Unit 4 · Judaism: Torah, Talmud and a People

In a Jewish home a small case is often fixed to the doorpost, tilted slightly inward. It is called a mezuzah, and inside is a tiny handwritten scroll. The first words on that scroll are the words a Jewish child learns to say before sleep. They are also the words many Jews hope to say at the moment of death. In Hebrew they begin Shema Yisrael, which means Hear, O Israel. Because of that first word, the whole prayer is called the Shema.

The line comes from the Torah, in Deuteronomy 6:4. In the 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation it reads: Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one. Six words in Hebrew carry the central claim of Judaism, which scholars call monotheism: there is one God, and only one. The verses that follow command Israel to love God with all its heart, soul and might, to teach these words to children, to bind them on the hand and forehead and to write them on the doorposts. The mezuzah and the small leather boxes called tefillin worn during weekday morning prayer come from a literal reading of those verses.

Observant Jews recite the Shema twice a day, in the morning and evening services, and again at bedtime. Many cover their eyes while saying the first line, to shut out distraction. Jewish tradition treats the Shema less as a prayer that asks for something and more as a declaration, a statement of who God is and to whom the speaker belongs. When historians want one sentence to sum up what Judaism teaches about God, this is usually the sentence they choose.

In the Book of Exodus, three months after leaving Egypt, the Israelites camp at the foot of Mount Sinai. Before the Ten Commandments are given, God tells Moses to make the people an offer. In the King James wording: if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people. The people answer that they will do all that the LORD has spoken. That exchange is the model for what Jewish tradition calls the covenant, in Hebrew brit: a binding agreement with obligations on both sides.

The covenant did not start at Sinai. Genesis describes God making a covenant with Abraham, promising him descendants and a land, with circumcision as its sign. Later Jewish thought treats Sinai as the moment that covenant became the bond of a whole people, with the Torah as its terms. Israel promises to keep the commandments; God promises to be their God. Because the agreement is with a people and not only with individuals, Jews speak of being born into the covenant, and converts are described as joining it.

Out of this comes the idea often translated as chosenness. The phrase peculiar treasure in the old translation means a valued possession, not something odd. In Jewish teaching, being chosen means being chosen for a task: to receive the Torah and live by it. The prophet Amos even warns that being known by God brings greater accountability, not less. Jewish thinkers across the centuries have stressed that chosenness is not a claim to be better than other peoples. Many modern Jews, especially in the Reform and Reconstructionist movements, have debated or reworded the idea; Reconstructionist prayer books removed the language of chosenness altogether.

Ask an observant Jew why the family does not cook on Saturday, or why there is a mezuzah on the door, and the answer is often a single word: it is a mitzvah. The word literally means commandment. Jewish tradition holds that the Torah contains 613 mitzvot (the plural), a count first stated in the Talmud and later listed in detail by medieval scholars such as Maimonides. By the traditional count, 248 are positive commands (do this) and 365 are prohibitions (do not do this). Many concern the Temple in Jerusalem, which no longer stands, so far fewer than 613 can be practiced today.

The Torah’s commands are often brief. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy, says Exodus, but it does not spell out what counts as work. Working that out is the job of halakhah, a word usually translated law but built on the Hebrew verb to walk: the way one walks, the path. Halakhah draws on the Torah, the discussions of the rabbis in the Talmud, later law codes and centuries of written questions and answers from rabbis called responsa. It covers prayer, food, business ethics, medical decisions and how to treat a stranger, not only ritual.

Jewish communities differ over how binding halakhah is. Orthodox Jews hold that it is divine law that can be interpreted but not set aside. Conservative Judaism treats halakhah as binding but historically developing, so its rabbis have ruled, for example, that driving to synagogue on the Sabbath may be permitted. Reform Judaism regards the ethical commandments as central and treats ritual laws as choices individuals make in an informed way. In everyday speech, though, mitzvah has a second, warmer meaning that every branch shares: a good deed. Visiting the sick, feeding the hungry and welcoming guests are each called a mitzvah.

The Jewish day runs from sunset to sunset, following Genesis, where each day of creation is counted as evening and then morning. So the seventh day, Shabbat in Hebrew (Sabbath in English), begins on Friday evening. Custom fixes the start at eighteen minutes before sunset, which in Chicago means a little after 4:00 in December and after 8:00 in June. In traditional homes a woman of the household lights at least two candles and says a blessing. Once the candles are lit, the Sabbath has begun and its rules apply.

The Friday night meal is the center of the home celebration. It opens with kiddush, a blessing said over a cup of wine or grape juice that declares the day holy and recalls both creation and the exodus from Egypt. Then comes a blessing over two loaves of braided bread called challah. The two loaves remember the double portion of manna the Israelites gathered on Fridays in the wilderness, according to Exodus 16. In many families parents bless their children, and songs greet the Sabbath, which Jewish tradition pictures as a bride or a queen.

None of this requires a synagogue or a rabbi. The Sabbath table is a home ritual, led by family members, and that is one reason it has survived twenty centuries of exile and migration. The customs vary widely. Sephardi families from Spain, North Africa and the Middle East sing different melodies and serve different foods than Ashkenazi families from Central and Eastern Europe. Secular Israelis who never enter a synagogue may still gather for Friday dinner. The common thread is a meal set apart, at a set time, with words that mark it as different from the other six nights.

The fourth of the Ten Commandments reads, in the King James Version: Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work. The commandment appears twice in the Torah, with a different reason each time. Exodus 20 says God rested on the seventh day of creation. Deuteronomy 5 says Israel were slaves in Egypt and should remember it. Rest, in this reading, is both an imitation of God and a protection for workers.

But what is work? The Torah does not give a list. The Mishnah, edited around 200 CE, lists thirty-nine categories of forbidden labor, called melachot. The Talmud explains that they are the kinds of work used to build the portable sanctuary in the wilderness, which the Torah describes right beside the Sabbath command. The list includes planting, baking, weaving, writing, building and kindling a fire. Later authorities extended the categories to new inventions: most Orthodox rabbis forbid turning on an electric light, many treating it as a form of kindling, which is why observant families set lights on timers before sunset.

This is why a Sabbath-observant Jew will carry a heavy book but not write a single word, or walk two miles to synagogue but not drive two blocks. The measure is not effort but creative change to the world. Jewish law also makes an exception that overrides nearly every Sabbath rule: pikuach nefesh, saving a life. A doctor may drive to the hospital and a person who is ill must eat. The Talmud puts it this way: the Sabbath was given to you, not you to the Sabbath. Reform and many Conservative Jews keep the day more selectively, choosing rest, family time and worship without the full list of prohibitions.

On Saturday morning Jews gather in a synagogue, a word from Greek meaning a place of assembly. The building is not a temple; no sacrifices are offered. It is a house of prayer, study and community. At the front stands the ark, a cabinet holding the Torah scrolls, handwritten on parchment by a trained scribe. The main event of the morning is taking a scroll out, carrying it through the congregation and reading a portion aloud in Hebrew. The Torah is divided into weekly portions so that the whole of it is read over one year, ending and restarting on the holiday of Simchat Torah each fall.

Services follow a prayer book called the siddur, from a Hebrew word for order. A rabbi, whose title means teacher, leads and gives a sermon, and a cantor may lead the singing, but any adult who knows the service can lead prayers. Practice varies by movement. In Orthodox synagogues men and women sit separately and the service is almost entirely in Hebrew. In Reform congregations, often called temples, families sit together, much is in English, and American Reform Judaism has ordained women as rabbis since 1972. Conservative synagogues fall between, mostly Hebrew with mixed seating and women fully included in most congregations.

The Sabbath does not end with sunset but with nightfall, when three stars are visible. A short home ceremony called Havdalah, meaning separation, marks the change. A braided candle with several wicks is lit, wine is blessed, and a box of sweet spices is passed around and smelled, a comfort, tradition says, as the extra soul a person is given on the Sabbath departs. A final blessing praises God who separates holy from ordinary, light from dark, the seventh day from the six days of work. Then the candle is put out in the wine, the phones come out of the drawer, and the week begins.

Ask why Hanukkah fell in late November one year and late December another, and the answer is the Jewish calendar. Its months follow the moon. Each begins with the new moon and lasts 29 or 30 days. Twelve months therefore come to about 354 days, eleven short of the solar year. If nothing were done, Passover would drift backward through the seasons, as the months of the Islamic calendar do. But the Torah calls Passover a spring festival. So the calendar adds a thirteenth month, a second Adar, in seven years out of every nineteen. This makes it a lunisolar calendar: moon for the months, sun for the years.

The rules were once decided by witnesses reporting the new moon to a court in Jerusalem, with messengers carrying the news. Communities far away could not be sure which day was correct, so they kept some holidays for two days to be safe. That is why Jews outside Israel traditionally keep eight days of Passover while Israel keeps seven. According to tradition, the sage Hillel II made a calculated calendar public in the fourth century CE, and it reached its present fixed form by about the tenth century. The year count begins from a traditional date for creation; the Jewish year that began in the fall of 2025 was 5786.

The months carry Babylonian names from the time of the exile: Tishrei in the fall holds Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot; Kislev holds Hanukkah; Adar holds Purim; Nisan in the spring holds Passover. Every holiday, like the Sabbath, begins at sunset the evening before the date printed on a wall calendar. That is why a Jewish student may ask to leave school early on the day before a holiday. Knowing the calendar is the first step to understanding Jewish time.

In early fall a curved ram’s horn called a shofar is blown in synagogues around the world. Its raw, broken blasts open Rosh Hashanah, the head of the year, on the first of Tishrei. The Torah names the day only as a day of blowing the horn. Later tradition made it the anniversary of creation and a day of judgment. In the imagery of the prayers, God opens a book and weighs each life. Families eat apples dipped in honey for a sweet year and round challah for the cycle of the year. On the afternoon of the first day many walk to a river or lake. There they symbolically cast away their sins by throwing bread crumbs on the water, a custom called tashlich.

The ten days that follow are called the Days of Awe, or the Ten Days of Repentance. The Hebrew word for repentance, teshuvah, literally means return. Jewish teaching holds that Yom Kippur atones for wrongs against God, but wrongs against another person are forgiven only when that person is asked and forgives. So in these ten days people apologize, repay debts and make peace. The period ends on the tenth of Tishrei with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which Leviticus 23 describes as a day to afflict your souls and do no work.

Yom Kippur is a full fast of about twenty-five hours: no food or drink from before sunset to after nightfall the next day, plus, by tradition, no bathing, leather shoes or perfume. The evening service opens with Kol Nidre, a legal formula sung to a haunting melody that cancels personal religious vows a person has made to God, not promises to other people. Much of the next day is spent in synagogue, confessing sins in the plural: we have sinned, we have betrayed. The final service ends with a long blast of the shofar. Even many Jews who rarely attend synagogue keep this day, and in Israel roads fall almost silent.

Five days after Yom Kippur, small huts appear on porches and in backyards. This is Sukkot, the Feast of Booths. The Torah connects it to the harvest and to the temporary shelters the Israelites lived in after leaving Egypt. Families eat, and some sleep, in a sukkah with a roof of branches thin enough to see the stars. Each day they hold together four plants named in Leviticus 23: a palm branch, myrtle, willow and a citron called an etrog. They wave them in every direction. Sukkot ends with Simchat Torah, when the year’s reading of the Torah finishes and starts over amid dancing with the scrolls.

Hanukkah, in Kislev, is the best-known Jewish holiday in America but a minor one in Jewish law. It remembers events of 164 BCE. Jewish fighters led by the Maccabees recaptured the Temple in Jerusalem from the Greek-ruled Seleucid kingdom, which had banned Jewish practice. They cleansed and rededicated it, and Hanukkah means dedication. The Talmud adds the story of a single day’s supply of pure oil that burned for eight days. So for eight nights Jews light a lamp with eight lights and a helper candle, adding one flame each night, eat foods fried in oil such as potato latkes and jelly doughnuts, and play with a spinning top called a dreidel. The lamp is placed in a window so that the miracle is publicized.

Purim, in Adar, is the loudest day of the year. Its story is the Book of Esther, in which a Jewish queen in Persia and her cousin Mordecai foil a plot by the royal official Haman to destroy the Jews. The whole scroll, the megillah, is read aloud, and every time Haman’s name is spoken the congregation drowns it out with noisemakers. People wear costumes, give gifts of food to friends and money to the poor, and eat a festive meal. Historians debate whether the events of Esther happened as told; for Jews the day marks survival in exile and a reversal of expected fate.

On the night of the fifteenth of Nisan, a Jewish family sits down to one of the most widely observed rituals in Jewish life: the seder, a word meaning order. The holiday is Passover, Pesach in Hebrew. It is named for the night in Exodus when the tenth plague passed over the Israelite homes. For eight days (seven in Israel) Jews eat no leavened bread and clear it from their homes. Instead they eat matzah, flat unleavened bread, because the Israelites left Egypt in too much haste for dough to rise. Cleaning for Passover can take weeks.

The seder follows a book called the Haggadah, the telling. It walks through the story of the exodus with questions, songs, and food that carries meaning. The youngest child asks the Four Questions, beginning Why is this night different from all other nights? On the seder plate sit bitter herbs for the bitterness of slavery. Beside them is a mixture of apples and nuts for the mortar of the bricks, and a roasted bone for the Passover lamb once offered in the Temple. Four cups of wine are drunk. The Torah’s command in Exodus 13 to tell your child on that day is the whole point. Every generation is told to see itself as if it personally came out of Egypt.

From the second night of Passover, Jews count forty-nine days, a period called the omer, and on the fiftieth comes Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks. In the Torah it is a harvest festival. Later tradition made it the anniversary of the giving of the Torah at Sinai, which the Book of Exodus places in the third month. Many stay up all night studying. Congregations read the Book of Ruth, in which a Moabite woman joins the people of Israel. Families eat dairy foods such as cheesecake and blintzes. Reform temples often hold confirmation ceremonies for teenagers on Shavuot. Passover and Shavuot together frame the story of freedom followed by law.

Turn over a box of cereal in a Chicago grocery store and you may see a small circled U or K. That symbol, a hechsher, certifies that a rabbi or agency has confirmed the product is kosher, a Hebrew word meaning fit or proper. The body of dietary law is called kashrut. Its rules begin in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14. Land animals may be eaten only if they both chew the cud and have a split hoof, so cattle, sheep and goats are permitted but pigs, camels and rabbits are not. Fish must have fins and scales, which rules out shellfish. Birds of prey are forbidden; chicken, turkey and duck are allowed.

Permitted animals must be slaughtered in a specific way, called shechita. A trained person uses a very sharp knife in a single cut. The blood must then be drained, since the Torah forbids eating blood. A second set of rules comes from a verse repeated three times in the Torah: Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk. The rabbis read this as a ban on cooking or eating meat and dairy together. Observant homes keep two sets of dishes, pots and utensils, one for meat and one for dairy. They wait a set number of hours between a meat meal and a dairy dessert. Foods that are neither, such as fruit, vegetables, eggs and fish, are called pareve. They can be eaten with either.

Why keep these rules? The Torah gives no health reason; it says Israel is to be holy. Jewish thinkers have offered explanations from self-discipline to compassion for animals, but for many observant Jews the reason is simply that these are commandments. Practice varies widely. Orthodox and many Conservative Jews keep kosher strictly. Some Jews avoid pork and shellfish but eat in ordinary restaurants. Reform Judaism leaves the choice to individuals, and a growing number of Jews of every kind speak of eco-kashrut, adding concerns about workers and the environment. Kosher food is also sought by some Muslims, since its rules overlap with halal.

On the eighth day after a Jewish boy is born, family and friends gather for a brit milah, the covenant of circumcision. The practice goes back to Genesis 17. There God tells Abraham that every male in his household shall be circumcised as a sign of the covenant, and specifies the eighth day. The ceremony is performed by a trained specialist called a mohel, often in the home or synagogue. The boy is given his Hebrew name at the same time. For a girl, the naming happens at a synagogue service. Many communities today also hold a home ceremony created in recent decades, called a simchat bat, joy of a daughter.

The next milestone comes at the edge of adolescence. Under Jewish law a boy becomes a bar mitzvah, son of the commandment, at thirteen, and a girl becomes a bat mitzvah, daughter of the commandment, at twelve or thirteen depending on the community. The phrase describes a status, not a party. From that age the young person is counted as an adult responsible for keeping the mitzvot. A boy can now be counted toward the minyan, the quorum of ten needed for public prayer; most non-Orthodox congregations count girls as well. The synagogue ceremony marks this by calling the young person up to the Torah for the first time. Often the student chants a portion in Hebrew after a year or more of study.

The bat mitzvah ceremony is a modern development. The first widely recorded one in the United States was held in 1922 for Judith Kaplan, the daughter of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, who founded Reconstructionist Judaism. Today Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist congregations treat bar and bat mitzvah identically, with girls reading Torah before the whole congregation. Orthodox communities mark a girl’s coming of age in varied ways, often with a speech or celebration rather than a public Torah reading. Whatever the form, the young person delivers a short teaching on the week’s portion, and the community responds by calling out congratulations: mazel tov.

A Jewish wedding happens under a chuppah, a canopy of cloth held up on four poles, open on all sides. Tradition explains it as the couple’s new home, open like the tent of Abraham and Sarah to guests. Before the ceremony a ketubah is signed. This is a marriage contract in Aramaic that spells out the husband’s obligations to his wife. Couples today often commission one as a work of art, and in liberal movements the text states mutual promises. Under the chuppah, blessings are said over wine, a ring is given with a Hebrew formula, and seven blessings are sung. Then the groom, or in many congregations both partners, stamps on a glass wrapped in cloth. One common explanation is that even at the happiest moment Jews remember the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.

Jewish mourning moves through set stages. Burial happens quickly, usually within a day or two, in a plain wooden coffin or a shroud; Jewish law forbids embalming and traditionally cremation, though Reform Judaism permits cremation. Mourners tear a garment or a black ribbon. Then comes shiva, seven days when the immediate family stays home, sits on low stools, covers mirrors and receives visitors who bring food and simply keep them company. A short prayer called the Kaddish, which praises God and never mentions death, is recited at services, and for a parent it is said daily for eleven months.

After shiva come thirty days of lighter mourning called sheloshim, and for a parent a full year. On every anniversary of the death, the yahrzeit, a candle burns for twenty-four hours and Kaddish is said again. Visitors to a Jewish grave leave a small stone rather than flowers, a custom whose origin is debated but which is nearly universal. The stages are meant to carry a mourner gradually back into ordinary life. From the eighth day of life to the last stone on a grave, Jewish practice marks each turning point with a text, a blessing and a community that shows up.

In Rome, near the ancient Forum, stands a stone arch built in the 80s CE to honor the emperor Titus. One carved panel shows soldiers carrying a great seven-branched lampstand, a menorah, as war loot. The scene records a real event. In 70 CE, Titus’s legions captured Jerusalem and burned the Temple that stood at its heart. For many Jews in Rome over the centuries, the arch was a monument to loss, and some refused to walk beneath it.

That building is called the Second Temple. The first, built according to the Bible by King Solomon, was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. Exiles who returned from Babylon rebuilt it around 516 BCE, and King Herod greatly enlarged it shortly before the Common Era. For centuries it was the one place where priests offered the sacrifices the Torah commands. Pilgrims crowded the city for Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot. Jewish groups of the period, such as the Sadducees, the Pharisees and the Essenes, disagreed about much, but the Temple stood at the center of their world.

In 66 CE a revolt broke out against Roman rule in Judea. Four years later the Temple lay in ruins. A second revolt, led by Simon bar Kokhba from 132 to 135 CE, also failed, and Rome barred Jews from Jerusalem. Only a retaining wall of the Temple platform survived. Today that Western Wall is a central place of Jewish prayer, where people pray and tuck written prayers into the cracks. Jewish tradition mourns both Temples on Tisha B'Av, the ninth day of the month of Av. It is a fast day on which the Book of Lamentations is read aloud.

A famous rabbinic story tells how a teacher named Yohanan ben Zakkai escaped Jerusalem during the Roman siege. His students, the story says, carried him past the guards in a coffin. Brought before the Roman general Vespasian, he asked for one thing: give me Yavneh and its sages. Historians cannot confirm the details, but the story captures something real. After 70 CE, the town of Yavneh, near the coast, became the place where scholars began to rebuild Jewish life without a Temple.

Each of these teachers was called rabbi, meaning my teacher, and most historians see them as heirs of the Pharisees. They faced a hard question. The Torah commands sacrifices at the Temple, and the Temple was gone. Another story tells of Yohanan ben Zakkai walking past the ruins with a student who wept that the place of atonement was destroyed. Do not grieve, the teacher answered. We have another atonement just as good: acts of loving-kindness. Then he quoted the prophet Hosea.

Over the next generations the rabbis set daily prayer services at the hours when offerings had once been made. They fixed the core prayer, the Amidah, which means standing, since it is said on one’s feet. They placed study of the Torah beside prayer as a way to draw near to God. The synagogue, which already existed in many towns, became the center of every community. Scholars call this new shape rabbinic Judaism. Nearly all Jewish movements today descend from it, and its mark is on the Sabbath table, the seder and the study hall.

A short tractate called Pirkei Avot, Ethics of the Fathers, opens with a chain of names. Moses received the Torah at Sinai and passed it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Great Assembly. The list continues down to the early rabbis. The chain expresses a belief central to traditional Judaism. Along with the written Torah, God gave Moses an Oral Torah: explanations and laws handed down by word of mouth, from teacher to student.

The Oral Torah explains what the written text leaves open. The Torah says to rest on the Sabbath, and the oral tradition lists the thirty-nine kinds of forbidden work. The Torah says to bind words on the hand, and the oral tradition explains how tefillin are made. For centuries this teaching was memorized and debated, not written down. After the Temple fell and the revolts failed, many feared it would be lost. Around 200 CE, in the Galilee, a leader known as Rabbi Judah the Prince edited these teachings into one book, the Mishnah, meaning repetition or teaching.

The Mishnah is written in compact Hebrew. It is divided into six orders, which cover farming and blessings, the Sabbath and festivals, marriage and family, civil and criminal law, the Temple and its offerings, and ritual purity. The orders hold sixty-three tractates, each on one subject. The teachers quoted in it are called the Tannaim, the repeaters. The Mishnah often records more than one opinion and names who held each. Traditional Jews regard it as the authoritative written form of the Oral Torah. Historians see it as the work of generations of scholars, gathered and shaped by its editor.

Open any page of the Talmud and you will see a few lines of the Mishnah followed by a much longer passage marked Gemara, meaning study or completion. The Gemara records how later rabbis questioned, tested and applied the Mishnah over roughly three hundred years. Together, Mishnah and Gemara make up the Talmud, from a Hebrew word for learning. The Gemara is written mostly in Aramaic, the everyday language of many Jews in the Near East at that time.

There are two Talmuds. The Jerusalem Talmud, finished in the Galilee around 400 CE, is shorter. The Babylonian Talmud was produced in the academies of Babylonia, in what is now Iraq, and took its final form over the next two centuries. Babylonia had a large and stable Jewish community, and its Talmud is fuller. It became the one studied and followed most widely. When Jews today say the Talmud without a label, they mean the Babylonian. Its standard printed edition fills about 2,700 double-sided pages.

The Talmud mixes two kinds of material. Much of it is law, debating everything from Sabbath rules to damage caused by an ox. The rest is aggadah, meaning telling: legends, sayings, advice, history and dreams. A legal debate may pause for a story about a rabbi and then return to the case. The goal is less to hand down a verdict than to train a way of reasoning. Since 1923 Jews around the world have followed Daf Yomi, a program of studying one page a day. The whole Talmud takes about seven and a half years, and the completion in 2020 filled a stadium in New Jersey with about ninety thousand people.

Around the turn of the Common Era, two teachers led rival schools in Jerusalem. Hillel, remembered as patient and humble, and Shammai, remembered as strict and exacting, disagreed on many questions. Their students carried the debates on as the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai. The Hanukkah lights are one example: eight lights going down, or one light going up. In most of their disputes Jewish law follows Hillel, but the Talmud keeps Shammai’s opinions and reasons.

The Talmud explains why. It says the two schools argued for three years, each claiming the law followed it. Then a heavenly voice declared: these and these are the words of the living God, but the law follows the House of Hillel. Why Hillel? Because, the Talmud says, its members were kind and modest. They taught Shammai’s view along with their own and even mentioned it first. The lesson for readers is that a view can be set aside in practice and still be honored as part of the conversation.

Pirkei Avot gives a test for good disagreement. An argument for the sake of heaven, it says, will last; one that is not will not. Its example of the first kind is Hillel and Shammai. Its example of the second is Korah, who in the Book of Numbers rebels against Moses to win power for himself. This value runs through Jewish learning. Students often study in pairs, called chavruta, so that each can challenge the other. Rabbis still write rulings that name the opinions they did not follow.

In the town of Troyes, in northern France, a scholar named Shlomo Yitzhaki wrote short, clear notes on almost every line of the Bible and the Talmud. Jews know him by his initials as Rashi (1040 to 1105). His comments define hard words, sometimes in Old French, and fill in steps the Talmud skips. Rashi’s grandsons and their students, known as the Tosafot, meaning additions, went further. They raised questions and compared passages across the whole Talmud. Their comments became the two columns that frame the center of every page.

Others wanted a clear answer to what the law actually requires. Maimonides (c. 1138 to 1204), born in Córdoba in Muslim Spain, completed the Mishneh Torah around 1180. It arranged all of Jewish law by subject in fourteen books. In the 1500s Joseph Karo, working in Safed in the land of Israel, wrote the Shulchan Arukh, meaning set table, a practical guide based on Sephardi practice. Moses Isserles of Kraków, in Poland, added notes for Ashkenazi custom. Together they remain a standard reference for Orthodox Jewish law today.

Printing gave the page its shape. Between 1520 and 1523 Daniel Bomberg, a Christian printer in Venice, published the complete Babylonian Talmud with Rashi and the Tosafot around the text. His page numbers are still used, which is why a student anywhere can turn to Shabbat 21b. An edition printed in Vilna, Lithuania, in the 1880s added more commentaries and became the standard. Not every ruler welcomed the book. In Paris in 1242, after a public disputation put the Talmud on trial, officials burned thousands of handwritten volumes. That is one reason early manuscripts are rare.

Medieval Jews borrowed two place names from the Bible to describe where they lived. Sepharad came to mean Spain, and Ashkenaz came to mean the German lands along the Rhine. Sephardi Jews trace their roots to Spain and Portugal, and many spoke Ladino, a form of Spanish often written in Hebrew letters. Ashkenazi Jews spread from Germany into Central and Eastern Europe and spoke Yiddish, a German-based language with Hebrew and Slavic words. Jews of the Middle East and North Africa, from Iraq, Iran, Yemen and Morocco, are often called Mizrahi, from the Hebrew for eastern.

For centuries most of the world’s Jews lived under Muslim rule. Islamic law classed Jews and Christians as dhimmi, protected peoples of scripture. They could practice their religion and run their own courts, but they paid a special tax and faced limits, such as rules against building new houses of worship in some places. Conditions varied by ruler and century. In al-Andalus, as Muslim Spain was called, Jewish poets, doctors and scholars flourished from the 900s to the 1100s. Samuel ibn Naghrela served as chief minister of Granada. In Baghdad, the scholar Saadia Gaon translated the Torah into Arabic.

Protection could also break down. In the 1140s the Almohads, a strict dynasty from North Africa, took control of much of Muslim Spain and pressed Jews and Christians to convert. The family of the young Maimonides fled, eventually settling in Egypt. There he became a court physician in Cairo and a leader of its Jewish community, and he wrote his philosophy in Arabic. His life, moving from Spain to Morocco to Egypt, shows both the richness of Jewish life under Islam and its insecurity. Historians still debate how to weigh the tolerance and the limits of that age.

In 1096, bands on their way to the First Crusade attacked Jewish communities in the Rhineland towns of Speyer, Worms and Mainz. Many hundreds, and by some estimates thousands, were killed, and some chose death over forced baptism. Jewish chroniclers wrote down the names, and prayers remembering the dead are still said. Over the next centuries false charges led to more massacres. One was the blood libel, the invented claim that Jews killed Christian children for ritual use, first recorded in Norwich, England, in 1144. During the Black Death, around 1348, Jews were falsely blamed for poisoning wells.

Church and rulers also set legal limits. A church council in 1215 required Jews and Muslims to wear distinctive clothing. Jews were often barred from owning land or joining craft guilds, which pushed many into trade and moneylending. Then came expulsion, the forced removal of a whole community. England expelled its Jews in 1290 and France in 1306. In 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella ordered all Jews in Spain who would not convert to leave, and in 1497 Portugal forced most of its Jews to convert. Many Sephardi exiles found refuge in the Ottoman Empire, North Africa and later Amsterdam.

In 1516 the city of Venice required its Jews to live on a small island beside an old foundry, called a getto in the local dialect, whose gates were locked at night. The word ghetto spread across Europe for closed Jewish quarters. Meanwhile many Ashkenazi Jews moved east to Poland and Lithuania, where kings invited them and granted charters. By the 1700s this region held the largest Jewish population in the world, much of it in small market towns, each called a shtetl in Yiddish. There, in the mid-1700s, a teacher known as the Baal Shem Tov inspired Hasidism, a movement stressing joyful prayer and heartfelt devotion, not scholarship alone.

In 1783 Moses Mendelssohn, a Jewish philosopher in Berlin, finished a translation of the Torah into German, printed in Hebrew letters. Jews could learn the language of their neighbors through their own sacred text. Mendelssohn became a symbol of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, which urged Jews to study science and European languages alongside Torah. At the same time came emancipation, the granting of equal citizenship. France was the first European country to grant it, in 1791, and others followed slowly. For the first time Jews could enter universities, professions and politics, and each had to decide what Jewish life should look like.

Reform Judaism began in Germany in the early 1800s. Its founders shortened services, added prayers and sermons in German and organ music, and taught that Jewish law should change with the times while its ethical core stayed. In the United States, Isaac Mayer Wise founded Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati in 1875 to train Reform rabbis. In response, leaders who held that the Torah and halakhah are unchanging divine law came to be called Orthodox. Samson Raphael Hirsch in Germany taught that faithful Jews could keep the whole law and also take part in modern culture.

Others sought a middle path. Conservative Judaism, rooted in the work of Zacharias Frankel in Germany, held that Jewish law is binding but has always developed through history. In America it grew around the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, founded in 1886. In the twentieth century Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan described Judaism as an evolving religious civilization, and his followers founded Reconstructionist Judaism. In Eastern Europe and later in America and Israel, Hasidic groups kept their own path under a rebbe. Each denomination, or organized movement, differs on law, worship and the roles of women and men. Yet most Jews recognize one another as one people.

At the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie, visitors pass a German railroad car of the kind used to deport Jews to killing centers. The museum was founded by survivors who had made new lives in Skokie. In 1977 and 1978, when a neo-Nazi group sought to march in their village, many decided they had to tell their stories in public. The event they described is called the Holocaust, from a Greek word for a sacrifice burned whole. Many Jews prefer the Hebrew word Shoah, meaning catastrophe.

The Nazi Party took power in Germany in 1933 and quickly pushed Jews out of public life. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped German Jews of citizenship. On November 9 and 10, 1938, in attacks called Kristallnacht, mobs burned synagogues and smashed Jewish shops across Germany and Austria. After World War II began in 1939, Jews in German-occupied Poland and much of Eastern Europe were forced into sealed ghettos. From 1941 mobile killing units shot Jews by the hundreds of thousands, and the regime built killing centers such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka. About six million Jews were murdered, roughly two of every three Jews in Europe, including as many as 1.5 million children.

The Nazis also persecuted and murdered Roma, disabled people, Polish and Soviet civilians and prisoners of war, gay men and others. Jews resisted in many ways, from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 to secret schools and hidden prayer. After the war, Jewish thinkers responded in different ways. Some asked how to speak of God at all. Others insisted that continuing Jewish life was itself the answer. Jewish communities mark Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, each spring. In 1990, Illinois became one of the first states to require public schools to teach about the Holocaust.

At many Jewish weddings, before the glass is broken, someone recites a line from Psalm 137, a lament from the Babylonian exile: If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. For centuries Jews living far away faced Jerusalem in prayer and ended the Passover seder with the words next year in Jerusalem. Jews use the word diaspora, a Greek term for scattering, for Jewish communities outside the land of Israel. For most of that history, the hope of return was a religious hope, left to God’s timing.

In the late 1800s, amid rising nationalism and violent attacks on Jews in Eastern Europe, a political movement called Zionism argued that Jews needed a state of their own. Theodor Herzl, a journalist in Vienna, organized the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897. Jewish immigration to Ottoman and then British-ruled Palestine grew. After the Holocaust, the United Nations voted in 1947 to divide the land into a Jewish state and an Arab state. Fighting between Jewish and Arab forces followed. Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, and the armies of neighboring Arab states entered the war. About 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were driven from their homes, which Palestinians call the Nakba, the catastrophe. In the following years hundreds of thousands of Jews left or were forced out of Arab countries, and many settled in Israel.

Jews have never agreed about Zionism. Early Reform leaders saw Judaism as a religion rather than a nation. Some Haredi, or strictly Orthodox, groups hold that only God should restore Jewish rule in the land. Over time most Jewish movements came to support the state. Israel’s Law of Return (1950) gives any Jew the right to settle there and become a citizen. Many Jews distinguish between Judaism as a religion and the policies of Israel’s government, which Israelis and Jews abroad debate sharply. The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians continues. Today nearly half of the world’s Jews live in Israel, and the largest diaspora community is in the United States.

Chicago’s first Jewish congregation, Kehilath Anshe Maariv, the Congregation of the Men of the West, was founded in 1847 by immigrants from Germany. After later mergers it continues today as KAM Isaiah Israel in the Kenwood neighborhood. Chicago’s German Jews built Reform congregations such as Chicago Sinai, founded in 1861. At the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions, Chicagoan Hannah Greenebaum Solomon organized a Jewish Women’s Congress. Out of it grew the National Council of Jewish Women, which still works on social causes.

From the 1880s to the 1920s, tens of thousands of Jews from Eastern Europe arrived, fleeing poverty and violence. Many crowded into the Near West Side around Maxwell Street, whose open-air market sold everything from pickles to overcoats. They spoke Yiddish and founded small Orthodox synagogues. They also formed societies for people from the same hometown, each called a landsmanshaft, which helped members with loans, jobs and burial. Jane Addams’s Hull House nearby served many of these families. As they prospered, many moved west to Lawndale, then north to Albany Park and Rogers Park, and later to suburbs such as Skokie and Highland Park.

Chicago Jews also built lasting institutions for the whole city. Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck, gave much of his fortune to philanthropy. He helped fund the Museum of Science and Industry and thousands of schools for Black children in the rural South, built together with local Black communities. Today the Chicago area is home to roughly 300,000 Jews, by common estimates, and every movement is present, from Orthodox families along Devon Avenue in West Rogers Park to Reform temples on the North Shore. Hebrew Theological College in Skokie trains Orthodox rabbis, and the Spertus Institute on Michigan Avenue offers Jewish learning to the public.