Judaism
Judaism is the religious culture of the Jewish people, united around belief in a single, omniscient, transcendent God who created the universe[^c1][^c12]. It is one of the first recorded monotheistic faiths and one of the oldest religious traditions still practised today[^c3]. According to Jewish thought, God established a covenant with the Jewish people, then known as the Israelites, and revealed laws and commandments to them in the form of the Torah[^c2]. The name Judaism derives from the Kingdom of Judah, the southern of the two Hebrew kingdoms and the primary force in developing its religious traditions[^c5]. Judaism does not fit easily into common Western categories such as religion, ethnicity, or culture[^c6], and its tenets and history form a major part of the foundation of Christianity and Islam[^c7].
The tradition is organised around the covenant between God and Israel, expressed through the mitzvot, the commandments that structure daily life, and elaborated through Halakhah, the legal tradition that applies them. Practice has traditionally been devoted to the study of Torah and the observance of its laws and commandments[^c9]. The intimate relation between choice, covenant, and Torah determined the modality of Israel's existence[^c11], and the written and oral dimensions of Torah — the Hebrew Bible, the Mishnah, the Talmud, and the midrashic and commentary traditions — form an ongoing conversation between revelation and interpretation. The Jewish year is structured by Shabbat, the festivals, and the High Holy Days, while the life cycle is marked by rituals of birth, coming of age, marriage, and mourning.
Jews are often called the "People of the Book," and Judaism has an age-old intellectual tradition focusing on text-based Torah and Talmud study[^c8]. Over the past two centuries the Jewish community has divided into a number of denominations[^c10], principally Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform, with Reconstructionist, Hasidic, and secular currents alongside them. These movements disagree about the authority of Jewish law, the nature of revelation, and the place of modernity, but they share a common textual heritage, a common history, and a common sense of peoplehood.
Jewish history stretches from the biblical period and the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, through the Second Temple period and the emergence of rabbinic Judaism, to the medieval flowering of commentary and philosophy, the expulsions and the diaspora, the Haskalah and emancipation, the catastrophe of the Holocaust, and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Across this history the land of Israel, the Hebrew language, and Jerusalem have remained central symbols of identity and hope. Jewish life today is lived in Israel, North America, Europe, and communities around the world, and its culture encompasses not only law and theology but also language, literature, music, food, and communal institutions. Contemporary Jewish life is marked both by continuing antisemitic violence, such as the 2025 attack on a synagogue in Manchester[^c13], and by rapid demographic growth in Hasidic and Haredi communities, whose yeshiva enrollment has risen sharply outside New York City[^c14].