Who are the Jews?
No people on earth has been recorded for so long, scattered so far, or survived so much. The Jews begin in bronze-age Mesopotamia, cross nearly four millennia of empires that rose and fell around them, and today — some 15.7 million strong — live on six continents. This is the story of how.
Last updated: October 2026
Jerusalem ★ Babylon Córdoba Fez New York Heartland and diaspora — stylized map c. 1800 BCE Abraham 586 BCE Babylonian exile 70 CE Second Temple destroyed c. 900 Golden age in Spain 1492 Expulsion from Spain 1948 State of Israel Origins · exile · return Moroccan Jews, 1948 to today Morocco · 1948 250,000 Morocco · late 1960s 30,000 Morocco · today 2,500 From a quarter-million to a few thousand — the Moroccan exodus Origins The story opens, in Jewish tradition, c. 1800 BCE, with Abraham’s journey from Ur of the Chaldees — a city in southern Mesopotamia, in what is today Iraq — toward a promised land. The patriarchs who follow, the sojourn in Egypt, and the Exodus under Moses form the founding memory of the people: less a documented history than the charter every later generation carried. And then the archaeology begins to rhyme with the tradition. By the 10th century BCE there are kings in Jerusalem; a stone fragment found at Tel Dan, carved around 850 BCE, boasts of the “House of David” — the first non-biblical evidence of the dynasty the scriptures describe.
The story of the Jewish people begins, in Jewish tradition, with Abraham, who is said to have left the Mesopotamian city of Ur in obedience to one God, and to have received the promise that his descendants would become a great nation. Whether read as history or as founding narrative, the account places the Jews in the world of the Bronze Age Near East, among the peoples of Mesopotamia and Canaan. The Hebrew Bible, which Jews call the Tanakh, tells how the Israelites came to Egypt, left it in the Exodus under Moses, and settled in the land of Canaan, and how, under kings including David and Solomon, they built a kingdom centred on Jerusalem and its Temple.
Archaeology has filled in parts of that picture and complicated others. By the tenth century BCE there are kings in Jerusalem, and a stone fragment found at Tel Dan, carved around 850 BCE, boasts of the House of David, the first non-biblical evidence of the dynasty the scriptures describe. The kingdom later split into two, Israel in the north and Judah in the south, and both fell to greater empires: Israel to Assyria in 722 BCE, Judah to Babylon in 586 BCE, when the Temple was destroyed and the leading families carried into exile.
The Babylonian exile was a turning point. Cut off from Temple and land, the exiles, according to the biblical account, deepened their attachment to scripture, law, and the idea of a people bound to God by covenant. When the Persian king Cyrus conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, he permitted the exiles to return, and a Second Temple rose in Jerusalem. Under Persian, then Greek, then Roman rule, Jewish life in the land of Israel continued, alongside growing Jewish communities in Alexandria, Babylon, Rome, and across the Mediterranean.
In 70 CE, after a great revolt against Rome, the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, and in the decades that followed, the centre of Jewish life shifted decisively. Without a Temple, sacrifice ended, and the synagogue, the house of study, and the authority of the rabbis, teachers of the law, became the anchors of Jewish life. The rabbis compiled the Mishnah and, over the following centuries, the Talmud, vast works of law, commentary, and debate that remain central to Judaism today. Judaism became, in the phrase historians use, a religion of the book and of interpretation.
For nearly two thousand years, most Jews lived in diaspora, scattered across the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, with smaller communities reaching as far as India, Central Asia, and China. The diaspora produced great centres of learning and culture: in Muslim Spain, where Jewish poets, philosophers, and physicians flourished in Arabic and Hebrew; in the cities of the Ottoman Empire; and in the towns of Eastern Europe, where Yiddish, a language written in Hebrew characters, became the everyday tongue of millions. Sephardic Jews, whose name comes from Sepharad, the Hebrew word for Spain, carried their traditions across the Mediterranean after the expulsion from Spain in 1492; Ashkenazi Jews, from the Hebrew name for Germany, built the communities of northern and eastern Europe; Mizrahi Jews, from the Hebrew word for the east, lived across the Middle East and North Africa.
Diaspora life was marked by both achievement and persecution. Jews were repeatedly expelled from kingdoms and cities, restricted to particular trades or quarters, and attacked in pogroms, while also serving as merchants, physicians, scholars, and financiers in societies across the world. Jewish identity was held together by a shared religion, the Hebrew language of prayer, the calendar of festivals, and the law, even as customs, foods, music, and languages varied widely from community to community.
The modern era brought both emancipation and catastrophe. From the late eighteenth century, Jews in Western Europe gradually gained civil rights, and many entered the professions, the arts, and public life. In the nineteenth century, new movements arose within Judaism, Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox, disagreeing about how the law should apply in a modern world. The Zionist movement, founded in the 1890s, argued that the Jews were a nation as well as a religion and needed a national home, and Jewish immigration to Palestine grew in waves.
The Holocaust, the murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during the Second World War, remains the central catastrophe of modern Jewish history, and the memory of it shapes Jewish life, Israeli politics, and international law to this day. In 1948, the State of Israel was established, and hundreds of thousands of Jews from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa made their homes there. Today the worldwide Jewish population is estimated at roughly fifteen million, the largest communities in Israel and the United States, with smaller communities across Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere. Jewish life today spans the full range from strictly observant to entirely secular, and from Hebrew to Yiddish to Ladino to English, one people still bound, as in antiquity, by a shared story, a shared law, and a shared memory.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, entries on the Jews, Judaism, and Jewish history.
- Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, Jerusalem.
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington.
- The Hebrew Bible / Tanakh, and the Talmud, as primary sources.
- Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews, Bodley Head.