Jewish History
Jewish history 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
CE)
Ancient Israelites
1759 map of the tribal allotments of Israel
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.
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 (See
Christianity and world religions#Possible relationship with
Zoroastrianism through Judaism).
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 BCE to 63 BCE. 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. In
66 CE, 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 CE through 1700 CE)
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 (see History of the Jews in France) and Germany (see History of
the Jews in 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.
Spain, North Africa, and the Middle East
During the Middle Ages, Jews were generally better
treated by Islamic rulers than Christian ones. Despite second-class
citizenship, Jews played prominent roles in Muslim courts, and experienced a
"Golden Age" in the
Moorish Spain about 900-1100, though the situation deteriorated after that
time. History of Jewish communities indigenous to the Middle East and North
Africa is described in the article Mizrahi Jew.
The European Enlightenment and Haskalah (1700-1800s)
During the period of the European Renaissance and
Enlightenment, significant changes were happening within the Jewish
community. The
Haskalah movement paralleled the wider Enlightenment, as Jews began in the
1700s to campaign for emancipation from restrictive laws and integration
into the wider European society. Secular and scientific education was added
to the traditional religious instruction received by students, and interest
in a national Jewish identity, including a revival in the study of Jewish
history and Hebrew, started to grow. Haskalah gave birth to the Reform and
Conservative movements and planted the seeds of Zionism while at the same
time encouraging cultural assimilation into the countries in which Jews
resided. At around the same time another movement was born, one preaching
almost the opposite of Haskalah, Hasidic Judaism. Hasidic Judiasm began in
the 1700s by Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, and quickly gained a following with its more exubarent, mystical approach to religion. These two movements, and the
traditional orthodox approach to Judiasm from which they spring, formed the
basis for the modern divisions within Jewish observance.
At the same time, the outside world was changing, and
debates began over the potential emancipation of the Jews (granting them
equal rights). The first country to do so was France, during the
Revolution in 1789. Even so, Jews were expected to integrate, not continue
their traditions. This ambivalence is demonstrated in the famous speech of
Clermont-Tonnerre before the National Assembly in 1789:
-
- "We must refuse everything to the Jews as a
nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals. We must withdraw
recognition from their judges; they should only have our judges. We must
refuse legal protection to the maintenance of the so-called laws of
their Judaic organization; they should not be allowed to form in the
state either a political body or an order. They must be citizens
individually. But, some will say to me, they do not want to be citizens.
Well then! If they do not want to be citizens, they should say so, and
then, we should banish them. It is repugnant to have in the state an
association of non-citizens, and a nation within the nation. . . "
1800s
Though persecution still existed, emanicipation spread
throughout Europe in the 1800s.Napoleon invited Jews to leave the Jewish
ghettos in Europe and seek refuge in the newly created tolerant political
regimes that offered equality under Napoleonic Law (see Napoleon and the
Jews). By 1871, with Germany’s emancipation of Jews,
every European country except Russia had emancipated its Jews.
Despite increasing integration of the Jews with
secular society, a new form of anti-Semitism emerged, based on the ideas of
race and nationhood rather than the religious hatred of the Middle Ages.
This form of anti-Semitism held that Jews were a separate and inferior race
from the Aryan people of Western Europe, and led to the emergence of
political parties in France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary that campaigned on
a platform of rolling back emancipation. This form of anti-Semitism emerged
frequently in European culture, most famously in theDreyfus Trial in France.
These persecutions, along with state-sponsored pogroms in Russia in the late
1800s, led a number of Jews to believe that they would only be safe in their
own nation. See Theodor Herzl and Zionism.
At the same time, Jewish migration to the United
States (see
Jews in the United States) created a new community in large part
freed of the restrictions of Europe. Over 2 million Jews arrived in the
United States between 1890 and 1924, most from Russia and Eastern Europe.
1900s
Though Jews became increasingly integrated in Europe,
fighting for their home countries in World War I and playing important roles
in culture and art during the 20s and 30s, racial anti-Semitism remained. It
reached its most virulent form in the killing of approximately six million
Jews during the
Holocaust, almost completely obliterating the two-thousand year history of
the Jews in Europe. In 1948, the Jewish state of Israel was founded,
creating the first Jewish nation since the Roman destruction of
Jerusalem. Subsequent wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors, and the
flight in the face of persecution of almost all of the 900,000 Jews
previously living in Arab countries. Today, the largest Jewish communities
are in the United States and Israel, with major communities in France,
Russia, England, and Canada.
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