What Is Judaism? Beliefs, History, Scripture and Practice
What is Judaism? An introduction to the covenant, the Torah and Talmud, Jewish law, prayer and festivals, and the history and diversity of the Jewish people.
Judaism is the religion of the Jewish people, founded on the belief in one God who made a covenant with Abraham and his descendants and revealed the Torah to Israel at Mount Sinai. It grew from the religion of ancient Israel and the Jerusalem Temple into rabbinic Judaism, the tradition of the Talmud, and today it is practised in many forms by about fifteen million Jews around the world. Judaism is at once a faith, a body of law, a textual culture and the inheritance of a people.
The Covenant and the Core Beliefs of Judaism§
At the heart of Judaism stands the idea of brit, covenant. According to the Hebrew Bible, God called Abraham to leave Mesopotamia for the land of Canaan and promised that his descendants would become a great nation (Genesis 12). Generations later, after the exodus from Egypt, God gave the Torah to Moses and the Israelites at Sinai (Exodus 20). The covenant binds the people to God's commandments and binds God to the people, in a relationship the prophets compared to a marriage.
The most important statement of Jewish belief is the Shema, recited morning and evening: "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD" (Deuteronomy 6:4). Jews affirm that God is one, incorporeal, the creator of the world and the giver of the Torah, who rewards and judges, and who will one day bring redemption through the Messiah. In the twelfth century the philosopher Moses Maimonides summed up these convictions in his Thirteen Principles of Faith, which became the basis of the hymn Yigdal and of the "Ani Ma'amin" ("I believe") statements printed in many prayer books.
Yet Judaism has never relied on a single creed in the way some Christian churches do. Many Jews and rabbis argued with Maimonides' list, and the tradition has generally placed more emphasis on what a Jew does than on a fixed set of propositions. Being Jewish is also a matter of belonging: in traditional Jewish law a Jew is someone born of a Jewish mother or someone who has converted, and Jewish identity has ethnic, cultural and national as well as religious dimensions.
From Ancient Israel to Rabbinic Judaism§
The history of Judaism is usually divided into several broad periods. The religion of ancient Israel, in the first millennium BCE, centred on the worship of YHWH, the God of Israel, through sacrifice and on the guidance of priests and prophets; King Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, was its great sanctuary. The exile in Babylonia and the return under Persian rule led to the rebuilding of the Temple and the gathering of Israel's scriptures, the beginning of what historians call Second Temple Judaism. That period, discussed in our article on ancient Israel and the Temple, saw the Maccabean revolt, the rise of Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes, and the writing of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
In 70 CE the Romans destroyed the Second Temple. Without sacrifice or a Temple priesthood, Jewish religious life was reorganised by the sages known as rabbis. Their teachings were gathered in the Mishnah, edited around 200 CE under Rabbi Judah the Prince, and in the two Talmuds of the Land of Israel and of Babylonia, completed between the fifth and seventh centuries. This rabbinic Judaism, described in our guide to rabbinic Judaism and the Talmud, replaced sacrifice with prayer, study and the performance of the commandments, and it remains the foundation of nearly all Jewish practice today.
Torah, Talmud and the Jewish Textual Tradition§
The word Torah means "teaching" or "instruction". In its narrowest sense it is the Five Books of Moses — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy — handwritten on a scroll and read aloud in the synagogue over the course of a year. More broadly it means the whole Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, an acronym of Torah, Nevi'im (Prophets) and Ketuvim (Writings); our article on the Hebrew Bible describes how it was formed.
Rabbinic Judaism holds that Moses received at Sinai not only the Written Torah but also an Oral Torah, an authoritative tradition of interpretation passed down by teachers. The Mishnah, the Talmud and the collections of midrash (scriptural interpretation) are the written record of that tradition. Later centuries added commentaries, such as those of Rashi of Troyes (1040–1105), and codes of law, such as Maimonides' Mishneh Torah and Joseph Karo's Shulchan Arukh (first printed in 1565). Study of these texts, often in pairs and in argument, is itself a central religious act in Judaism.
Jewish Practice: Law, Prayer, Sabbath and Festivals§
Jewish religious life is structured by halakha, "the way" or "the path", the body of law derived from the Torah and rabbinic tradition. Rabbinic tradition counts 613 commandments in the Torah, including both ritual and ethical duties. Halakha governs prayer, the Sabbath, food (kashrut), marriage, mourning and business ethics; it is explained in our article on Jewish law and ethics.
Daily prayer takes place three times a day, either alone or with a quorum of ten (minyan) in the synagogue, using the prayer book or siddur. The weekly Sabbath, from sunset on Friday to nightfall on Saturday, is a day of rest from creative work, marked by candles, blessings over wine and bread, synagogue services and family meals. The Jewish year is marked by festivals: the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the three pilgrimage festivals of Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot, and later festivals such as Hanukkah and Purim. These are described in our guides to prayer and the synagogue and the Sabbath and Jewish festivals.
The life cycle is also marked by ritual: circumcision (brit milah) of baby boys on the eighth day, the coming of age as bar or bat mitzvah, the wedding under a canopy (chuppah), and the mourning customs of shiva and the recitation of the Kaddish.
Diaspora, Diversity and the Modern Movements§
For most of the last two thousand years the majority of Jews lived in the diaspora, outside the Land of Israel, and Jewish cultures developed in many lands. Ashkenazi Jews, from medieval Germany and later Eastern Europe, spoke Yiddish; Sephardi Jews, descended from the Jews of Spain and Portugal expelled in 1492 and 1497, spoke Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) and settled across the Ottoman world, North Africa and the Netherlands; Mizrahi Jews lived for centuries in Iraq, Iran, Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East. There are also ancient communities in Ethiopia (Beta Israel), India and Central Asia.
The modern era brought emancipation, the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), and new movements that answered the challenge of modernity in different ways: Reform Judaism, Orthodoxy, Conservative (Masorti) Judaism and Reconstructionism, as well as Hasidism and secular Jewish nationalism. The twentieth century brought the catastrophe of the Holocaust, in which about six million Jews were murdered, and the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. Today the two largest Jewish populations are in Israel and the United States. These developments are covered in our article on modern Judaism.
Mysticism, Philosophy and Folk Religion in Judaism§
Judaism has produced rich intellectual traditions alongside its law. Jewish philosophers from Philo of Alexandria to Saadia Gaon, Judah Halevi and Maimonides tried to reconcile revelation with Greek reason; their work is surveyed in Jewish philosophy from Philo to Maimonides. Jewish mysticism, from the visions of the heavenly chariot in late antiquity to the medieval Zohar and the teachings of Isaac Luria, is treated separately in our Kabbalah section; What Is Kabbalah? is the place to start.
Beside these learned traditions stood popular beliefs and practices: amulets inscribed with divine names, protection against the evil eye and against the demon Lilith, legends of the golem and the dybbuk. Rabbis both condemned sorcery and accepted many protective practices, and our article on Jewish magic and folklore traces this long and complex history.
Frequently asked questions§
What do Jews believe about God?§
Jews believe in one God, the creator of the universe, who is without body or form, who revealed the Torah to Israel and who cares for and judges the world. The oneness of God, proclaimed in the Shema, is the central affirmation of Jewish faith.
Is Judaism a religion or an ethnicity?§
It is both. Judaism is a religion that anyone may join through conversion, but Jews also understand themselves as a people with a shared history, and many Jews who are not religiously observant still identify strongly as Jewish.
What is the holy book of Judaism?§
The Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, is Judaism's scripture, and its first five books, the Torah, are the most sacred. In practice Jewish life is also guided by the Oral Torah recorded in the Mishnah and Talmud and by later commentaries and law codes.
How old is Judaism?§
Judaism traces its origins to the patriarch Abraham and the revelation at Sinai. Historians see the religion of Israel developing over the first millennium BCE, with rabbinic Judaism, the basis of Jewish practice today, taking shape in the first centuries CE.
Sources and further reading§
- Judaism: A Very Short Introduction — Norman Solomon, 1996
- To Be a Jew: A Guide to Jewish Observance in Contemporary Life — Hayim Halevy Donin, 1972
- Jewish Literacy — Joseph Telushkin, 1991
- A History of the Jews — Paul Johnson, 1987
- God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism — Abraham Joshua Heschel, 1955
- The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion — R. J. Zwi Werblowsky & Geoffrey Wigoder (eds.), 1997