Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jews originated from the Israelites, Iron Age Semitic-speaking tribes that inhabited the highlands of Canaan. Archaeological evidence, including the Merneptah Stele dated to around 1200 BCE, provides the earliest written reference to a people called Israel. Genetic studies show that most Jews worldwide share a common gene pool tracing back approximately four millennia to the Middle East.
Six million Jews were systematically murdered during the Holocaust, the genocide carried out by Nazi Germany during World War II. In Poland alone, three million Jews were killed in concentration camp gas chambers, with one million murdered at the Auschwitz complex. Before the war, the global Jewish population had reached a peak of 16.7 million.
The State of Israel was declared on the 14th of May 1948, upon the termination of the British Mandate over Palestine. David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the creation of a Jewish and democratic state. The following day, neighboring Arab states invaded, initiating the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which ended in 1949.
The three major ethnic divisions are the Ashkenazim, whose ancestors settled in the Rhineland and Central Europe; the Sephardim, whose ancestors originated in the Iberian Peninsula; and the Mizrahim, who come from the Middle East and North Africa. Ashkenazi Jews represent at least 70 percent of Jews worldwide. Smaller distinct groups include Romaniote Jews, Ethiopian Beta Israel, Indian Bene Israel, and the Kaifeng Jews of China.
Jews have historically spoken Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Yiddish, Ladino, and dozens of other vernaculars developed in diaspora communities. Hebrew, the liturgical language of Judaism, was revived as a spoken language by Eliezer ben Yehuda after arriving in Palestine in 1881. Today the three most commonly spoken languages among Jews are Hebrew, English, and Russian.
In 1492, Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon decreed the expulsion of all Jews in Spain who refused conversion, sending an estimated 200,000 people into exile. In 1497, Portugal's Jews, numbering around 30,000, were forcibly converted rather than expelled. In 1498, some 3,500 Jews were expelled from Navarre.