Jews

• 1. Introduction

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  Jews, or the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group whose origins trace back to the Israelites of ancient Israel and Judah. Before the Second World War, their global population reached a peak of 16.7 million people, representing around 0.7 percent of the entire world. Then came the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were systematically murdered. Today, over 85 percent of the world's remaining Jewish population lives in just two countries: Israel and the United States.

  What makes the Jewish people so unusual is the question that runs through centuries of history, scholarship, and debate. They are at once a religion, an ethnicity, a nation, and a culture. Their name traces back to a single tribe and a single geographic region, yet their communities have taken root across every continent. Their language was considered liturgically preserved for sixteen centuries, then revived as a spoken tongue. Their identity survived exile, expulsion, mass conversion, and genocide.

  How did a people originating from the Iron Age highlands of Canaan become one of the most geographically dispersed groups in human history? And how did they maintain a recognizable collective identity across millennia, without a state, without a shared territory, and often without a shared language?

• 2. A Name and Its Layers

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  The English word "Jew" descends through a chain of languages that stretches back to ancient Judah. It passed from the Hebrew Yehudi into Aramaic, then into Greek as Ioudaios, into Latin as Iudaeus, into Old French as giu, and eventually into Middle English as Gyw or Iewe. Somewhere along the way, the letter "d" was dropped, and a new word was born.

  Scholars disagree about what "Judah" itself originally meant. Genesis links the name to the Hebrew verb yada, meaning praise, but most scholars believe it actually derives from a Levantine geographic region defined by gorges and ravines. The same uncertainty surrounds the broader shift in terminology: the Book of Esther, dated to around the 4th century BCE, marks an explicit transition from the ethnonym "Israelites" to "Jews," a shift not found in the Torah itself.

  Some scholars prefer rendering the Greek Ioudaios as "Judean" rather than "Jew" in biblical translations, arguing the geographic precision prevents antisemitic misreading. Others resist, saying this erases the Jewish identity of biblical figures, including Jesus. Jodi Magness offered a formulation that threads the two: Ioudaioi refers to "a people of Judahite/Judean ancestry who worshipped the God of Israel as their national deity and (at least nominally) lived according to his laws."

  The equivalents across modern languages reveal just how far the word traveled: yahūdī in Arabic, Jude in German (whose adjective jüdisch gave rise to the word Yiddish), judeu in Portuguese, Juif in French, judío in Spanish. In Italian and Persian and Russian, however, the word "Hebrew" became the basis for describing a Jew instead, showing that even the naming of the people branched into different traditions depending on where the communities settled.

• 3. From Canaan to Kingdoms

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  The earliest written mention of a people called Israel appears in the Merneptah Stele, an Egyptian inscription dated to around 1200 BCE. At that time, the people described were living in the central highlands of Canaan, in hundreds of small settlements built between the 12th and 10th centuries BCE. Archaeological evidence indicates they were not newcomers imposing themselves on the region from outside; they appear to have branched out of the existing Canaanite populations.

  Gary A. Rendsburg links the early forebears of the Israelites to nomadic pastoralists known to the Egyptians as the Shasu, attested around the 15th century BCE. These groups eventually settled the mountain ranges of Canaan, living in simple communities where, notably, pig bones are absent from the archaeological record, suggesting distinctive dietary practices from an early date.

  By around 900 BCE, historians agree that a Kingdom of Israel existed in the north, with its capital mostly in Samaria. A southern Kingdom of Judah, centered on Jerusalem, is generally dated to at least the 7th century BCE, with recent excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa pushing evidence for it back to the 10th century BCE. The two kingdoms shared ethnic, linguistic, and religious characteristics but followed different political trajectories. Israel was larger and wealthier, but its royal succession was repeatedly settled by military coup. Judah was smaller and more mountainous, yet it was ruled by the House of David without dynastic interruption for four centuries.

  In around 720 BCE, the Neo-Assyrian Empire destroyed the northern Kingdom of Israel. A significant portion of its population was exiled to Mesopotamia, while immigrants from the same region were settled in their place. Judah survived as an Assyrian vassal, and actually experienced population growth and prosperity through the 7th century BCE. That prosperity ended in 587 BCE, when the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II besieged Jerusalem, destroyed the First Temple, and deported much of the Judahite population to Babylon.

• 4. Exile, Return, and the Temple

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  According to the Book of Ezra, it was Cyrus the Great of Persia who ended the Babylonian exile in 538 BCE, the year after he captured Babylon. The exiles who returned were led by Zerubbabel, a descendant of the royal line of David, and Joshua the Priest, a descendant of the High Priests. Together they oversaw the construction of the Second Temple, completed around 516 BCE. The former Kingdom of Judah became the province of Yehud Medinata within the Persian Empire, smaller in territory and reduced in population.

  Judea changed hands repeatedly in the centuries that followed. Alexander the Great conquered the region in 332 BCE. After his death, Ptolemaic Egypt held it from around 301 BCE, then the Seleucid Empire from 198 BCE. When the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV attempted to suppress Jewish religious practice, the Maccabean Revolt erupted in 167 BCE. By 141 BCE the revolt had succeeded, and Jews enjoyed political independence under the Hasmonean dynasty from 110 to 63 BCE. Under the Hasmonean kings John Hyrcanus, Aristobulus I, and Alexander Jannaeus, the kingdom expanded to encompass Samaria, Idumaea, Galilee, and parts of Transjordan. The Idumeans, who had moved into southern Judea after the First Temple's destruction, were converted to Judaism en masse during these conquests.

  Roman power arrived in 63 BCE, when the general Pompey intervened in a Hasmonean succession crisis and made Judea a client state. The Herodian dynasty ruled as vassals, with Herod the Great reigning from 37 to 4 BCE. After his death, his kingdom was divided, and in 6 CE, Judea came under direct Roman administration. The First Jewish-Roman War, from 66 to 73 or 74 CE, ended with the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple. A few generations later, the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132-136 CE led to the near-total depopulation of Judea, the banning of Jews from Jerusalem, and the renaming of the province as Syria Palaestina. Jewish life shifted northward, centering on Galilee, where the Mishnah and the Jerusalem Talmud were composed.

• 5. The Making of the Diaspora

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  Jewish communities outside Judea existed long before the destruction of the Second Temple. Among the earliest evidence are the Al-Yahudu Tablets, dated to the 6th-5th centuries BCE, which document the lives of Judean exiles in Babylonia. Documents from Elephantine in Egypt reveal a Jewish garrison community established at two frontier fortresses during the 5th-4th centuries BCE. According to Josephus, a Jewish community in Alexandria existed from the city's founding by Alexander the Great in the 4th century BCE.

  By 200 BCE, established Jewish communities were present in both Egypt and Mesopotamia. Over the following two centuries, Jewish populations spread to Asia Minor, Greece, Macedonia, and Cyrene. The Jewish-Roman Wars of the first and second centuries CE accelerated this dispersal dramatically: large numbers of Jews were taken captive, sold into slavery, or forced to flee, spreading communities across the Roman Empire as well as into Arabia and Mesopotamia.

  In Mesopotamia, the Jewish community under Parthian and later Sasanian rule operated largely outside Roman reach. Its population in the 3rd to 7th centuries has been estimated at around one million, making it the largest Jewish diaspora community of that period. Under the political leadership of the exilarch, regarded as a royal heir of the House of David, this community maintained an autonomous status. The academies of Nehardea, Pumbedita, and Sura became centers of Jewish learning, and the Babylonian Talmud was compiled there between the 3rd and 6th centuries.

  Over time, diaspora communities coalesced into three major ethnic subdivisions. The Ashkenazim originated in the Rhineland and France, taking their name from the Hebrew word for a region in that area. The Sephardim originated in the Iberian Peninsula, named after the Hebrew word for Spain. The Mizrahim covered the Middle East and North Africa. Many other smaller groups, including Romaniote Jews of Greece, Yemenite Jews, Ethiopian Jews, and Bukharan Jews, predated the arrival of the Sephardic diaspora in their respective regions.

• 6. Medieval Fortunes and Expulsions

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  In 1144, the first documented blood libel in Europe occurred in Norwich, England, marking a visible escalation in patterns of violence against Jews that had been building for generations. The 12th and 13th centuries brought waves of antisemitic legislation, segregation, repeated blood libels, pogroms, and massacres. Jews in the Holy Roman Empire were designated Servi camerae regis, "servants of the imperial chamber," by Frederick II, a status that offered limited protection while drawing them into the political struggles between emperor and German cities. During the Black Death in the mid-14th century, Jews were accused of poisoning wells, and many communities were destroyed. An expulsion from England in 1290 drove Ashkenazi populations further eastward, into Poland, Lithuania, and Russia.

  In contrast, Jewish communities in the Middle East thrived under Islamic rule, particularly in cities like Baghdad, Cairo, and Damascus. The Pumbedita and Sura academies led Jewish scholarship from the 7th to 11th centuries, and the period produced important figures in Hebrew poetry, grammar, philosophy, and science. The Jews of Muslim Iberia entered what became known as a Golden Age, with leading figures including the scholar and poet Samuel ibn Naghrillah, who served as grand vizier and military commander of Granada, along with Hasdai ibn Shaprut, Judah Halevi, Moses ibn Ezra, and Solomon ibn Gabirol.

  That Golden Age ended with the Almoravid and Almohad dynasties, whose persecutions drove many Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, including Maimonides. In 1391, widespread pogroms swept across Spain, leaving thousands dead and forcing mass conversions. The Spanish Inquisition was established to pursue conversos who continued to practice Judaism in secret. In 1492, Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon decreed the expulsion of all Jews who refused conversion, sending an estimated 200,000 into exile in Portugal, Italy, North Africa, and the Ottoman Empire. Five years later, Portugal's Jews, numbering around 30,000, were formally ordered expelled but were instead forcibly converted to preserve their economic role. In 1498, some 3,500 Jews were expelled from Navarre. Many of those forcibly converted became crypto-Jews, practicing Judaism in secret while outwardly observing Christianity, and remained targets of the Inquisitions for centuries afterward.

• 7. Modernity, Zionism, and the Holocaust

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  Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat, or "The Jewish State," in 1896, articulating a vision for a Jewish polity in the Land of Israel. A year later, he presided over the First Zionist Congress. Herzl's movement emerged from a specific environment: Jews in Eastern Europe, particularly within the Russian Empire's Pale of Settlement, faced mounting legal restrictions and recurring pogroms. Zionism offered a different answer to persecution than assimilation or emigration to the Americas. Between 1881 and 1924, 2.8 million Jews emigrated to the United States.

  From this same era came some of the most influential Jewish figures in modern intellectual history: Albert Einstein in physics, Sigmund Freud in psychology, Franz Kafka in literature, and Irving Berlin in music. Many Nobel Prize winners of that period were Jewish, as has continued to be the case.

  When Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in 1933, conditions deteriorated rapidly. Jews fled to Mandatory Palestine, the United States, and the Soviet Union. World War II began in 1939. By 1941, Hitler occupied nearly all of Europe. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union that year, the Final Solution began: a systematic, organized effort to annihilate the Jewish people entirely. In Poland, three million Jews were murdered in concentration camp gas chambers, with one million killed at the Auschwitz complex alone. Six million Jews in total were murdered in the Holocaust.

  On the 14th of May 1948, upon the termination of the British Mandate over Palestine, David Ben-Gurion declared the creation of the State of Israel. The following day, all neighboring Arab states invaded, initiating the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Israel's newly formed defense forces resisted. By 1949, the war ended, and Israel began absorbing waves of Jewish immigration, granting citizenship to Jews worldwide through the Law of Return, passed in 1950. Between 1948 and 1958, Israel's Jewish population rose from 800,000 to two million.

• 8. Identity Without Borders

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  Hebrew was revived as a spoken language by Eliezer ben Yehuda, who arrived in Palestine in 1881. Before that, it had not been used as a mother tongue since Tannaic times, a gap of roughly sixteen centuries. For much of that period it survived as a liturgical language and the language of Jewish scholarship, preserved across communities that were otherwise speaking Arabic, German, Spanish, Aramaic, Greek, or Persian.

  This linguistic story captures something essential about Jewish identity. Across the diaspora, communities developed distinct vernaculars: Yiddish, the Judaeo-German language developed by Ashkenazi Jews in Central Europe; Ladino, the Judaeo-Spanish language of Sephardic Jews; and dozens of smaller dialects, including Judaeo-Georgian, Judaeo-Arabic, Judaeo-Berber, Krymchak, and Judaeo-Malayalam, many of which have largely fallen out of use in the wake of the Holocaust, the Jewish exodus from Arab countries, and emigration patterns across the 20th century.

  Genetic studies have added another dimension to the question of Jewish continuity. Research shows that most Jews worldwide share a common genetic heritage originating in the Middle East, with a common gene pool estimated to trace back four millennia. Ashkenazi Jews share more common paternal lineages with other Jewish and Middle Eastern groups than with non-Jewish populations in the regions of Eastern Europe and Germany where they lived. A 2025 genetic study on the Ashkenazi Jewish founder population identified around 54 core maternal founder lineages, likely originating from the Near East, distinct from later admixture that entered the population.

  The historian Anthony D. Smith wrote that the Jews of the late Second Temple period provide "a closer approximation to the ideal type of the nation... than perhaps anywhere else in the ancient world." Adrian Hastings argued that through the model of ancient Israel in the Hebrew Bible, Jews gave the world the original concept of nationhood. As of 2021, demographer Sergio Della Pergola estimated 6.8 million Jews in Israel, 6 million in the United States, and 2.3 million elsewhere in the world, with more than half of all world Jewry concentrated in just ten metropolitan areas.