where they were given little food and disease was common.

After the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the majority of the 850,000 Jews previously living in North Africa and the Middle East fled to Israel, joining an increasing number of immigrants from post-War Europe (see Jewish exodus from Arab lands). By the end of the 20th century, Jewish population centers had shifted dramatically, with the United States and Israel being the centers of Jewish secular and religious life.

In the Papal States, which existed until 1870, Jews were required to live only in specified neighborhoods called ghettos. In the 19th and (before the end of World War II) 20th centuries, the Roman Catholic church adhered to a distinction between "good antisemitism" and "bad antisemitism". The "bad" kind promoted hatred of Jews because of their descent. This was considered un-Christian because the Christian message was intended for all of humanity regardless of ethnicity; anyone could become a Christian. The "good" kind criticized alleged Jewish conspiracies to control newspapers, banks, and other institutions, to care only about accumulation of wealth, etc.

The one described by Bernard Lewis as "most degrading" was the requirement of distinctive clothing, not found in the Qur'an or hadith but invented in early medieval Baghdad; its enforcement was highly erratic. Lewis (1999), p.131 On the other hand, Jews rarely faced martyrdom or exile, or forced compulsion to change their religion, and they were mostly free in their choice of residence and profession. Lewis (1999), p.131; (1984), pp.8,62 Notable exceptions include the massacre of Jews and/or forcible conversion of some Jews by the rulers of the Almohad dynasty in Al-Andalus in the 12th century, Lewis (1984), p. 52; Stillman (1979), p.77 as well as in Islamic Persia, Lewis (1984), pp. 17-18, 94-95; Stillman (1979), p. 27 and the forced confinement of Morrocan Jews to walled quarters known as mellahs beginning from the 15th century and especially in the early 19th century. Lewis (1984), p. 28.

Legislation to remove the Jews from civil society was enacted years before the outbreak of World War II. Concentration camp were established in which inmates were used as slave labour until they died of exhaustion or disease. Where the Third Reich conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews and political opponents in mass shootings.

Instead, a variety of secular and religious institutions at the local, national, and international levels lead various parts of the Jewish community on a variety of issues.

Source: Wikipedia > Jew