The Jews (Hebrew: יְהוּדִים, Yehudim) or the Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation.[3][4][5] Converts to Judaism, whose status as Jews within the Jewish ethnos is equal to those born into it, have been absorbed into the Jewish people throughout the millennia.
In Jewish tradition, Jewish ancestry is traced to the Biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the second millennium BCE. The Jews enjoyed two periods of political autonomy in their national homeland, the Land of Israel, during ancient history. The first era spanned from 1350 to 586 BCE, and encompassed the periods of the Judges, the United Monarchy, and the Divided Monarchy of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, ending with the destruction of the First Temple. The second era was the period of the Hasmonean Kingdom spanning from 140 to 37 BCE. Since the destruction of the First Temple, the diaspora has been the home of most of the world's Jews.[6] Except in the modern State of Israel, established in 1948, Jews are a minority in every country in which they live, and they have frequently experienced persecution throughout history, resulting in a population that fluctuated both in numbers and distribution over the centuries.
According to the Jewish Agency for Israel, as of 2007 there were 13.2 million Jews worldwide, 5.4 million of whom lived in Israel, 5.3 million in the United States, and the remainder distributed in communities of varying sizes around the world; this represents 0.2% of the current estimated world population.[1] (Other sources, such as the Jewish Virtual Library, cite higher estimates of the American Jewish population, as many as 6.5 million, or more than one in 50 Americans.[7]) These numbers include all those who consider themselves Jews whether or not affiliated with a Jewish organization.[8] The total world Jewish population, however, is difficult to measure. In addition to halakhic considerations, there are secular, political, and ancestral identification factors in defining who is a Jew that increase the figure considerably.[8]
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The Gazette (Montreal)
The word " Jew " had been painted across her front door and, with the same green paint, two happy face stickers put up by her grandchildren had been crossed ...
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solely because of search engine optimization factors which do include the freshness of a page Update 4 May 4 The site front page http www jewwatch com has returned to being the first result for a search the word Jew Whatever technical reasons which caused it not to appear or rank lower in the past few weeks have apparently changed Anti Semites have also started
Paul Woodward
Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:20:11 GM
In the beloved Old Country, a . Jew. has visions of her homeland. By Lizzy Ratner, Mondoweiss, August 8, 2009. Jews have a long history in the sprawling eastern European basin that is and has been Poland. Some say this history stretches ...
