Judaism
Judaism is considered by religious Jews to be the expression of the covenant that God established with the Children of Israel. It evolved from ancient Israelite religions around 500 BCE, and is considered one of the oldest monotheistic religions. In 2015, the world Jewish population was estimated at about 14. 3 million, or roughly 0. 2% of the total world population.
About Judaism in brief
Judaism is considered by religious Jews to be the expression of the covenant that God established with the Children of Israel. Judaism has its roots as an organized religion in the Middle East during the Bronze Age. It evolved from ancient Israelite religions around 500 BCE, and is considered one of the oldest monotheistic religions. Jews are an ethnoreligious group including those born Jewish, in addition to converts to Judaism. In 2015, the world Jewish population was estimated at about 14. 3 million, or roughly 0. 2% of the total world population. About 43% of all Jews reside in Israel and another 43% reside in the United States and Canada. Most of the remainder live in Europe, and other minority groups spread throughout Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Australia. The Torah is part of the larger text known as the Tanakh or the Hebrew Bible, and supplemental oral tradition represented by later texts such as the Midrash and the Talmud. Ethical monotheism is central in all Jewish texts. Judaism is a system through which Jews bring God into the world through the observance of Halakha and verbal blessings that are spoken every time a positive commandment is given. Whereas philosophers often debate whether God is immanent or transcendent, whether people have free will or whether their lives are determined by the will of God, Judaism is central to all normative Jewish texts in all its various forms. It is considered to be a religion of the Jewish people, with between 14. 5 and 17. 4 million adherents worldwide, Judaism is the tenth largest religion inThe Torah is a book of texts, practices, theological positions, and forms of organization.
Within Judaism there are a variety of movements, most of which emerged from Rabbinic Judaism, which holds that God revealed his laws and commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai in the form of both the Written and Oral Torah. Orthodox Judaism maintains that the Torah and Jewish law are divine in origin, eternal and unalterable, and that they should be strictly followed. Conservative and Reform Judaism are more liberal, with Conservative Judaism generally promoting a more traditionalist interpretation of Judaism’s requirements than Reform Judaism. A typical Reform position is that Jewish law should be viewed as a set of general guidelines rather than as aSet of restrictions and obligations whose observance is required of all Jew. Unlike other ancient Near Eastern gods, the Hebrew God is portrayed as unitary and solitary; consequently, the Israeli God’s principal relationships are not with other gods, but with the world, and more specifically, with the people he created. The Jewish nation is to reciprocate God’s concern for the world. Many generations later, he commanded the nation of Israel to love and worship only one God; that is, Jews are to imitate God’s love for people. Judaism’s texts, traditions and values strongly influenced later Abrahamic religions, including Christianity, Islam and the Baháʼí Faith. Hebraism, like Hellenism, played a seminal role in the formation of Western civilization through its impact as a core background element of Early Christianity.
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This page is based on the article Judaism published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 29, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
