Judaism

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Origins of the faith

The Jewish history goes back to the three archfathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, whose lifetime is estimated approximately between 1900 and 1500 B.C.E. Geographically, the origin is considered to be in the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Dead Sea, thus the periphery of Jerusalem. Judaism first became a religion with the prophet Moses (also "Mose"), whose five books make up the Torah. The Exodus from Egypt is the first historical step in the spread of Judaism. According to the legend, Moses converted the Israelites to the faith and led them out of the slavery of the Egyptian Pharaoh to Canaan.

First home in Jerusalem

The priest Ezra is regarded as the founding father according to today's view. In his time, around 440 B.C.E, 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 eight million believers. In the first century C.E., Jerusalem was destroyed by the Roman Emperor Tiberius and numerous Jews were expelled from the country. As a result, Jewish communities 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 one million by the middle of the last century, before being expelled again. Today, after a Jewish diaspora of more than 2,000 years, there are about 1.36 million Jews living in Europe. Worldwide, there are about 7.9 million outside Israel.