The Jewish People

The Jerusalem Great Synagogue

The Jewish People are the collective group of people who are descended ethnically and culturally from the people who originated in Israel in the second and first millennia BCE and amongst whom Judaism evolved as a religion during that time. They have one of the most complex and resilient cultures of any people in the world, having preserved elements of not just their religion, but also a unique culture and ethos, over a period of thousands of years. For many different historical reasons large sections of the Jewish people became dispersed from Israel in late antiquity and the Jewish diaspora became spread across North Africa and Europe in particular. Anti-Semitism also emerged in late antiquity, being deeply rooted in both Roman attitudes towards and Christian views of the Jewish people. As a consequence of this, the Jews of Europe faced enormous persecution over the centuries, culminating in the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. There are believed to be approximately 15 million Jews worldwide today, with slightly less than half of these living in the modern-day state of Israel and much of the remainder in the United States.

The origins of the Jewish people

Exploring the origins of the Jewish people is an extremely complex thing, in large part because the Levant and the regions running from the Sinai Peninsula north towards modern-day Turkey was such a melting pot of different peoples, customs and cultures in ancient times. It was also a battleground between competing empires such as those of New Kingdom Egypt and the Hittite Empire in the middle of the second millennium BCE. Furthermore, study of the different peoples here in the Bronze Age requires proficiency in reading multiple ancient languages.

These difficulties aside, what can be said without dispute is that a people coalesced here in the Dark Age that followed the Late Bronze Age Collapse of the thirteenth century BCE, a group with a unifying religion and traditions. This was based on their origin story as outlined in the Exodus of Moses and the Israelites from Egypt around the time of the Late Bronze Age Collapse and their settlement in the land of the Israelites. These Israelites were unusual during their time in that they were monotheists who believed in one all-powerful god, identified through the Tetragrammaton, YHWH, usually rendered in Anglophone discussion as Yahweh.

The belief system of the Israelites was clearly well developed by around the tenth and ninth centuries BCE and was systematically written down as the Torah and other religious texts in the centuries that followed. Archaeological evidence from around Israel indicates that the Israelites were refraining from eating pork already by this time on religious grounds, while their center of worship became the Temple built by King Solomon on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in the tenth century BCE. The term ‘Jew’ or ‘descendants of Yehuda’ did not begin to enter common usage until around the fifth century BCE to describe the Israelites, gradually being cemented over time.

The Kingdoms of Israel and Judah

Map of the approximate locations of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

Although the Early Iron Age is a poorly documented era in the history of the ancient Levant, there is little doubt that by the ninth century BCE or earlier two Jewish polities, the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah, had emerged in the region west of the River Jordan and occupying much of the region to the Mediterranean between the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee. The Kingdom of Israel lay in the north and was centered around settlements like Jericho, Samaria and Jaffa, while the Kingdom of Judah lay further south and its capital was at Jerusalem, the center of the Jewish world. This followed a golden age of the Jewish people in which a united Kingdom of Israel had been ruled over by King David and then wise King Solomon. These two rulers had expanded the Kingdom of Israel and been responsible for the development of Jerusalem to begin the First Temple Period. A civil war of sorts later led to the division into the distinct kingdoms of Judah and Israel.

By the eighth century BCE both of these Jewish states were under pressure from resurgent empires to the north and east. Indeed, even during its golden age, the Kingdom of Israel had rivals for power within the Levant itself, peoples such as the Canaanites and Phoenicians who occupied lands close to the coast and to the north in what is now Lebanon, while the Tanakh (the equivalent of the Old Testament in the Christian tradition) contains long sections addressing the relations of the Israelites with the Moabites, Edomites and Midianites to the east and south-east in modern-day Jordan and other regions.

Yet it was the Assyrians and then the Babylonians, two peoples who established large empires that expanded out of their base in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) who really caused the destruction of these earlier Jewish states. The Kingdom of Israel was largely defeated and annexed by the Assyrians in the late eighth century BCE. Then the Kingdom of Judah was pillaged in a brutal war by the Babylonians led by King Nebuchadnezzar II around 586 BCE. Furthermore, the Babylonians not only conquered the Jewish people, but destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem, bringing the First Temple Period to an end. Many Jews were also enslaved and taken to Babylon, the beginning of the Jewish diaspora, though soon, as the Babylonians were in turn conquered by the Persians, the Jews of Babylon headed back west to Israel to re-establish their places of worship in an event often termed the Return to Zion.

The Second Temple Period

The destruction of the Temple and the conquest of Israel by the Babylonians was a tumultuous event, though the region did not remain long under Babylonian rule. Instead in the middle of the sixth century BCE, just a few decades later, the Achaemenid Persians to the east in what is now Iran began a rapid series of conquests which by 500 BCE had created an empire that completely replaced Babylon as the power in the region, extending as far west as Egypt and Anatolia. The Jewish people became subjects of the Persian Empire as a result.

The era that now commenced, known as the Second Temple Period owing to the reconstruction of the Temple of Jerusalem after the Babylonian destruction of it, was one marked by distinct periods of foreign domination. Between the mid-sixth century BCE and the middle of the fourth century BCE the region was ruled as part of the Persian Empire. It then fell under Macedonian/Greek control as a result of the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 330s and early 320s BCE. When Alexander’s empire fragmented after his death, the Levant was incorporated into the Seleucid Empire ruled by the heirs to one of Alexander’s leading generals, Seleucus.

Destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem (1867) by Francesco Hayez.

The Jewish people would remain under Seleucid rule for a century and a half, that is until the rise of the Maccabean kings who led a revolt against Hellenistic (Greek) rule between 167 BCE and 160 BCE. Over time this resulted in the emergence of a newly independent Jewish state. It was short-lived though. A century after the Maccabean Revolt the Romans expanded into the area, conquering the Seleucid Empire and establishing the Hasmonean Dynasty as a client state in what the Romans would come to know as Judaea.

Ultimately Roman rule would end in much the same way as the brief Babylonian conquest. In the first century CE under rulers like Emperor Caesar Augustus, Emperor Tiberius and Emperor Caligula the client state was more fully incorporated into the Roman Empire as the province of Roman Judaea. In tandem, the Romans, who found many of the Jewish peoples' religious and cultural customs such as circumcision, monotheism and their dietary habits peculiar, consistently engaged in acts which sought to undermine the holiness of the Temple of Jerusalem. In 66 CE this led to a massive revolt amongst the Jewish people against Roman rule. In the course of what would prove to be one of the largest revolts ever launched against the Roman state the Temple was destroyed by the Romans following the siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE, bringing the Second Temple Period to an end.

The beginning of the Jewish diaspora

A key element in the story of the Jewish people is the manner in which they were driven from Israel and the Levant in ancient times and dispersed to other parts of the world, a phenomenon known as the Jewish diaspora, however while most ethnic diasporas come about owing to emigration from one’s homeland to seek better economic opportunities, in the case of the Jewish people the flight from Israel in ancient times was usually brought about as a result of violence and coercion. This might be said to have begun in the early sixth century BCE with the conquest of Israel by the Babylonians and the Babylonian Captivity which followed. While many Jewish groups eventually made their way home from Mesopotamia, others were dispersed far afield. For instance, tradition holds that the first community of Jewish people in India arrived there around the middle of the sixth century BCE as an indirect result of the conquest of their homeland by the Babylonians.

We are on firmer ground when it comes to events in subsequent centuries. During the Second Temple Period the conquest of the homeland of the Jewish people successively by the Persians, Macedonians, Seleucids and Romans often created disturbed social and political conditions which led to migration to other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean. We know there were large communities of Jewish people in places like Cyrenaica (Libya), Cyprus and Egypt by the time of the Roman Empire, with Alexandria in northern Egypt, the second largest city of the Roman Empire, having a particularly large diaspora community by the first century CE, so much so it led to a large pogrom here in 38 CE as anti-Jewish sentiment in the city boiled over, something which was extensively recorded by Jewish scholars of the times such as Philo and Josephus.

Emperor Vespasian (r. 69 CE – 79 CE) introduced the Fiscus Judaicus.

The major period of the ancient diaspora came as a result of this growing anti-Jewish sentiment across the Roman Empire. The Jewish Revolt did not just result in the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, it also ushered in a period of pronounced persecution of the Jewish people by the Roman state for decades thereafter, epitomized in the Fiscus Judaicus, an annual tax on all Jewish people first introduced by Emperor Vespasian. Even more consequentially, in the mid-130s CE, Emperor Hadrian decided that he was going to establish a new Roman colony in Jerusalem called Aelia Capitolina. This act, along with the expulsion of the Jewish people from Jerusalem following the revolt of Simon bar Kokhba between 132 CE and 135 CE, seems to have led to a fresh exodus of people from Roman Judaea, with many settling in North Africa.

Thus, the Jewish diaspora primarily came about owing to the anti-Jewish policies of the Roman state. A further cause of the dispersal of the Jews from Israel was the unrest of the late antique world as waves of attacks on the Roman provinces occurred from the third century onwards. In the case of the Levant this came from Queen Zenobia of Palmyra who conquered much of the region and Egypt in the early 270s CE. Then further Arab warlords were operating here in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries, followed by the Arab conquests and the inception of the Islamic caliphate in the seventh century. All of these events led to a further dispersal of the Jewish people, with some of those who had earlier sought refuge in North Africa being pushed onwards again to Western Europe.

The Jewish people in Medieval Europe and the Islamic world

During the medieval era, after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and the advent of Christianity in Europe and Islam in North Africa and the Middle East, the Jewish people would experience differing fortunes in different regions. In medieval Europe Jewish people were systematically persecuted. There was a very severe strain of anti-Semitism running through the Christian church from its earliest days. This stemmed from a view amongst the earliest followers of Christ that they needed to distinguish themselves from the adherents of Judaism in the eyes of the Roman state. Because the Romans were actively persecuting the Jews in the first and second centuries CE following the Jewish revolts, the Christians were anxious to affirm that they were not a branch of Judaism, but a different religion altogether. In doing so they actively condemned the Jewish people for a wide range of religious practices, cultural traits and historical actions.

This anti-Semitism survived and expanded in medieval Europe. Two issues in particular became objects of criticism for Christian commentators. The foremost of these was the argument that the Temple authorities in Jerusalem had been responsible for the condemning and death of Jesus Christ and that the Jews were consequently collectively guilty of deicide, the murder of god. Secondly, Christians condemned the Jewish resort to usury, the lending out of money at high rates, something which Christian doctrine forbade in light of Jesus’s condemnation of money-lenders. The Christian critique of usury amongst the Jews would have a long history and influenced the development of the conspiratorial notion of the Jewish people having an outsized influence over the world’s financial systems in more modern times.

A statue of Maimonides in Cordoba, Spain.

As a result of these condemnations, the Jews were often forced to live in ghettoes in parts of European cities in the Middle Ages and even wear the Star of David to identify themselves as adherents of Judaism. Eventually, however, even this form of persecution gave way to pogroms and outright expulsions. For instance, at the beginning of the First Crusade to the Holy Land in the late 1090s, the Crusader armies committed pogroms against the Jewish communities they passed through on their way from France and Germany to Constantinople. Later rulers like King Philip IV of France and King Edward I of England ordered the complete expulsion of the Jewish communities which lived in their kingdoms. Many headed eastwards and would come to live in large numbers in Poland and adjoining territories.

There was a very different situation in the Islamic world in medieval times. The Islamic rulers of the Arab Caliphate and other emirates which came to dominate the Middle East, North Africa and parts of southern Europe such as the Iberian Peninsula and Sicily in the seventh and eighth centuries were much more tolerant of other religions than was Christian Europe at the time. In particular, Jewish people were allowed to live and prosper unmolested in the emirate of Cordoba in what is now Spain from the eighth century onwards. Consequently, some of the greatest scholars anywhere in the world between the ninth and thirteenth centuries were brilliant Jewish polymaths such as Maimonides who lived and worked in Iberia and North Africa during this era. Maimonides, for example, was a philosopher, physician and a very consequential interpreter of the Torah.

Different communities of Jewish people

Owing to the nature of the Jewish diaspora and the varied cultures, geographies and political settings in which different communities of Jewish people lived from late antiquity onwards, it is generally accepted that different Jewish edot or ‘communities’ with their own traditions and characteristics emerged over time. In Europe the two main branches of the Jewish people were the Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews. Sephardic basically means ‘Jews of Spain’ and recognizes the fact that a very large Jewish community existed here in medieval times. Ashkenazi is effectively a way of saying ‘Jews of Germany’, though as we will see presently, over time a huge proportion of Ashkenazi Jews ended up migrating to Eastern Europe in late medieval times.

The largest denomination of the Jewish people outside of Europe are the Mizrahi Jews, a broadly umbrella term for the Jewish diaspora in North Africa and parts of the Middle East, though the small communities of Jewish people who ended up living in places like Central Asia and western India are also sometimes included amongst the Mizrahim. The Mizrahi diaspora is amongst the oldest and most enduring in Jewish history, as it incorporates groups who were settled in large numbers in places like Egypt and Yemen. However, some of these groups are virtually non-existent today in the countries they were associated with for many centuries. For instance, in the late 1940s and early 1950s nearly all Yemenite Jews left southern Arabia and returned to Israel.

A final denomination of the Jewish diaspora are Ethiopian Jews. Ethiopia is a country which has a peculiar religious history, with branches of both Judaism and Christianity developing in their own unique fashions here for centuries in the medieval era as they were cut off from the wider world Jewish and Christian worlds as a result of the Muslim conquest of Egypt in the seventh century. All of these different Jewish communities, whether they be Sephardic, Ethiopian, Ashkenazi, Mizrahi or any sub-denominations within them, have their own unique traditions and culture forged over many centuries in very different places.

Sephardic Jews, the Spanish Inquistion and crypto-Judaism

One of the groups amongst the Jewish people who experienced mixed fortunes in times by gone are Sephardic Jews. As we have seen, in the period of the Islamic emirate of Cordoba there were many Jewish scholars in the Iberian Peninsula and a substantial degree of religious toleration for adherents of Judaism. However, this began to give way in certain parts of the country as the Christian Reconquista or ‘Reconquest’ of the peninsula advanced over a long period between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. The eleventh and twelfth centuries saw the Christian states of the north such as Portugal, Castile, Aragon and Leon make substantial gains in conquering central Spain and Portugal for the Christian cause. The Reconquista was then completed in the fifteenth century with the annexation of the emirate of Granada in the far south by Castile.

By the time Granada fell to the Spanish in 1492, there was already an enormous amount of persecution of both the Jewish and Muslim communities of Spain by the nascent Spanish Inquisition. This only increased thereafter, with a series of mass expulsions in the mid-1490s and again periodically for well over a century thereafter. Many Jewish people left and ended up finding sanctuary in places like Poland or the lands of the growing Ottoman Empire in the Eastern Mediterranean. Others remained though and either converted to Christianity or feigned to do so, becoming crypto-Jews in the process, adherents of Judaism who claimed to be Christians in public but continued to worship as Jews in private.

Ashkenazi Jews and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

Reception of Jews in Poland by Jan Matejko (1889).

No account of the Jewish people would be complete without discussion of the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe in the late medieval and early modern eras. As numerous Christian kingdoms, cities and states in Western and Central Europe expelled their Jewish communities from the twelfth century onwards, large numbers of Jewish people began relocating eastwards to the Kingdom of Poland, where they were afforded an unusual degree of toleration by Christian standards at the time. This migration was further fuelled by pogroms such as those which occurred in the late 1340s and 1350s as many Christian communities attacked their Jewish neighbors, persecuting them as an outlet for their despair over the arrival of the bubonic plague, the ‘Black Death’, to Europe.

In the east in the Kingdom of Poland and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that succeeded it in the sixteenth century, a particularly rich Jewish community from a cultural perspective developed. Yeshivas abounded and prominent ones emerged in cities like Warsaw and Krakow. Some of the very first books ever printed in Hebrew emerged from printing presses established in Krakow and Lublin, notably an edition of the Torah in 1530. Talmudic learning and also the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalism also flourished here, with Yiddish as the lingua franca of this community of Jewish scholarship. Hence, for a time in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth became the home of a golden age of Ashkenazi Jewry. Unfortunately, it came to an end between the 1770s and 1790s as Poland’s more powerful neighbors, Prussia, Austria and Russia, carved up the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and annexed it in the course of three Partitions of Poland.

The resurgence of anti-Semitism in the nineteenth century

The nineteenth century saw a marked increase in anti-Semitism across Europe. In many ways it is somewhat contradictory that this should have happened. On the one hand, Europe was becoming more secular and was leaving behind its religious divisions after hundreds of years of the Wars of Religion between Roman Catholics and various Protestant denominations, epitomized in the Thirty Years War between 1618 and 1648. Why then was there such an uptick in anti-Semitism? One would think it should have declined in line with the more rational and secular spirit of the Enlightenment and the advent of modernity.

Alfred Dreyfus.

The causes of the surge in anti-Semitism have been widely speculated on. It was intertwined with the rise in secular nationalism across Europe, movements which led to the lionizing of individual ethnic groups within different countries. As a result, minorities such as the Jewish people, or indeed the Romani people, were facing growing levels of persecution in places like France, the German Empire and the Russian Empire. Furthermore, the rise of new economic and social ideologies led to the development of what can be classed as conspiracy theories about the Jewish people and other groups such as the Freemasons and their allegedly hidden influence over society at large.

Whatever the reasons for all of this might have been, we know what the consequences were. In some countries there was a growing level of social and economic persecution of Jewish people, as demonstrated through well-known events like the Dreyfuss Affair in France from the mid-1890s. Much more nefarious were the Jewish pogroms which were perpetrated periodically across the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These had the additional impact of expanding the Jewish diaspora further as a wave of Jewish migration from the Russian Empire to the United States began, principally from the former lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that had been annexed by the Russians back in the late eighteenth century.

The Holocaust

The swelling tide of anti-Semitism would continue into the twentieth century with horrific results. Following the First World War, the anti-Semitism which had become particularly virulent in Germany in the final decades of the nineteenth century, became especially poisonous, with many groups such as the National Socialists led by Adolf Hitler blaming Germany’s defeat in the conflict on a vast international Jewish conspiracy. This became intertwined with the fascist detestation of the Bolshevik communists of the Soviet Union so that in the Nazi imagination the Jews and Bolsheviks were engaged in some elaborate program to destroy the Germans and other Aryan peoples of Europe.

The outcome of this ideology is all-too well-known. Even before the Second World War broke out the Nazis had been engaged in punitive policies towards the half a million or so Jewish people who lived in German, notably through the Nuremburg Laws and the Kristallnacht of 1938. The worst came though once the war began and the Nazis conquered vast parts of Central and Eastern Europe, lands where millions of Ashkenazi Jews lived in Poland and western Ukraine. Appalling massacres such as the mass murder of over 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar near Kyiv in the space of just two days in late September 1941 followed. Thereafter the Nazi state decided on the Final Solution, a program whereby Europe’s Jews were sent to six death camps in Poland (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, Belzec and Chelmno) and were systematically murdered there. By the time the Holocaust ended as Poland was liberated in late 1944 and early 1945, approximately six million of Europe’s Jewish people had been killed by the Nazis.

Israel and the Jewish people today

David Ben-Gurion.

As a consequence of the Holocaust, the movement to establish a new state for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland in Israel gained momentum immediately following the end of the Second World War. The idea that the people of the Jewish diaspora might return to their ancient homeland from Europe, North Africa and other regions had first gained traction in the second half of the nineteenth century and accelerated following the First World War when Britain took over the region from the Ottoman Empire as a Mandate territory. Promises were made to the growing community of Jewish people in Israel in the 1920s and 1930s by the British government and some forms of self-government were granted. However, owing to issues around the Arab population here the British were unwilling to reach a final political settlement. That did not come until 1948 after the war when the state of Israel came into being with David Ben-Gurion as its first Prime Minister.

Israel is home to nearly nine and a half million people today, of which some 80% are Jewish people. The Jewish population worldwide is an estimated 15 million or more people. Of those that live outside of Israel the vast majority reside in the United States. The Jewish population of Europe is very small today, a consequence of both the Holocaust and the fact that many Jews who survived the Nazi genocide decided to leave continental Europe after the war, either settling in Israel or heading to the US.

See also

• Israel
• Ashkenazi Jewish ethnicity
• Mizrahi Jewish ethnicity
• Sephardic Jewish ethnicity
• Yemenite Jewish ethnicity
• Russian Jewish genealogy
• Holocaust
• How to Research Eastern European Archives Online
• How to Research Archives in Spain and Portugal
• Israeli Immigration Records
• Sephardic Jewish surnames
• Jewish surnames

Explore more about the Jewish people

• Worldwide Jewish Burial Registry from JewishGen record collection on MyHeritage
• Israel, Immigration Lists record collection on MyHeritage
• Germany, Jewish Victims of Nazi Persecution, 1933-1945 record collection on MyHeritage
• Index of Jewish Displaced Person and Refugee Cards, 1943-1959 record collection on MyHeritage
• Jewish Ethnicity & DNA: History, Migration, Genetics at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
• Finding Jewish Records in the MyHeritage Search Engine at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
• Jewish Resources on the Genealogy Giants at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
• Researching Your Jewish Ancestors at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
• Documenting Jewish Families in America: The Early Years 1654-1880 at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
• Unearthing Israel’s Ancient Past: The Stunning Mosaics of Huqoq at the MyHeritage Blog
• The Apprentice of Buchenwald: A Story of Survival, Triumph, and Family Love at the MyHeritage Blog

References

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