Judaism

A covenant older than most empires, carried by a people who outlived every one of them.

Origins and History

Judaism is the oldest of the surviving monotheisms, and its history is inseparable from the history of the Jewish people. The tradition traces itself to Abraham, with whom God cut a covenant, and to Moses, through whom God gave the Torah at Sinai after delivering Israel from Egypt. Historically, Israelite religion emerged in the Late Bronze and Iron Age Levant, and the decisive transformation came with catastrophe: the Babylonian destruction of Solomon's Temple in 586 BCE and the exile that followed. In Babylon — and then under Persian rule, where contact with Zoroastrianism likely sharpened Jewish ideas about angels, resurrection, and cosmic adversaries — Israelite religion became something portable, textual, and unambiguously monotheist.

The Second Temple period ended in 70 CE when Rome burned the rebuilt Temple. With sacrifice impossible, the rabbis remade Judaism around study, prayer, and law, producing the Mishnah (c. 200 CE) and the Talmud (c. 500 CE). Medieval Judaism flowered in Spain and the Rhineland, producing philosophers like Maimonides and the mystical tradition of Kabbalah; it also endured expulsion after expulsion. Modernity brought emancipation, the Reform and Orthodox responses to it, the Shoah — the murder of six million Jews — and the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. Roughly 15 million Jews live today, chiefly in Israel and North America.

Core Beliefs

Judaism's confession fits in a single sentence, recited morning and evening: Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad — Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. God is one, incorporeal, the creator of all things, and bound to Israel by covenant. The covenant carries obligation: Israel is to keep the commandments — traditionally 613 mitzvot — and to be a holy people, and God in turn is faithful across every generation and every disaster. Judaism has generally cared more about practice than creed; Maimonides' Thirteen Principles are the closest thing to a catechism, but a Jew who wrestles with God — the literal meaning of Israel — remains within the family.

The mystical stream imagines the inner life of the One God with startling richness. Kabbalah maps divinity through the ten sefirot of the Tree of Life, describes the indwelling feminine presence of God as The Shekhinah — exiled with Israel and awaiting reunion — and treats the divine names themselves, elaborated in traditions like the Shem ha-Mephorash, as objects of contemplation and power. Jewish eschatology looks toward the Messianic age, the repair of the world (tikkun olam), and, in rabbinic tradition, the resurrection of the dead.

Practices

Jewish life runs on a rhythm of sanctified time. The Sabbath — Friday sunset to Saturday nightfall — is the tradition's cathedral, a weekly cessation from work that the rabbis called a taste of the world to come. The year turns through Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Days of Awe of judgment and atonement; the pilgrimage festivals of Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot; and later additions like Hanukkah and Purim. Daily practice includes fixed prayers (three services, with a quorum of ten for full liturgy), the dietary discipline of kashrut, and the study of Torah, which rabbinic Judaism regards as worship in its own right. Life-cycle rituals — circumcision on the eighth day, bar and bat mitzvah, the wedding canopy, the mourner's Kaddish — bind the individual biography into the covenant.

Sacred Texts

The written Torah — the five books of Moses — anchors the Tanakh, which adds the Prophets (Nevi'im) and Writings (Ketuvim). Alongside it stands the Oral Torah: the Mishnah and its vast Talmudic commentary, in which the rabbis argue across centuries about everything from Temple law to the ethics of speech, preserving minority opinions as carefully as majority rulings. Midrash fills the narrative silences of scripture; the medieval codes, above all the Shulchan Aruch, distill the law for daily life; and the Zohar, the masterwork of Kabbalah, reads the Torah as a map of the divine interior. Study is dialogical by design — the traditional page of Talmud is a text surrounded by its own arguments.

Major Branches

Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, whose traditions developed in the Iberian and Middle Eastern worlds, largely stand outside this Ashkenazi-derived denominational grid.

Related

• Christianity — The daughter tradition
• Islam — The other Abrahamic sibling
• Zoroastrianism — Persian influence on Second-Temple Judaism
• Kabbalah — The Jewish mystical tradition
• The Shekhinah — The indwelling presence of God
• Tree of Life — The sefirotic map of divinity
• Shem ha-Mephorash — The explicit Name and its angelic elaboration
• Bahá'í Faith — A modern tradition in the Abrahamic line

"Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD." — Deuteronomy 6:4