Generally speaking, the Jewish people are descendants of an ancient, Hebrew-speaking branch of the Semitic race. Unlike other ancient religions and cultures, Judaism is rooted in history, not in mythology. While great empires rose and fell in the ancient world the Jews remained a tiny, obscure nation, but their religion has influenced the lives of millions. Three of the world's major religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam are descended from their beliefs.

Covenant with Abraham

The father of the Hebrew nation is Abraham, who left Ur with his family and migrated to Canaan, settling near Hebron. According to Genesis, he did this on the instructions of God, who intended Canaan for his descendants, circumcision, the mark distinguishing Jews from other people (an Egyptian custom), can be traced back to Abraham. The Old Testament relates how God made a covenant with Abraham, in which he and his descendants were to carry the message of one God to all mankind. In return, Abraham was promised the land of Canaan for his people's inheritance. The Jews still believe that they are the chosen people of God and of the covenant.

JACOB

Israel (Champion of God), the name God gave to Jacob when he was about 97 years old lived in Canaan, he personifies the Jewish nation and had twelve sons, from who were descended the twelve tribes. Famine forced the family of Jacob, to leave Canaan and settle in Egypt. Where the Hebrews, who were called Israelites after their ancestor, were eventually enslaved by the Egyptians.

On his deathbed Jacob blessed his 12 sons in this order: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Zebulun, Issachar, Dan, Gad, Asher, Naphtali, Joseph, Benjamin;

MOSES IN EGYPT

We read in the book of Exodus, of how the Israelites were delivered from bondage by the intervention of God, who called upon Moses, (who become the first and greatest of the prophets) to lead his people out of Egypt. The story unfolds of how Moses asked Pharaoh to let the people go, how Pharaoh refused, how God brought plagues and disasters upon the Egyptians and how the fleeing Israelites came to the Red Sea, where God parted the waters for them to cross, but Pharaoh's chariots and horsemen, in hot pursuit, all drowned in the water.

MONARCHY

The founding of the monarchy under Saul (c. 1025 BC) strengthened the tribes against threats from warlike neighbours. The first king, Saul, was killed in battle. His successor was David, a formidable warrior who established a kingdom covering most of Palestine. Storming the Canaanite hill-fortress of Jerusalem, he made it his capital and the Ark was brought there from Shiloh in ceremonial procession, with the king himself dancing before it. Later generations looked back to David as the greatest national hero after Moses, the king who fastened the Israelite grip securely on Palestine and who was, correspondingly, most signally favoured by God.

David's son Solomon, famed for his wisdom, his wealth and his harem of foreign women, built a magnificent temple for Yahweh at Jerusalem, with the Holy of Holies, the innermost shrine, as the dwelling-place of God on earth. As the political and religious capital, and with the building of the Temple, Jerusalem began to acquire a sacred mystique. It became in Jewish eyes a uniquely holy place; God's chosen home, the focus of national loyalty, the centre of the world. Solomon however imported Egyptian and Canaanite gods into Jerusalem along with his foreign women. Once the Israelites had settled down in Palestine they inevitably became preoccupied with the fertility of the land and so with the local gods in whose gift fertility was believed to lie.

TWO KINGDOMS

After Solomon s death the northern tribes rebelled against his son Rehoboam (C.997 B.C.) and set up their own kingdom under Jeroboam. There were now two kingdoms, Israel in the north, and Judah, including the tribe of Benjamin, in the South. The existence of each was precarious for great powers were on the move. The Kings of both Israel and Judah paid honour to the Canaanite god Baal, the lord of storm and the winter rain which brought the crops to life in the spring, and his consort, the goddess Asherah, whose cult involved erotic rites and sacred prostitution, intended to promote fertility. At Mizpeh, north of Jerusalem, in the ninth century temples of Asherah and Jehovah stood side by side.

THE PROPHETS

The prophets from Elijah (c. 940 B.C.) to Jeremiah (c. 647 B.C. the first one to use the name Jews the writer of the books of Kings, See 2Kings 16:6; 25:25.) spoke in the name of God, and sought to recall the nation to the pure faith.

Elijah, (meaning 'My God is Jah') denounced King Ahab (c.940 B.C,) of Israel and his wife Jezebel for supporting the cults of Baal and Asherah. The prophet won a famous victory over the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel by succeeding in calling down lightning from the sky when they could not, but Jezebel's fury against him was such that he had to flee for his life she passed into history as an archetype of female evil.

With the menace of Assyria looming up in the north, Amos (c. 829 to about 804 B.C.E.,) Hosea (c.829-769 B.C.), Isaiah (c.740 B.C.) and Micah (777-717 B.C.) called for a return to the one true God. It seems, that the prophets had little effect on events, but their words were written down and preserved, and profoundly influenced Judaism and the world. The heart of the prophetic message is powerful heavenly ruler, a God, holy, moral, the God of righteousness, justice, and compassion.

Eventually both kingdoms were destroyed, Israel by Sargon II of Assyria, who annexed it and deported thousands of Israelites to Mesopotamia and Iran. The deportees vanished into history as 'the lost tribes of Israel'. They were replaced in Palestine by Assyrian settlers, who intermarried with the surviving northerners to form a people to whom the southern Jews remained fiercely hostile for centuries, the Samaritans.

Judah was destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 BC. Their leading citizens were exiled. The Jews were thereafter to be a subject people, first of the Babylonians, then of the Persians, the Greeks and the Romans. The Jews who were exiled to Assyria were absorbed into the population, and disappeared from history. But the Babylonian exile was the turning point in the history of the Jewish race. The Jews in Babylon grew into a united community sustained by the Law of Moses, and after the Persian conquest of Babylon in 539 BC they returned to Palestine, a group deeply committed to their ancestral religion.

EXILE & AFTER

The 'Babylonian captivity' lasted about fifty years for some of those deported from Judah to Mesopotamia, and considerably more for others. Many prospered in exile and some never returned to Palestine at all. The exiles were comforted by the prophet Ezekiel (taken to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar in 617 B.C.), who held out the hope of a return to the Promised Land.

Another prophet, now known as the second Isaiah (Deuteronomy-Isaiah), spoke of the Suffering Servant of Hashem -

'He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief' (Isaiah, chapter 53) - which Christians believe to be a prophecy of Christ.

Without a king, with Jerusalem lost and the Temple destroyed, the exiles found hope in their religion, though how much of the Old Testament was now in existence is not known. The seventh day of the week, the Sabbath, which had long been a day of rest, now turned into a day of religious devotion, when people met to hear the scriptures read and expounded, prayers were offered and, possibly, psalms were sung. Special 'assembly-houses' were built for the meetings and these were the first synagogues.

When Babylon fell to a Persian conqueror, Cyrus the Great, Palestine became part of the Achaemenian Empire. Cyrus allowed some of the exiles to return c. 537 B.C. to devastated Jerusalem and reconstruct the city and Temple. Hashem had come back to his earthly home, but for some 200 years Judea the region around Jerusalem, was a Persian province under the influence of Zoroastrian ideas. The monarchy was not just under Persian imperial rule and political and religious authority was in the hands of the high priest at Jerusalem, supported by an aristocratic priestly families. The institution of the local synagogue had taken firm root and flourished everywhere. Outside Judea there was still an important Jewish community in Babylonia and another grew up in Egypt.

After the exile, Judaism began to take a more definite shape. The Jews of Palestine, a people with little political influence, gradually grew into a community controlled by priests, and the religion became increasingly centred on the strict observance of the Law. The scribe Ezra had brought a book of the Law from Babylon c. 468 B.C. and, on the basis of the rules and regulations contained in it; he started a reform movement which restored the exclusive national character of Judaism.

During this period the sacred writings were collected and studied, the interpretations of the written law by rabbis, or teachers, were arranged into a coherent system. These instructions and discussions were compiled in their final form in the 2nd century AD by Rabbi Judah, under the title Mishnah, or repetition'. The Talmud itself is made up of the Mishnah and the Gemara, or completion', which contains explanatory notes on the Mishnah.

Since the time of the exile, groups of Jews had begun to stray from Babylon and settle in other parts of the world. These scattered communities kept the Jewish faith alive by worship and instruction at the synagogues, and maintained contact with their homeland through pilgrimages to the Temple at Jerusalem.

In Egypt, the Jews had a special quarter of the city of Alexandria assigned to them, and it was there that the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek (250-100 BC) for the benefit of those who did not read Hebrew. This translation is called the Septuagint version.

It was also in the period after the exile that the belief in a MESSIAH, or anointed one, who would restore the nation became dominant. This was not a new belief - the early prophets had looked forward to a day when God would raise up a king, endowed with divine gifts, to establish a reign of justice and peace. Now, returned from exile but faced by the might of the empires of Persia and Greece, Israel looked again to God to intervene in its history. It was believed that a Day of the Lord would come, when God would act to save his chosen people, scatter the forces of darkness and bring in a new age. Such belief fostered hopes of a Messiah who would deliver the nation from bondage.

ALEXANDER THE GREAT

The Achaemenian Empire fell in its turn, to the Greek general Alexander the Great (c.332 B.C.), The first-century Jewish historian Yoseph ben Mattityahu (Flavius Josephus) relates that when Alexander arrived at Jerusalem, the Jews opened the gates to him and showed him the prophecy from the book of Daniel written over 200 years earlier that clearly described Alexander s conquests as the King of Greece. Jewish Antiquities, Book XI, Chapter VIII 5; Daniel 8:5-8, 21, and for almost another 200 years Judea was ruled by Alexander's successors: first by the Ptolemy dynasty of Egypt, who after years of warfare were driven out by the Seleucid dynasty of Syria. Under these Hellenistic regimes the Jews were influenced by false gods, false religions and philosophies from Greece. Mesopotamia, Iran, Syria and Egypt. Some were attracted, some were repelled, and two opposite tendencies developed, one which wanted to Hellenize and modernize Jewish life in tune with the latest intellectual fashions and one which took its stand on the old ways.

So toward the beginning of the third century B.C.., the first translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, called the Septuagint, was made into Greek, and through it, many Gentiles came to respect the Jews religion, some even converting. Jews, on the other hand, were becoming conversant with Greek thought and some even became philosophers, something entirely new to the Jews. One example is Philo of Alexandria of the first century C.E., who endeavoured to explain Judaism in terms of Greek philosophy, as if the two expressed the same ultimate truths.

The Hellenizing trend reached its peak under a high priest who took the Greek name of Jason and tried to turn Jerusalem into a Greek city. To the horror of the traditionally minded, young aristocrats and priests promenaded about naked in Jason's new gymnasium and resorted to surgery to make themselves appear uncircumcised.

The Greek abomination of desolation

There were riots and the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV, who called himself Epiphanes, 'the manifest god', came to Jerusalem to restore order. He had supported Jason and he now determined to secure peace and quiet in his dominions by stamping out the Jewish religion. Circumcision, observance of the Sabbath and other Jewish customs were prohibited and the Temple was turned into a sanctuary of Zeus, the Greek sky-god. Pigs were sacrificed to Zeus on the great altar of Hashem and prostitutes were installed in the house of God.

This profanation, 'the abomination of desolation' as it was called, sent a chill of outrage through Jewry. The reaction was swift and fierce. Five brothers of the Hasmonean family, led by Judas, known as Maccabaeus, 'the Hammerer', conducted a successful war against the Syrians. The enemy were driven from Jerusalem and the Temple was purified and rededicated in 165 BC, an event which has been commemorated ever since at Hanukkah, the festival of lights in December. The Jews won the right to keep their own religion and customs, and in 142 BC achieved independence under Simon, the last of the Maccabee brothers, as high priest and ruler. The Hasmonean monarchy survived for another eighty years of unrest, intrigue and bloodshed culminating in civil war, when both sides appealed to Rome for help. Rome sent help, of a sort. The Roman legions under Pompey stormed Jerusalem, killed thousands of its inhabitants and slaughtered the priests at the altar of Hashem.

ROMAN

The Judaism of the first century of the Common Era was at a unique stage. Max Dimont states that it was poised between "the mind of Greece and the sword of Rome." Jewish expectations were high because of political oppression and interpretations of Messianic prophecies, especially those of Daniel. The Jews were divided into factions. The Pharisees emphasized an oral law rather than temple sacrifice. The Sadducees stressed the importance of the temple and the priesthood. Then there were the Essenes, the Zealots, and the Herodians. All were at odds religiously and philosophically.

HEROD THE GREAT

For a time Palestine was governed by political rulers, of whom the most effective was Herod the Great. Notorious for his political murders and his numerous and sometimes incestuous marriages, he succeeded in keeping the peace. The rebuilding of the temple of Zerubbabel at Jerusalem is most noteworthy. It was constructed at tremendous cost and is described by Josephus as truly magnificent. Herod died about seventy years of age of an obscure disease which his enemies described as God's punishment for his iniquities.

To quote Josephus, "an intolerable itching of the whole skin, continuous pains in the intestines, tumours in the feet as in dropsy, inflammation of the abdomen and gangrene of the privy parts, engendering worms, in addition to asthma, with great difficulty in breathing, and convulsions in all his limbs."-The Jewish War, I, 656 (xxxiii, 5).

What in fact awaited the Jews was not triumph but disaster. For most of the period after Herod's death Judea was ruled directly by Roman officials. A fiercely militant group, the Zealots, formed under the leadership of Judas of Galilee, determined to win independence from foreign domination once and for all, to rid the Promised Land of the heathen presence which polluted it and restore it to God, the chosen people and the Torah. The militants were opposed by the more realistic, the less fanatical and those who preferred a quiet life, but after years of tension, protests and riots, Menahem, the son of Judas, led the Zealots in a revolt which dragged Palestine into a hopeless war against Rome.

The Roman abomination and desolation

The pagan desecration of the temple altar by Antiochus, however disgusting in God's sight, did not result in desolation for Jerusalem, the temple, or the Jewish nation. 33 years after Jesus' death, dissension among the Jews led to the Roman invasion of Palestine, General Vespasian and his son Titus, moved slowly down through Galilee. Christians "caught sight of the disgusting thing that causes desolation . . . standing in a holy place." (Matthew 24:15). In 66 C.E. pagan Roman armies surrounded "the holy city" Jerusalem, Jesus Christ s words echoed

"Therefore, when you catch sight of the disgusting thing that causes desolation, as spoken of through Daniel the prophet, standing in a holy place, (let the reader use discernment,) then let those in Judea begin fleeing to the mountains." (Matthew 24:15, 16)

Thus, the 'causing of desolation' by the disgusting thing was imminent, and so this was the final signal for discerning Christians to 'flee to the mountains.' In March of the year AD 70 the Romans laid siege to Jerusalem, where the Zealot leaders were conducting their own reign of terror against all who questioned their aims and tactics. Gripped by famine, the city held out until September, the Temple was burned to the ground and its treasures were carried off to Rome to adorn Titus's triumph.

The remaining Zealot strongholds were reduced, despite brave resistance. At the hill-top fortress of Masada the defenders killed their wives and children and finally themselves rather than surrender.

Jochanan ben Zekkai, a distinguished teacher, had escaped from Jerusalem during the siege by feigning death and having himself carried out of the city in a coffin. With Roman permission he founded a teaching college at the coastal town of Jabneh (or Jamnia). He and his colleagues continued the work which the Pharisees had begun, of interpreting the Torah for practical purposes of everyday living and adapting it to changed conditions and it was at Jabneh that the canon of the Old Testament was finally settled.

Armed resistance to Rome in Palestine was not yet finished. A fresh revolt broke out when the Emperor Hadrian ordered a temple of Jupiter to be built on the ruins of the Temple in Jerusalem. Rebellion was led by Simeon, who called himself Bar-Kokhba, Son of the Star, and was hailed as the Messiah by Rabbi Akiba, the leading light of the Jabneh centre. Roman troops subdued the country once more. Jerusalem was destroyed, many of the inhabitants were killed or deported as slaves, the site of the city was ploughed up and Jews were forbidden to go anywhere near it. Hoping to rid Rome once and for all of this troublesome and obstinate religion, Hadrian closed the Jabneh school and issued what proved to be a short-lived order banning the study and practice of the Torah. Akiba and many other Jews who publicly defied the order were executed.

Zion, the holy city, which had been the centre of Jewish hopes and emotions for so many centuries, was laid waste. Hadrian rebuilt Jerusalem as a Roman city, Aelia Capitolina, with temples of Roman gods and a shrine of Jupiter on the site of the Holy of Holies. Not for another eighteen centuries was Israel to recover the Promised Land.

In the fourth century Jerusalem again became a sacred centre but not a Jewish city, a Christian one and a Muslim one in the seventh. The conversion of the apostle Paul a student of the Pharisee Gamaliel emphasises that some of the Jews accepted early Christian claims that JESUS was the Messiah, the 'expected one', . Most Jews, however, believed that the true Messiah had yet to appear.

TALMUDIC JUDAISM

There were Jewish communities in Babylonia, Iran, Syria, Egypt, the Yemen, in Rome itself and in many other cities of the empire, and in time Jews settled in every continent of the world. After the destruction of the Temple the priesthood became virtually extinct and religious leadership passed to the rabbis, with whom it has remained ever since. Rabbi means 'teacher' and a rabbi is not a priest in the Christian sense. His nearest Christian equivalent is a Nonconformist minister. He officiates at the services in the synagogue, his principal responsibility is to expound the scriptures, and he is often the leader of his congregation in its relations with the outside world and it s care of its own members.

DISPERSION & PERSECUTION

After the official conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity in the 4th century AD, Jews were actively persecuted, and the fact that they were blamed for the death of Jesus provided an excuse for laws discriminating against them. In many places the Jews were confined to special quarters in cities, known as ghettos.

Important to the survival of Jewish identity was the continued observance of Jewish law and custom. The period from the destruction of Jerusalem to the end of the fifth century saw the compilation in Babylonia and Palestine of the Talmud, which takes second place only to the Holy Scriptures as the authoritative regulator of Jewish life and faith. The Talmud records the precepts of learned rabbis as to the correct interpretation of scripture and the right living of daily life, and includes ethical rules, religious and civil laws, marriage laws, rules of diet and hygiene, and regulations for services and festivals. The Talmud is also a treasury of sermons, moral tales, and legends. Although the Holy Scriptures have remained the ultimate authority in Judaism, it is the Holy Scriptures as seen through the Talmud, the Talmud remains the foundation of traditional Jewish devotions and rites. The Great festivals remind the faithful of the historic past.

Despite sporadic persecutions and frequent harassment Jewish intellectual life flourished in the early Middle Ages (from about 500 to 1500 C.E.), two distinct Jewish communities emerged-the Sephardic Jews, who flourished under Muslim rule in Spain, and the Ashkenazi Jews in Central and Eastern Europe. Both communities produced Rabbinic scholars whose writings and thoughts form the basis for Jewish religious interpretation until this day. Interestingly, many of the customs and religious practices current today in Judaism really got their start during the Middle Ages. With the compilation of the Talmud, Judaism had become the religion which essentially it has remained ever since, and medieval intellectuals concentrated on interpreting it.

CHRISTIAN CRUSADES

In Christian Europe things changed for the worse with the Crusades, with Christian fanaticism against the Muslims spilling over on to the Jews. Jewish communities were pillaged and massacred. Persistent stories circulated among Christians of Jews slaughtering children to use their blood in abominable secret rites, blasphemously abusing consecrated hosts to mock and torture Christ, poisoning wells and causing bad harvests by black magic. Jews were forced to live in ghettos, walled-off quarters in towns, and often to wear a yellow badge as a distinguishing mark. The fact that money-lending was largely a Jewish preserve, usury being forbidden to Christians by the Church, created the caricature of the grasping, extortionate Jew. During the Second Crusade, that intended to win back the holy places in Palestine from the Muslims, Crusaders on their way to Palestine plundered European ghettos and slaughtered Jews.

In the 12th century, there began a wave of expulsions of Jews from various countries. As Israeli author Abba Eban explains in My People - The Story of the Jews: "In any country . . . which fell under the unilateral influence of the Catholic Church, the story is the same: appalling degradation, torture, slaughter, and expulsion."

A mood of inquiry began after the exile, as a search for deeper illumination than the Torah could provide, the Jewish philosopher Maimonides gave rational explanations for questions of faith. In his attempts to show that there was no contradiction between faith and reason, he was strongly influenced by classical philosophy.

It developed from the 12th century onwards into a system of philosophic and esoteric teaching known as CABBALA ('something received'). The purpose of Cabbala was to relate mystical experience to Israel's traditional faith. Sometimes it degenerated into speculation and magic. Jewish mysticism also owes something to outside influences, and has affinities with the mystical tradition in Christianity and Islam.

Edward I expelled Jews from England in 1290, and they were not readmitted until the time of Cromwell in the 17th century.

SPANISH INQUISITION

In 1478, thousands of Jews were forcibly converted to Christianity, and many others were killed under the Spanish Inquisition. Finally, in 1492, Spain, which had once again come under Catholic rule, followed suit and ordered the expulsion of all Jews from its territory. So by the end of the 15th century, Jews had been expelled from nearly all Western Europe, fleeing to Eastern Europe and countries around the Mediterranean. Many German Jews fled from pogroms to Poland and Lithuania so that by the early seventeenth century more than half of Jews was concentrated there, but the respite was only temporary. Many Jews were massacred during the Polish wars against Russia and Sweden, the Russian Cossacks earning an infamous reputation for cruelty.

By the 17th century, new initiatives were needed to reinvigorate the Jews and pull them out of this dark period. In the mid-18th century, there appeared an answer to the despair the Jewish people felt. It was Hasidism, a mixture of mysticism and religious ecstasy expressed in daily devotion and activity. In contrast, about the same time, philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, a German Jew, offered another solution, the way of Haskala, or enlightenment, which was to lead into what is historically considered to be "Modern Judaism."

According to Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86), Jews would be accepted if they would come out from under the restraints of the Talmud and conform to Western culture. In his day, he became one of the Jews most respected by the Gentile world.

The partitions of Poland in the eighteenth century put a million Jews under Russian rule and the Jewish 'pale' was established, an area stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea at Odessa, to which the Jews were confined. The only exception was for Jewish prostitutes, who were benevolently permitted to live anywhere in Russia. After a hundred years of intermittent persecution, a series of atrocious pogroms between 1880 and 1910 drove Russian Jews to America in a flood. Jews from other European countries also emigrated, and between 1870 and 1940 the Jewish population of the United States rose from a quarter of a million to four and a half million.

By contrast, modern anti-Semitism is racist rather than religious, basing itself on a pseudoscientific theory that the Jews are of an inferior race. This was the view that resulted in the pogroms, or persecution and murder of Jews, in Poland and elsewhere between 1880 and 1910, which drove 3 million Jews out of Eastern Europe the horrific climax was the murder of 6 million Jews in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War. Anti-Semitism in Russia today is both racist and religious.

In Poland in the 18th century, another movement grew out of the Cabbalist tradition. This was Hasidism, which taught that even those ignorant of the Law could still enjoy mystical communion with God. Despite some disapproval in other Jewish circles, the movement survived, and is still alive in the USA and Israel.

The eighteenth-century worship of Reason carried with it an impatience for tradition and a demand for freedom, tolerance and equality for all. The French Revolution proclaimed liberty, equality and the brotherhood of man, and Napoleon opened the ghettos all over Europe. The consequences were double-edged. Liberated from isolation in the ghettos, Jews were able to contribute to philosophy, science, the arts and scholarship in the West with remarkable effect - as the names Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Marcel Proust and Albert Einstein suggest. But at the same time liberation exposed the Jewish communities to the non-Jewish world, to the same western influences which transformed traditional ways of life in India, China and Japan. It also exposed them to a fresh wave of virulent anti-Semitism. In their old seclusion, fraught with danger and humiliation as it was, the Jews had stayed Jewish. The escape raised the question whether they could, or even should, remain Jewish, for the Jew who had emerged from the ghetto and wanted to live on equal terms with his non-Jewish neighbours as a full and loyal citizen of a Gentile state. It played down the idea of the chosen people, claimed that Judaism ought to be a purely religious and not a nationalist phenomenon, and converted the personal Messiah into a Messianic age in which all mankind would share. In western Europe, however, the nineteenth century saw the release of the Jews from medieval conditions. Zionism, which had its roots in the age-old longing of the Jews to return to their holy land of Zion (Jerusalem), began to become an international force in the late 19th century.

REFORM, ORTHODOX & ZIONISM

In the United States the three main divisions, each with its own synagogues and schools, are Reform, Orthodox and Conservative.

In the 2Oth century, Reform Judaism, or Liberal Judaism, attempted to adapt the religion to suit modern conditions, shortening services and using the language of the country instead of Hebrew for some prayers. Emphasis was placed more on the prophets' teachings and social justice than on the requirements of the Law.

Orthodox Judaism objected that these practices undermine the foundation of the religion, which is the Torah. On the whole, European Jewry is more or less Orthodox.

In its modern form Zionism is a nationalist movement which seeks to bring back the dispersed Jews to the land of Israel, the founder of the Zionist movement was Theodore Herzl, a Hungarian Jewish journalist, who called for the establishment of a home for the Jewish people in 1917, the British government pledged support, Jews began to emigrate to Palestine in thousands, to the dismay of the Arabs. Reform Judaism at first opposed Zionism, believing that the Jews should settle in the countries of their adoption and keep alive the true knowledge of God. However, anti-Semitism continued in various countries and the threat to Israel from Arab nationalists have encouraged many Reform Jews to share in building the Jewish state by moral and financial support.

THE HOLOCAUST

The murder of some six million European Jews in the Nazi-inspired Holocaust (1935-45) changed their minds, the previous opponents of Zionism became committed, and the new state of Israel was proclaimed in 1948. In the first ten years a million impoverished exiles from sixty different countries were absorbed into the new state and a country began to blossom. At last, after 2000 years of exile and dispersion, Zion was regained; the Promised Land was once more a Jewish land.