Is modern Judaism the same as biblical Judaism?

Answer 1

Modern Judaism evolved from biblical Judaism. Biblical Judaism was centered on the sacrificial system at the Temple under the leadership of the cohenim (Hereditary Jewish priests). The destruction of the Temple by the Roman army in the year 70 led to the rise of the community synagogue as the central institution, and the rise in importance of rabbis as leaders. In biblical times, there was certainly an oral tradition to explain Jewish practice, but it was not written down in any permanent form until the threat of Roman persecution threatened to extinguish the oral tradition. That led to the creation of the Mishna, which became the central text of the rabbinical academies in Roman Palestine and suburban Babylon that created the Talmud -- essentially a collection of commentaries on the Mishna. While the Talmud describes the traditions of the Jewish liturgy, it is not organized in a way that can be used for prayer, and the extent to which any particular community followed the tradition varied by the education of the local leadership. That changed at the end of the first millenium when Jews from as far away as Spain asked for help on the liturgy from the leaders of the Babylonian academy. This led to the creation of the first Jewish prayerbooks, the ancestors of today's prayerbooks. The Tamud holds the arguments about halacha, Jewish law, but they are frequently in the form of arguments and it is not easy for any but an expert to discern which of the many positions presented is the law. This lead to a series of attempts to compile well organized law codes starting around the 12th century. While there is plenty of mysticism in the Hebrew Bible (read Ezekiel, for example), interest in Jewish mysticism grew after the publication of the Zohar in 13th century Spain and even more in what is best described as a wave of spiritual revival sparked by the students of Isaac Luria in 16th Century Spain. Within a century, this wave spread across Europe, adding a layer of new material to the prayerbook. The enlightenment and the Emancipation of the Jews of Western Europe in the 19th century led to the Reform movement and various streams of liberal Judaism, and a reaction to this led to a hardening of Orthodoxy. The waves of persecution that raged over the Jewish world throughout much of this period certainly had an impact. The Holocaust in the 20th century was unique in the industrialization and racializaiton of slaughter, but in much of Europe, individual Jewish communities rarely survived two centuries between major incidents of slaughter.