History of Judaism

Answer 1

One supreme, all encompassing, ethereal, all dimensional, God. No idol or image. Something so great that it has no need for shape or form, and perhaps shouldn't even have the term "being" applied...as that may reduce the idea and imply some type of form.

The concept of a face and shape and form for God is totally at odds with Judaism (and Islam). The idea of a trinity is also rejected by Judaism.

Answer 2

Dictionaries define "Judaism" as The monotheistic religion of the Jews, since the founding principle of Judaism was and is the belief in One God. This was the teaching which was spread by Abraham, and has continued since then. From Judaism, belief in One God has spread through the Western world.
In Judaism:

• God is One. The concept of a dualism (as in Zoroastrianism), an independent Satan, multiple gods (polytheism; paganism) or a trinity of three in one, are all unimaginable in Judaism. Also, any belief that an intermediary between humanity and God should be used, whether as necessary or even optional, is considered heretical.
  
• God is non-physical, indivisible and incomparable. Jewish tradition teaches that God is beyond human comprehension; and that it is only God's revealed deeds, as He interacts with mankind and the world, that we can begin to grasp. His names indicate His attributes and the ways in which He relates to us.
  
• God is omniscient (He is aware of everything), and infinitely wise.
  
• God created the universe and all existence, including time and space, in a deliberate, purposeful act of benevolent Creation.
  
• God is the mover of everything. No molecule can move without the energy and direction with which God imbues it.
  
• God is eternal; and His ways are also eternal. He is not capricious, forgetful or fickle.
  
• God is just. He rewards good and punishes evil - whether in this world or in the afterlife.
  
• God is ethical and moral; and He expects us to imitate His ways.
  
• The God of Israel is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He is the guide of history, who delivered the Israelites from Egyptian slavery.
  
• God is the source of law, who gave the Torah to the Israelites at Mount Sinai.
  
• God is immanent and personal, meaning that he relates to humanity and hears our prayers. This is the basis of the Psalms and our siddur (prayerbook).

Answer 3

Judaism is strictly monotheistic, meaning it has One God. Jews do not worship anything other than The Creator.

The Creator has one true name which is represented by the letters YHVH in English. The Hebrew letters are "yud, hei, vav, hei". These four letters are referred to as the tetragrammaton and are a contraction of the Hebrew words for, "was, is, and will be". His true name was only said in the Temple and with the Temple's destruction we lost the correct pronunciation.

In the Tanach (Jewish Bible), there are 72 different 'names' used for The Creator. However, these aren't actual names; they're descriptions of Him that are contextual. In daily conversation, most Jews use the name 'HaShem' which literally translates to 'The Name' in reference to His true name.

Since 1945-46, the most commonly quoted figure for the total number of Jews killed has been an estimate of approximately six million. This figure, first given at the Nuremberg Tribunal, has been broadly confirmed by later research.

The Holocaust commemoration center, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, comments:

There is no precise figure for the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. The figure commonly used is the six million established by the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1946 and repeated later by Adolf Eichmann, a senior SS official. Most research confirms that the number of victims was between five and six million. Early calculations range from 5.1 million (Professor Raul Hilberg) to 5.95 million (Jacob Leschinsky). More recent research, by Professor Yisrael Gutman and Dr. Robert Rozett in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, estimates the Jewish losses at 5.59-5.86 million, and a study headed by Dr. Wolfgang Benz presents a range from 5.29-6.2 million. The main sources for these statistics are comparisons of prewar censuses with postwar censuses and population estimates. Nazi documentation containing partial data on various deportations and murders is also used. We estimate that Yad Vashem currently has somewhat more than four million names of victims that are accessible.

Raul Hilberg, in the third edition of his ground-breaking three-volume work, The Destruction of the European Jews, estimates that 5.1 million Jews died during the Holocaust. This figure includes "over 800,000" who died from "Ghettoization and general privation"; 1,400,000 who were killed in "Open-air shootings"; and "up to 2,900,000" who perished in camps. Hilberg estimates the death toll in Poland at "up to 3,000,000". Hilberg's numbers are generally considered to be a conservative estimate, as they typically include only those deaths for which some records are available, avoiding statistical adjustment. British historian Martin Gilbert used a similar approach in his "Atlas of the Holocaust", but arrived at a number of 5.75 million Jewish victims, since he estimated higher numbers of Jews killed in Russia and other locations.

One of the most authoritative German scholars of the Holocaust, Wolfgang Benz of the Technical University of Berlin, cites between 5.3 and 6.2 million Jews killed in Dimension des Völkermords (1991), while Yisrael Gutman and Robert Rozett estimate between 5.59 and 5.86 million Jewish victims in the Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust (1990).

There were about 9.4 million Jews in the territories controlled directly or indirectly by the Nazis. (Some uncertainty arises from the lack of knowledge about how many Jews there were in the Soviet Union). The 6 million killed in the Holocaust thus represent about 64% of these Jews. Of Poland's 3.3 million Jews, over 90 percent were killed. The same proportion were killed in Latvia and Lithuania, but most of Estonia's Jews were evacuated in time. In Czechoslovakia, Greece, the Netherlands and Yugoslavia, over 70 percent were killed. More than 50 percent were killed in Belgium, Hungary and Romania. It is likely that a similar proportion were killed in Belarus and Ukraine, but these figures are less certain. Countries with notably lower proportions of deaths include Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Italy and Norway. Finally, of the 750,000 Jews in Germany and Austria in 1933, only about a quarter survived. Although many German Jews emigrated before 1939, the majority of these fled to Czechoslovakia, France or the Netherlands, from where they were later deported to their deaths.

The number of people killed at the major extermination camps is estimated as follows:

Auschwitz-Birkenau: 1.4 million; Belzec: 500,000; Chelmno: 152,000; Majdanek: 78,000; Maly Trostinets: 65,000; Sobibór: 250,000; and Treblinka: 870,000.

This gives a total of over 3.3 million; of these, 90% are estimated to have been Jews. These seven camps alone thus accounted for half the total number of Jews killed in the entire Nazi Holocaust. Virtually the entire Jewish population of Poland died in these camps.

In addition to those who died in the above extermination camps, at least half a million Jews died in other camps, including the major concentration camps in Germany. These were not extermination camps, but had large numbers of Jewish prisoners at various times, particularly in the last year of the war as the Nazis withdrew from Poland. About a million people died in these camps, and although the proportion of Jews is not known with certainty, it was estimated to be at least 50 percent. Another 800,000 to 1 million Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet territories (an approximate figure, since the Einsatzgruppen killings were frequently undocumented). Many more died through execution or of disease and malnutrition in the ghettos of Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Hungary before they could be deported.

Answer 1

Zionism is the Jewish desire to live in our ancestral homeland. Although there is a secular/political variant of zionism, religious zionism is a part of Judaism so there is no difference.

Answer 2

Zionism is the belief that the Jews should have political self-sovereignty and is the patriotic sentiment behind the Establishment of the State of Israel. It is entirely political in nature and largest number of Zionists are Christians.

Judaism is a religion that recognizes the Torah as its holy book and follows traditions of Divine Origin that are established and interpreted by Rabbis. Judaism has both a religious and ethnic component.

• Menorah (7 branched candelabrum used in the Temple)
• Mezuzah (small case containing the words of Shema)
• Tzitzit (complex procedure for tying knots)
• Tefillin (leather box containing scrolls which are bound to arms and foreheads).
• Torah Scrolls

The false prophets, at long last, were silenced forever. They had predicted that Judah would remain independent of Babylonia (Jeremiah ch.27) and no Destruction would take place.
Also, the lure of idolatry finally weakened, since the Destruction and Exile happened exactly as predicted by the true Prophets, who were the same ones who had spoken ceaselessly against dabbling in idolatry.See also the Related Link.

Link: Did Judaism change?

Judaism, the same as today, except that sacrifices have been replaced by prayer and study.

The ancient Hebrews worshipped many gods but by the end of the Babylonian Exile, at the latest, the national God Yahweh was to become the one God of Judaism, the new religion of Judah.

Nothing forced the Nazis to hate the Jews; they chose to do so. The Nazis willingly and ably served in committing one of the worst massacres of human life in all of history. Additionally, the phrasing of this question would offend numerous people because it assumes that the Jews were guilty of committing some sort of offense and were therefore rightfully castigated. While it is not true to say that Jews were innocent lambs, the Jews did not do half of the negative nonsense that is attributed to them in order to "justify" Anti-Semitism and violence against them. Jews have been punished for being different, unique, and misunderstood and never did anything worth punishing them for in the same way that Africans never did anything to merit enslavement. These actions were taken on account of bigotry and self-supremacy, not based on any system of equitable justice.

In terms of the reasons why the Nazis hated the Jews, those are as simply as possible:

• The Nazis thought that the German Jews were 'alien', 'un-German' and a 'corrupting influence' on Germany and that they were encouraging immorality.
• The Nazis believed that the Jews were Communists (and that Communism was a specifically Jewish ideology).
• There were strange conspiracy theories that claimed that the Jews were trying to achieve 'world domination'.
• The Nazis said that the Jews were enemies of Germany, and that Jews and Germans were locked in a struggle to the death. (This was another of those conspiracy theories that many Nazis took seriously).
• The Nazis believed that the Jews had made Germany lose World War 1.
• The Nazis subscribed to racialist theories that claimed that the Jews were inferior to others.
• However, Nazi propaganda also portrayed them as very clever indeed, very dangerous and close to achieving world domination: the two don't even begin to fit.
• With the start of World War 2 in September 1939 Hitler became obsessed with the idea that 'the Jews' had started the war.
• Earlier, 'religious' hostility to Judaism had often demonized the Jews and painted them as sinister and evil.

The way the question is written is to assume that it is not theirs, which is not the case in the slightest. Nobody asks what "entitled" Poles to create a nation-state in Prussian, Russian, and Austrian land or what "entitled" British colonists to create a European-Style country in North America. The people who live in a certain area and have a connection to that area have an intrinsic right to that land. The Jews are no different as concerns Palestine.

According to historical, religious, legal, and political grounds, the territory of the British Mandate of Palestine at least partially, if not entirely, belongs to the Jewish people.

1) Historically: The Jews have an undeniable presence in the land from at least 700 BCE until 70 CE and this is proven not only by the Biblical account, but from Assyrian Ruins, Babylonian documents, Hellenistic inscriptions, and Roman volumes. Jews had a continuous presence in the land from 70 CE until the present day (even though they were nowhere near the majority) even though they were forcibly deported from the territory. The fact that they survived, as opposed to the Arameans or Hittites who were similarly exiled does not illegitimate their claims.

In addition to the population-part of the historical claim, Jews have physical ruins and cities that are very sacred to them in the territory of the British Mandate of Palestine. The city of Jerusalem is mentioned over 700 times in the Jewish Bible. The city of Nablus used to be the Northern Metropolis of Shechem. Hebron was the first capital of Ancient Israel whence Saul ruled and David ruled until he conquered Jerusalem from the Jebusites. Even more recent sites like Masada document the Jewish presence and struggle to persevere.

2) Religiously: The Jewish claim to have a connection to the land of the British Mandate of Palestine is firmly grounded in their religion. Jews as early as the Babylonian exiles wrote about returning to the land because God had promised it to them. According to the Pentateuch, God promised Abraham that piece of land. (This promise is even acknowledged in the Qur'an 5:20-21, 17:104, and 26:59.) Many Jewish Holy Sites are in Israel such as the Kotel Hama'aravi (Western Wall).

3) Legally: By international law, the Ottoman Empire took the territory from the Seljuks and Abbassids by internationally recognized conquest. The territory was ceded to the British as a Mandate by the Ottomans as a term of surrender in World War I. (Even though the British had promised the territory to both the Arabs and Jews during the War, neither promise is legally binding.) According to the terms of the Mandate, even though the British were in control, the League of Nations had official jurisdiction. In 1947, the British gave direct authority to the League of Nations' successor, the United Nations, in accordance with the terms of their Mandate. The UN passed the 1947 Partition Plan that gave both a Jewish State and an Arab State the Right to Declare Statehood. The fact that the Arabs decided not to immediately declare such a state does not make the Israeli declaration any less valid. (It is important to note that Palestine did declare statehood on these grounds in 1988, which further cements the legality of this view.)

4) Politically: Jews invested a lot in building the political and physical infrastructure of the land even before they had control. Jews built farms, trained military brigades, created political parties, studied government, and defended themselves. This created a system that was able to repel the Arab Attacks in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948-9, secure expanded borders in the Six Day War of 1967, and hold those borders in the Arab-Israeli War of 1973. Israelis were actually able to exert control over this territory.

Of course, this list is not exhaustive, but should capture the sentiment of the question.

Answer 1

In Medieval Europe and some parts of the Arab World, the Jews were required to live only within certain areas of cities. In Venice, in the district of Canareggio, there was a neighborhood called "Ghetto" which happened to be the one assigned to the Venetian Jews. Eventually, the name of this particular area took on the meaning of any such area in any city. Jews remained in the ghettos well into the modern period and were first released from the ghettos by Napoleon who decreed that Jews were French citizens and need not live in separate areas. However, many Jews remained in the ghettos as they had a certain Jewish character to them by that point.

During the Holocaust, the term ghetto takes on a slightly different meaning. They were basically (to the Nazis) community homes to store as many possible Jews in for each city. Although there were more than just one ghetto in each city, more Jews than the ghettos could hold were always put into these ghettos to await "Relocation." This "Relocation" was actually deportation to a death camp. But, ghettos were just somewhat large Jew and other inferior containment buildings.

Answer 2

A ghetto was an area in a town or city where Jews lived, in most cases because they were not allowed to live elsewhere. As they tended to be overcrowded and, in many areas, the Jewish inhabitants were restricted in the work they were permitted to do (leaving many very poor) ghettos tended to be squalid, disease-ridden places with very poor living conditions. They existed in various European cities between the Middle Ages right up until WW2, which saw the famous uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto - when the Nazis tried to clear the ghetto, the Jews inside put up an armed resistance and were successful in holding off the Nazis for a number of weeks. However, the Nazis finally took the ghetto due to their superior numbers and firepower and set about burning or bombing the buildings, rounding up anyone they could and shooting anyone who tried to flee. Most of those captured were then sent to Treblinka where the majority died.

Comment on Answer 2

The above is confusing and inaccurate because it conflates medieval, early modern and Nazi ghettos. By 1870 ghettos (as places where Jews had to live bylaw) had been abolished in Europe, but were reintroduced by the Nazis in 1939-41, then liquidated.