Religion

Judaism

JOO-day-iz-um

Abrahamic (Monotheistic)

Origin from 586 BCE

Judaism holds that there is one God, without form or partner, who entered into covenant with Abraham and gave the Torah to Israel at Sinai. It is less a set of required beliefs than a way of life governed by that covenant: the commandments of the Torah as read, argued over and applied through the rabbinic literature, from the Mishnah and Talmud to the rulings of later centuries. Jewish identity is peoplehood as much as religion, transmitted by descent as well as belief, which is why many who observe little still count themselves Jews. Practice centres on Sabbath, festival, dietary law, prayer and study, led by scholars rather than priests. Adherents number roughly fifteen million.

History & Origin

Jewish tradition traces its origin to God's covenant with Abraham and, most definitively, to the covenant given to Moses and the people of Israel at Sinai after the exodus from Egypt.

Facts

Belief

Supreme Being

The God of Israel, understood as one, without partner or physical form, referred to in the Hebrew Bible by the name written as the tetragrammaton. 2

Theology

Monotheistic: one God 1

Transgression Category

Avon: iniquity, a sin arising from desire or moral failure, held more culpable than chet. 3Rabbinic Judaism

Transgression Category

Chet: an unintentional sin, literally a missing of the mark, wrongdoing through error rather than intent. 3Rabbinic Judaism

Transgression Category

Pesha: transgression, a willful rebellion against God, the most severe of the three, an intentional defiance rather than a lapse. 3Rabbinic Judaism

Position on Usury

Interest is permitted but bound by ethical constraints against exploiting the poor 4

Torah bars interest between Jews (Exodus 22:24, Leviticus 25:36-37, Deuteronomy 23:19) while permitting it on a loan to a non-Jew (Deuteronomy 23:20). The heter iska, recasting a loan as a shared investment, is a standing halakhic path to an interest-equivalent return between Jews without violating the underlying bar, formalized across the medieval period by named authorities rather than at one settled date.

Usury Position Detail

The heter iska, literally a permit for a joint venture, restructures what would otherwise be an interest bearing loan between Jews into a shared business investment: the party supplying the capital and the party using it become partners sharing profit and loss rather than creditor and debtor, so any return the capital earns is a business profit, not loan interest, and the Torah's prohibition on taking interest from a fellow Jew (Exodus 22:24, Leviticus 25:36-37, Deuteronomy 23:19) is honestly not triggered rather than evaded on paper. The mechanism's formalization is credited to named medieval authorities, Rabbi Baruch ben Isaac's Sefer Ha-Terumah and Rabbi Yisrael Isserlin's Terumat Ha-Deshen among them, developed across the medieval period rather than at a single settled date. It remains in common use today, including for interest bearing accounts at banks under rabbinical supervision. 4

Position on Sexuality

The body holds no single settled position; the question is actively and openly contested within it 5

the subject's own accountJudaism has no single teaching authority, and its recognized movements already hold documented positions across the whole range on this question. The Reform movement authorized same-sex rabbinic officiation in 2000 and later ruled that a same-sex union may constitute Jewish marriage in the full sense. The Conservative movement's own law committee left the question genuinely unsettled within the movement in 2006, some authorities permitting same-sex ceremonies and ordination and others continuing to hold the traditional prohibition. Orthodox Judaism holds, on the authority of Torah law, that homosexual acts are forbidden and that only a man and a woman may marry.

Sexuality Position Detailthe subject's own account

Judaism is governed by no single worldwide teaching authority, and its recognized movements read at every point on this question today. The Reform movement's Central Conference of American Rabbis authorized rabbis to officiate at same-sex ceremonies in 2000 and, in a 2014 responsum, held that a same-sex union may constitute Jewish marriage, kiddushin, in the full sense. The Reconstructionist and Humanistic movements likewise affirm same-sex marriage and ordain LGBTQ clergy. The Conservative movement's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards issued a combined responsum in 2006 that itself left the question unsettled, approving some liberalizing opinions on ordination and commitment ceremonies alongside others that retained the traditional prohibition, so both readings stand as valid within the movement. Orthodox Judaism, including its Modern Orthodox and Haredi streams, holds that the Torah forbids homosexual acts and sanctions only the marriage of a man and a woman, generally without denying a gay Jew ordinary synagogue membership. No statement speaks for Judaism as a whole. 6

Origins

Origin Period

from 586 BCE 1

Corrected from 900 BCE to 586 BCE. The atlas's own origin-period note, cited to the same source, already says Judaism proper takes shape after the Babylonian exile, and this atlas's own account of that exile already dates it to 597 through 586 BCE. A starting year of 900 BCE predated the exile by three centuries and could not be squared with either. An independently consulted reference work confirms the same account: the emergence of Judaism as a distinct religion is dated 587 to 423 BCE, beginning with the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon and running through the Persian period's shift from temple to Torah.

Origin Period

to 400 BCE 1

Origin Period

Judaism proper takes shape after the Babylonian exile 1

Place of Origin

The southern Levant: the highlands of Israel and Judah 1

Founder

None in the historical sense 1

Founder

Tradition traces the covenant to Abraham and the Torah to Moses 1

Reach

Adherents Today

14,800,000 7

Adherents Today

Pew Research Center's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020 report estimates the global Jewish population at about 14.8 million as of 2020, the smallest of the major world religions measured, concentrated primarily in Israel and the United States. 7

Practice

Practice Status

Partly restricted: some elements are closed to outsiders 8

the subject's own accountJewish scripture, law and commentary are extensively published and studied by Jews and non-Jews alike. One specific area carries a documented traditional restriction: study of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, has historically been reserved by custom in some communities for mature, married students already grounded in Torah and Talmud. That norm concerns who is encouraged to study, not whether the texts themselves may be published or described, and several core Kabbalistic works are in wide academic and popular print today.

Status

Status Today

Living tradition, practised today 1

Giving

Standing Giving Expectation

Ma'aser kesafim, giving one tenth of income to charitable causes (tzedakah), is a widely practiced Jewish norm modeled on the Torah's agricultural tithes. Most halachic authorities today hold that it is not itself a biblical or rabbinic commandment but a minhag, a custom, though a small number of authorities have argued it carries binding force; the debate itself is long standing and unsettled rather than resolved in either direction. 9

Standard Rate Expected

Ten percent. 9

How the Expectation Is Enforced

Customary Norm 9

Law and State

Establishment Status

Declared Not Established 10

Israel's 2018 Basic Law, Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People, declares the right to national self determination in the State of Israel unique to the Jewish people and names Jewish law a source of inspiration for the legislature, a constitutional declaration of Jewish national character that stops short of establishing Judaism institutionally, since Israel has no state religion and Orthodox rabbinical courts hold only the specific, separately legislated jurisdiction over Jewish marriage and divorce.

Trajectory

Membership Over Time

By Pew's 2020 "Jewish Americans in 2020" survey, that share had grown to 2.4 percent of US adults, an estimated 7.5 million people, a national self-identification measure rather than any single body's own membership rolls. 11

Membership Over Time

In Pew Research Center's 2013 "A Portrait of Jewish Americans" survey, 2.2 percent of US adults, an estimated 6.7 million people, identified as Jewish, according to Pew's 2020 follow-up report summarizing both waves. 11

Membership Figure As Of

2013-01-01 11

Membership Figure As Of

2020-01-01 11

Basis of the Membership Figure

Independent Survey 11

Classification

Kind of Tradition

Abrahamic (Monotheistic) 12

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Covenant, Torah and Commandment

Judaism asks less about belief than about obligation. Its central affirmation, the Shema, states that God is one. Beyond that there is no creed every Jew is required to recite, and attempts to fix one, of which the thirteen principles of Maimonides are the most famous, have never carried the binding force a creed has in Christianity.

What holds instead is covenant. God is held to have bound himself to Abraham and his descendants and, at Sinai, to have given Israel the Torah. The Torah is the five books of Moses; the wider scripture, the Tanakh, adds the Prophets and the Writings. Traditional belief holds that a second, oral Torah was given alongside the written one and is preserved in the rabbinic literature, which is why Jewish law is not read off the biblical text directly.

From this comes halakhah, the body of law derived and argued through the Mishnah, the Talmud, the medieval codes and a continuing literature of rulings. It governs the Sabbath, which begins at sundown on Friday and prohibits creative work; the festivals, above all Passover, the autumn days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and the pilgrimage feasts; the dietary law, kashrut; and the conduct of business, marriage and mourning.

Study is itself treated as an act of worship, and the disagreement recorded in the sources is not an embarrassment to be resolved but part of the tradition handed on. Prayer is communal and may be led by any competent member; a rabbi is a scholar and judge rather than a priest. The hereditary priesthood and its sacrifices ended with the Temple in 70 CE. The traditional liturgy still prays for their restoration, and the modern movements differ on whether that petition is to be understood literally.

How the Rabbis Remade It

Judaism as it is now practised is the product of a reconstruction. Until 70 CE the religion had a physical centre: the Temple in Jerusalem, a hereditary priesthood and a sacrificial cult prescribed by the Torah. Rome destroyed the Temple during the revolt of 66 to 73 CE, and none of that apparatus survived.

What replaced it was the achievement of the rabbis, heirs of the Pharisees, who relocated the religion into study, prayer and the household. The synagogue took the place of the sanctuary, the table the place of the altar, and recitation of the sacrificial order the place of the sacrifice. The Mishnah, compiled about 200 CE, set out the oral law in six orders. The debate that grew around it produced the Jerusalem Talmud by about 400 and the much larger Babylonian Talmud over the following two centuries. The Babylonian text became the authoritative one, and Jewish law has been argued through it ever since.

Medieval Jewry divided geographically rather than doctrinally. Communities under Islamic rule, the Sephardi world, produced Maimonides, a substantial philosophical literature and Hebrew poetry. Those of Christian Europe, the Ashkenazi world, produced Rashi, the Tosafists and, from the thirteenth century, the Zohar and kabbalah. Expulsions from England in 1290 and Spain in 1492 pushed populations east and around the Mediterranean.

The eighteenth century brought Hasidism, a popular mystical revival that met fierce opposition from the Lithuanian rabbinic establishment before the two reached coexistence. The Enlightenment and civil emancipation then forced a harder question: how a legal tradition built for a self-governing community should meet a society that no longer governed Jews as a separate body. The modern movements are the competing answers, and the fault line still runs between those who hold halakhah binding as given and those who hold it developing.

Movements, and Where Jews Live

There is no Jewish central authority, and the modern movements are best understood as different answers to emancipation.

Orthodox Judaism holds halakhah to be divinely given and binding, and divides internally between Haredi communities, which limit engagement with secular society, and Modern Orthodoxy, which does not. Conservative Judaism, known as Masorti outside North America, treats the law as binding but historically developing and open to rabbinic amendment. Reform Judaism, which began in nineteenth-century Germany, treats the ethical content of the tradition as its enduring core and individual conscience as the arbiter of ritual observance. Reconstructionist and other smaller streams sit alongside them, and a large share of Jews affiliate with none of these while still identifying as Jewish.

The Holocaust ended the demographic and cultural centre the religion had built in Eastern Europe, killing roughly six million Jews and destroying communities that had existed for centuries. The population has not returned to its pre-war level.

Estimates of the world Jewish population cluster around fifteen to sixteen million, but figures vary considerably with definition: a core count of those identifying as Jewish and as nothing else yields a lower number than one including partial ancestry. Israel and the United States hold the large majority between them, with the next largest communities in France, Canada, the United Kingdom, Argentina and Russia. Hebrew is the liturgical language everywhere and, revived as a spoken tongue in the twentieth century, a vernacular in Israel. Yiddish and Ladino, the everyday languages of the Ashkenazi and Sephardi worlds, survive mainly in Haredi communities and in scholarship.

Spread History

Marker size and shape show how established Judaism was there: a small filled dot for an arrival, a larger one for an established or dominant presence, and a hollow, distinct marker where it was suppressed or nearly disappeared, never simply absent.

2 events have a recorded place with no map coordinate yet, so they are not marked above: Judah Maccabee Rededicates the Second Temple (Jerusalem), Hadrian Suppresses Judaism After the Bar Kokhba Revolt (Roman Judaea).

View the Full Spread Map

Judaism Is Exiled To BabylonIraq, 597 BCE to 586 BCE, Arrived
Judaism Returns To Zion Under CyrusIsrael, 538 BCE, Revived
Judah Maccabee Rededicates the Second TempleJerusalem, 164 BCE, Established
Hadrian Suppresses Judaism After the Bar Kokhba RevoltRoman Judaea, 135 to 138, Suppressed
Judah ha-Nasi Redacts the MishnahGalilee, 200, Established
The Babylonian Talmud's Redaction Is Traditionally CompletedIraq, 499, Established
Jewish Life Flourishes In Al-AndalusSpain, 711 to 1085, Established
Saadia Gaon Becomes Gaon of the Sura AcademyIraq, 928, Established
Crusaders Massacre the Rhineland's Jewish CommunitiesGermany, 1096, Suppressed
Jewish Communities Are Established In PolandPoland, 1264 to 1550, Established
Edward I Expels the Jews From EnglandEngland, 1290 to 1656, Extinct
Jews Are Expelled From SpainSpain, 1492, Extinct
Cromwell Permits Jews to Return to EnglandEngland, 1656, Revived
Judaism Arrives In America In Its Great WaveUnited States, 1880 to 1924, Established
The Holocaust Destroys Polish JewryPoland, 1939 to 1945, Extinct
The State Of Israel Is FoundedIsrael, 1948, Revived
Spain Grants Citizenship to the Descendants of Its Expelled JewsSpain, 2015 to 2021, Revived

Within Judaism

Denominations

Philosophical Schools

Maimonidean Rationalism

Philosophical Schools

5 links

In the Texts

1 Enoch 1:1The Book of Enochapocalyptic

The words of the blessing of Enoch, wherewith he blessed the elect and righteous, who will be living in the day of tribulation, when all the wicked and godless are to be removed.

The Book of Enoch. translated by R. H. Charles.

About This Passage

1 Enoch 6:1-2The Book of Enochthe fall of the angels

And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters. And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: 'Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men and beget us children.'

The Book of Enoch. translated by R. H. Charles.

About This Passage

1 Kings 19:11-12The Holy Bible, American Standard Versionrevelation

And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before Jehovah. And, behold, Jehovah passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before Jehovah; but Jehovah was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but Jehovah was not in the earthquake: and after the earthquake a fire; but Jehovah was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.