Iron Age kingdoms became a global diaspora story
Jewish history begins with the Israelites of Iron Age Israel and Judah, first named on an Egyptian stele around 1210 BCE. Assyrian and Babylonian conquests started a diaspora that later split into Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Mizrahi branches, before emancipation, the Holocaust and the founding of Israel in 1948.
The earliest written mention of Israel appears on the Merneptah Stele, carved around 1213 to 1203 BCE. Tradition ties the name to the patriarch Jacob, renamed after wrestling an angel. The northern kingdom, centred on Samaria, fell to Assyria around 720 BCE and Judah to Babylon in 586 BCE, when part of its people were deported; those captivities are seen as the start of the diaspora. Persia's Achaemenid rulers later let exiles return and rebuild the temple, opening the Second Temple period. A revolt led by the Maccabees against the Seleucids produced the independent Hasmonean kingdom, which Rome gradually absorbed.
Failed revolts against Rome in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE destroyed Jerusalem and its temple, and in 135 CE the Romans renamed the province Syria Palaestina. The centre of Jewish life shifted to Galilee and then Babylon, where the Mishnah and Talmud took shape. Over the following millennia communities settled into three broad groups: Ashkenazim in Central and Eastern Europe, Sephardim first in Iberia, and Mizrahim across the Middle East and North Africa. Muslim Spain hosted a golden age until the Almohads arrived, and in 1492 Isabella and Ferdinand expelled Spain's Jews, many of whom resettled in the Ottoman Empire and Italy. Persecution in Central Europe between the 12th and 15th centuries drove Ashkenazim toward Poland.
The Haskalah enlightenment and campaigns for emancipation began in the 18th century. Western Europe granted legal equality in the 19th, while pogroms in the Pale of Settlement pushed more than two million Jews to America between 1881 and 1924, and the Zionist movement was founded in 1897. After Hitler took power in 1933, the Nazi genocide murdered about six million Jews, a million of them at Auschwitz alone.
David Ben-Gurion declared the State of Israel as the British Mandate ended. By 2022 its population of 9.6 million included 7 million Jews.
Source: Jewish history
