
Judaism
The Jewish religion is an independent monotheistic religion, which, like Christianity and Islam, goes back to the progenitor Abraham. Judaism is also considered to be its origin. As the smallest world religion with only about 14 million believers, it is not very widespread compared to other religions, but followers can be found in all parts of the world.
Origins of the faith

First home in Jerusalem
The priest Ezra is regarded as the founding father according to today's view. At his time around 440 B.C., the Israelite people numbered about 20,000. He obtained permission from the Persian king Artaxerxes to settle in Jerusalem and lead his Israelite community there according to his ideas regarding law and religion. In and around Jerusalem, "Judea" came into being. By late antiquity, Judaism included over 8 million believers. In the first century A.D. Jerusalem was destroyed by the Roman Emperor Tiberius and numerous Jews were expelled from the country. As a result, Jewish communities for the first time dispersed to small but widely scattered areas in the Roman Empire and the Persian Gulf.The Jewish population always remained a minority in the Christian territories. In the Arab lands, they reached a population of about 1 million by the middle of the last century, before being expelled again. Today, that is, after a Jewish diaspora of more than 2000 years, there are about 1.36 million Jews living in Europe. Worldwide, there are about 7.9 million outside Israel.
Country | Distribution | Total |
---|---|---|
Israel | 74.7 % | 6,884,000 |
United States | 1.8 % | 5,967,000 |
France | 0.7 % | 472,000 |
Canada | 1.1 % | 418,000 |
Palestine | 7.0 % | 336,000 |
United Kingdom | 0.4 % | 269,000 |
Argentina | 0.4 % | 182,000 |
Russia | 0.1 % | 144,000 |
Australia | 0.5 % | 128,000 |
Cuba | 1.0 % | 113,000 |