Judaism - One of the World's Oldest Religious Traditions

Judaism - One of the World's Oldest Religious Traditions

The terms Judaism and religion do not exist in premodern Hebrew. The

Jews spoke of Torah, God's revealed instruction to Israel, which

mandated both a worldview and a way of life-Halakhah. Halakhah derives

from the Hebrew word "to go" and has come to mean the "way" or "path."

It encompasses Jewish law, custom, and practice. Premodern Judaism, in

all its historical forms, thus constituted (and traditional Judaism

today constitutes) an integrated cultural system encompassing the

totality of individual and communal existence. It is a system of

sanctification in which all is to be subsumed under God's rule-that

is, under divinely revealed models of cosmic order and lawfulness.

Christianity originated as one among several competing Jewish

ideologies in 1st-century Palestine, and Islam drew in part on Jewish

sources at the outset. Because most Jews, from the 7th century on,

have lived within the cultural sphere of either Christianity or Islam,

these religions have had an impact on the subsequent history of

Judaism.

Judaism originated in the land of Israel (also known as Palestine) in

the Middle East. Subsequently, Jewish communities have existed at one

time or another in almost all parts of the world, a result of both

voluntary migrations of Jews and forced exile or expulsions (see

Diaspora). In the late 1990s the total world Jewish population was

14.1 million, of whom 5.9 million lived in the United States, 4.6

million in Israel, and 700,000 each in France and Russia, the four

largest centers of Jewish settlement. About 500,000 Jews lived in

Ukraine, 350,000 in Canada, 300,000 i...

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... Judaism has been profoundly affected by the Nazi destruction

of European Jewry and the founding of the modern state of Israel. The

Holocaust and Israel are closely linked in the perceptions of most

contemporary Jews as symbols of collective death and

rebirth-profoundly religious themes. Israel has a religious dimension,

embodying Jewish self-respect and the promise of messianic

fulfillment. All movements in American Judaism (excepting the

ultra-Orthodox sectarians) have become more Israel-oriented in the

past decades. Both the Reform and Conservative movements have been

striving to achieve legal recognition and equal status with Orthodoxy

in the state of Israel, where marriage, divorce, and conversion are

controlled by the Orthodox rabbinate, which is backed in the

government by the important National Religious Party.