Jews (Hebrew: ?????????, Yehudim; Ladino ???????, Djudios; Yiddish: ?????, Yidn)[1] are members of the Jewish people, an ethnic group originating in the Israelites of the ancient Middle East and others who converted to Judaism throughout the millennia. The ethnicity and the religion of Judaism are strongly interrelated, and converts are both included and have been absorbed within the Jewish people.
The Jews have suffered a long history of persecution in very many different lands, and their population and distribution per region has fluctuated throughout the centuries. Today, most authorities place the number of known Jewish people between 12 and 14 million,[2] the largest number of whom live in the United States (40.5% in 2002) and Israel (34.4% in 2002), with the remainder distributed in communities of varying sizes in almost every country. The total world Jewish population, however, is difficult to measure and is subject to the controversy of secular, halakhic or other parameters of defining who it is that is considered to be Jewish.
The origin of the Jews is traditionally dated to around 1800 BCE[citation needed] with the biblical account of the birth of Judaism.
The Merneptah Stele, dated to 1200 BCE, is one of the earliest archaeological records of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel, where Judaism, a monotheistic religion developed. According to Biblical accounts, the Jews enjoyed periods of self-determination first under the Biblical judges from Othniel through Samson, then in (c. 1000s BCE), King David established Jerusalem as the capital of the United Kingdom of Israel and Judah (the United Monarchy) and from there ruled the Twelve Tribes of Israel.
In 970 BCE, his son Solomon became king of Israel.[3] Within a decade, Solomon began to build the Holy Temple known as the First Temple. Upon Solomon's death (c. 930 BCE), the ten northern tribes split off to form the Kingdom of Israel. In 722 BCE the Assyrians conquered the Kingdom of Israel and exiled its Jews starting a Jewish diaspora.
The First Temple period ended around 586 BCE as the Babylonians conquered the Land of Israel and destroyed the Jewish Temple. In 538 BCE, after fifty years of Babylonian captivity, Persian King Cyrus the Great permitted the Jews to return to rebuild Jerusalem and the holy temple. Construction of the Second Temple, was completed in 516 BCE during the reign of Darius the Great seventy years after the destruction of the First Temple.[4][5] When Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire, the Land of Israel fell under Hellenistic Greek control, eventually falling to the Ptolemaic dynasty who lost it to the Seleucids. The Seleucid attempt to recast Jerusalem as a Hellenized polis came to a head in 168 BCE with the successful Maccabean revolt of Mattathias the High Priest and his five sons against Antiochus Epiphanes, and their establishment of the Hasmonean Kingdom in 152 BCE with Jerusalem again as its capital.[6] The Hasmonean Kingdom lasted over one hundred years then as Rome became stronger it installed Herod as a Jewish client king. The Herodian Kingdom also lasted over a hundred years. Defeats by the Jews in the First revolt in 70 CE, the first of the Jewish-Roman Wars and the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE notably contributed to the numbers and geography of the diaspora, as significant numbers of the Jewish population of the Land of Israel were expelled and sold into slavery throughout the Roman Empire. Since then, Jews have lived in almost every country of the world, primarily in Europe and the greater Middle East, surviving discrimination, oppression, poverty, and even genocide (see: anti-Semitism, The Holocaust), with occasional periods of cultural, economic, and individual prosperity in various locations (such as Spain, Portugal, Germany, Poland and the United States).
Until the late 18th century, the terms Jews and adherents of Judaism were practically synonymous, and Judaism was the prime binding factor of the Jewish people regardless of the degree of adherence. Following the Age of Enlightenment and its Jewish counterpart Haskalah, a gradual transformation occurred during which many Jews came to view being a member of the Jewish nation as separate from adhering to the Jewish faith.
The Hebrew name "Yehudi" (plural Yehudim) originally referred to the tribe of Judah. Later, when the Northern Kingdom of Israel split from the Southern Kingdom of Israel, the Southern Kingdom of Israel began to refer to itself by the name of its predominant tribe, or as the Kingdom of Judah . The term originally referred to the people of the southern kingdom, although the term B'nei Yisrael (Israelites) was still used for both groups. After the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom leaving the southern kingdom as the only Israelite state, the word Yehudim gradually came to refer to people of the Jewish faith as a whole, rather than those specifically from the tribe or Kingdom of Judah. The English word Jew is ultimately derived from Yehudi (see Etymology). Its first use in the Bible to refer to the Jewish people as a whole is in the Book of Esther.