Jewish history
or the History of Judaism is the history of the Jewish
people, faith (Judaism) and culture. Since Jewish history
encompasses four thousand years and hundreds of different
populations, any treatment can only be provided in broad
strokes. Additional information can be found in the main
articles listed below, and in the specific country histories
listed in this article.
Ancient Jewish
History (through 50 AD)
Ancient Israelites
For the first two periods the
history of the Jews is mainly that of
Fertile Crescent. It begins among those peoples which
occupied the area lying between the Nile river on the one
side and the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers on the other.
Surrounded by ancient seats of culture in Egypt and
Babylonia, by the deserts of Arabia, and by the highlands of
Asia Minor, the land of Canaan (later known as Israel, then
at various times Judah, Coele-Syria, Judea, Palestine, the
Levant, and finally Israel again) was a meeting place of
civilizations. The land was traversed by old-established
trade routes and possessed important harbors on the Gulf of
Akaba and on the Mediterranean coast, the latter exposing it to the
influence of other cultures of the Fertile Crescent.
1759 Map of the
Tribal
Allotments of Israel
Traditionally Jews around the
world claim descendance mostly from the ancient Israelites
(also known as Hebrews), who settled in the land of Israel.
The Israelites traced their common lineage to the biblical
patriarch Abraham through Isaac and Jacob. Jewish tradition
holds that the Israelites were the descendants of Jacob's
twelve sons (one of which was named Judah), who settled in
Egypt. Their direct descendants respectively divided into
twelve tribes, who were enslaved under the rule of an
Egyptian pharaoh, often identified as Ramses II. In the
Jewish faith, the emigration of the Israelites from Egypt to
Canaan (the Exodus), led by the prophet Moses, marks the formation of the Israelites as a
people.
Jewish tradition has it that
after forty years of wandering in the desert, the Israelites
arrived to Canaan and conquered it under the command of
Joshua, dividing the land among the twelve tribes. For a
period of time, the united twelve tribes were led by a
series of rulers known as Judges. After this period, a
Israelite monarchy was established under Saul, and continued
under King David and Solomon. King David conquered Jerusalem
(first a Canaanite, then a Jebusite town) and made it his
capital. After Solomon's reign the nation split into two
kingdoms, Israel, consisting of ten of the tribes (in the
north), and Judah, consisting of the tribes of Judah and
Benjamin (in the south). Israel was conquered by the
Assyrian ruler Shalmaneser V in the 8th century BCE. There
is no commonly accepted historical record of those ten
tribes, which are sometimes referred to as the Ten Lost
Tribes of Israel.
Exilic and Post-Exilic Periods
The kingdom of Judah was
conquered by a Babylonian army in the early 6th century BCE.
The Judahite elite was exiled to Babylon, but later at least
a part of them returned to their homeland, led by prophets
Ezra and Nehemiah, after the subsequent conquest of
Babylonia by the Persians. Zoroastrianism was the state
religion of the Persian Empire. The extent to which
Zoroastrianism has been an influence in the development of
Judaism is a subject of some debate among scholars
Already at this point the
extreme fragmentation among the Israelites was apparent,
with the formation of political-religious factions, the most
important of which would later be called
Sadduccees and
Pharisees.
The Hasmonean Kingdom
After the Persians were
defeated by
Alexander the Great, his demise, and the division of
Alexander's empire among his generals, the Seleucid Kingdom
was formed. A deterioration of relations between hellenized
Jews and religious Jews led the Seleucid king Antiochus IV
Epiphanes to impose decrees banning certain Jewish religious
rites and traditions. Consequently, the orthodox Jews
revolted under the leadership of the Hasmonean family, (also
known as the Maccabees). This revolt eventually led to the
formation of an independent Jewish kingdom, known as the
Hasmonaean Dynasty, which lasted from 165 BC to 63 BC. The
Hasmonean Dynasty eventually disintegrated as a result of
civil war between the sons of Salome Alexandra, Hyrcanus II
and Aristobulus II. The people, who did not want to be
governed by a king but by theocratic clergy, made appeals in
this spirit to the Roman authorities. A Roman campaign of
conquest and annexation, led by Pompey, soon followed.
Judea under Roman rule was at
first an independent Jewish kingdom, but gradually the rule
over Judea became less and less Jewish, until it became
under the direct rule of Roman administration (and renamed
the province of Judaea), which was often callous and
brutal in its treatment of its Judean subjects. In66 AD,
Judeans began to revolt against the Roman rulers of Judea.
The revolt was defeated by the Roman emperors Vespasian and
Titus Flavius. The Romans destroyed much of the Temple in
Jerusalem and, according to some accounts, stole artifacts
from the temple, such as the Menorah. Judeans continued to
live in their land in significant numbers, and were allowed
to practice their religion, until the 2nd century when
Julius Severus ravaged Judea while putting down the bar
Kokhba revolt. After 135, Jews were not allowed to enter the
city of Jerusalem, although this ban must have been at least
partially lifted, since at the destruction of the rebuilt
city by the Persians in the 7th century, Jews are said to have lived there.
The Diaspora
Many of the Judaean Jews were
sold into slavery while others became citizens of other
parts of the Roman Empire. This is the traditional
explanation to the diaspora. However, a majority of the Jews
in Antiquity were most likely descendants of convertites in
the cities of the Hellenistic-Roman world, especially in
Alexandria and Asia Minor, and were only affected by the
diaspora in its spiritual sense, as the sense of loss
and homelessness which became a cornerstone of the Jewish
creed, much supported by persecutions in various parts of
the world. The policy of conversion, which spread the Jewish
religion throughout the
Hellenistic civilization, seems to have ended with the
wars against the Romans and the following reconstruction of
Jewish values for the post-Temple era.
Of critical importance to the
reshaping of Jewish tradition from the Temple-based religion
it was to the traditions of the Diaspora was the development
of the interpretations of the Torah found in the
Mishnah and
Talmud.
Jews in the Middle Ages (50 AD
through 1700 AD)
The experience of Jews
varied from country to country and region to region. See the
main articles Jews in the Middle Ages in Europe and the
History of Jews in Arab lands.
Europe
Jews settled throughout
Europe, especially in the area of the former Roman Empire.
There are records of Jewish communities in France and
Germany from the 4th century,
and substantial Jewish communities in Spain even earlier. By
and large, Jews were heavily persecuted in Christian Europe.
Since they were the only people allowed to loan money for
interest (forbidden to Catholics by the church), some Jews
became prominent moneylenders. Christian rulers gradually
saw the advantage of having a class of men like the Jews who
could supply capital for their use without being liable to
excommunication, and the money trade of western Europe by
this means fell into the hands of the Jews. However, in
almost every instance where large amounts were acquired by
Jews through banking transactions the property thus acquired
fell either during their life or upon their death into the
hands of the king. Jews thus became imperial "servi cameræ,"
the property of the King, who might present them and their
possessions to princes or cities.
Jews were frequently
massacred and exiled from various European, countries. The
persecution hit its first peak during the
Crusades. In the First Crusade (1096) flourishing
communities on the Rhine and the Danube were utterly
destroyed; see German Crusade, 1096. In the Second Crusade
(1147) the Jews in France were subject to frequent
massacres. The Jews were also subjected to attacks by the
Shepherds' Crusades of 1251 and 1320. The Crusades were
followed by explusions, including in, 1290, the banishing of
all English Jews; in 1396, 100,000 Jews were expelled from
France; and, in 1421 thousands were expelled from Austria.
Many of the expelled Jews fled to Poland.
The worst of the expulsions
occurred following the reconquest of Muslim Spain, which was
followed by Spanish Inquisition in 1492, when the entire
Spanish population of around 200,000 Sephardic Jews were
expelled. This was followed by expulsions in 1493 in
Sicily (37,000 Jews) and Portugal in 1496. The expelled
Spanish Jews fled mainly to the Ottoman Empire, Holland, and
North Africa, others migrating to Southern Europe and the
Middle East.
In the 16th century, almost
no Jews lived in Western Europe. The relatively tolerant
Poland had the largest Jewish population in Europe, but the
calm situation for the Jews there ended when Polish and
Lithuanian Jews were slaughtered in the hundreds of
thousands by the Cossack
Chmielnicki (1648) and by the Swedish wars (1655).
Driven by these and other persecutions, Jews moved back to
Western Europe in the 17th century. The last ban on Jews,
that of England, was revoked in 1654, but periodic
expulsions from individual cities still occurred, and Jews
were often restricted from land ownership, or forced to live
in
ghettos.
