Short answers, pulled from the story.
Judaism is an Abrahamic, monotheistic, ethnic religion comprising the collective spiritual, cultural, and legal traditions of the Jewish people. It begins with ethical monotheism, the belief that God is one and concerned with human action. Religious Jews regard it as the means of observing the Mosaic covenant they believe was established between God and the Jewish people.
The core texts are the Torah, the Nevi'im, and the Ketuvim, which together form the Hebrew Bible, often called the Tanakh in Modern Hebrew. Alongside this Written Torah is the Oral Torah, which includes the Mishnah, redacted around 200 CE, and the Talmud, a compilation of the Mishnah and Gemara built over the following three centuries.
The largest Jewish religious movements are Orthodox Judaism, including Haredi and Modern Orthodox Jews, Conservative Judaism, and Reform Judaism. They differ mainly in their approaches to Halakha, rabbinic authority, and the significance of the State of Israel. Other branches include Reconstructionist, Humanistic, Karaite, and Samaritan Judaism, and Haymanot among Ethiopian Jews.
According to Rabbinic Judaism, a Jew is anyone born of a Jewish mother or who converted in accordance with halakha. Reconstructionist and much of Progressive Judaism accept a child as Jewish if one parent is Jewish and the child is raised with a Jewish identity, while Karaite Judaism transmits identity by patrilineal descent.
In 2025, the world Jewish population was estimated at 14.8 million, with religious observance varying from strict to non-existent. The majority live in Israel and the United States, the only two countries with Jewish populations exceeding one million.
The three pilgrimage festivals are Passover, which commemorates the Exodus from Egypt, Shavuot, which celebrates the revelation of the Torah at Mount Sinai, and Sukkot, which recalls forty years of wandering. The High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur center on judgment and forgiveness, with Yom Kippur as the holiest day of the year.
Judaism holds that the messiah has not yet arrived and the Messianic Age is not yet present, so it rejects Jesus as Christ. It regards the Christian view of Jesus as divine, as God the Son, as contrary to monotheism, and sees the worship of a person as a forbidden form of idolatry.