The Jews (Hebrew: יְהוּדִים‎, ISO 259-2: Yehudim, Israeli pronunciation: [jehuˈdim]), or the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group[14] and nation[15] originating from the Israelites of ancient Israel and Judah[16] and traditionally adhering to Judaism.

[27] By the late 6th century BCE, Judaism had evolved from the Israelite religion, dubbed Yahwism (for Yahweh) by modern scholars,[28] having a theology that religious Jews believe to be the expression of the Mosaic covenant between their ancestors and God.

[31] In the following millennia, Jewish diaspora communities coalesced into three major ethnic subdivisions according to where their ancestors settled: the Ashkenazim (Central and Eastern Europe), the Sephardim (Iberian Peninsula), and the Mizrahim (Middle East and North Africa).

[2] Jews have significantly influenced and contributed to the development and growth of human progress in many fields, both historically and in modern times, including in science and technology,[40] philosophy,[41] ethics,[42] literature,[40] governance,[40] business,[40] art, music, comedy, theatre,[43] cinema, architecture,[40] food, medicine,[44][45] and religion.

[53] The gradual ethnonymic shift from "Israelites" to "Jews", regardless of their descent from Judah, although not contained in the Torah, is made explicit in the Book of Esther (4th century BCE) of the Tanakh.

The latter was loaned from the Old French giu, which itself evolved from the earlier juieu, which in turn derived from judieu/iudieu which through elision had dropped the letter "d" from the Medieval Latin Iudaeus, which, like the New Testament Greek term Ioudaios, meant both "Jew" and "Judean" / "of Judea".

The ethnic stock to which Jews originally trace their ancestry was a confederation of Iron Age Semitic-speaking tribes known as the Israelites that inhabited a part of Canaan during the tribal and monarchic periods.

Over time these nomads left the desert and settled on the central mountain range of the land of Canaan, in simple semi-nomadic settlements in which pig bones are notably absent.

The majority of scholars agree that this text refers to the Israelites, a group that inhabited the central highlands of Canaan, where archaeological evidence shows that hundreds of small settlements were constructed between the 12th and 10th centuries BCE.

However, while in Israel the royal succession was often decided by a military coup d'état, resulting in several dynasty changes, political stability in Judah was much greater, as it was ruled by the House of David for the whole four centuries of its existence.

[170] Under the political leadership of the exilarch, who was regarded as a royal heir of the House of David, this community had an autonomous status and served as a place of refuge for the Jews of Syria Palaestina.

However, in the 12th to 15th centuries, the Iberian Peninsula witnessed a rise in antisemitism, leading to persecutions, anti-Jewish laws, massacres and forced conversions (peaking in 1391), and the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition that same year.

Many Jews fled from Europe to Mandatory Palestine, the United States, and the Soviet Union as a result of racial anti-Semitic laws, economic difficulties, and the fear of an impending war.

Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Final Solution—an extensive, organized effort with an unprecedented scope intended to annihilate the Jewish people—began, and resulted in the persecution and murder of Jews in Europe and North Africa.

Throughout history, in eras and places as diverse as the ancient Hellenic world,[185] in Europe before and after The Age of Enlightenment (see Haskalah),[186] in Islamic Spain and Portugal,[187] in North Africa and the Middle East,[187] India,[188] China,[189] or the contemporary United States[190] and Israel,[191] cultural phenomena have developed that are in some sense characteristically Jewish without being at all specifically religious.

[209] Today, Russian is the first language for many Jewish communities in a number of Post-Soviet states, such as Ukraine[210][211][212][213] and Uzbekistan,[214][better source needed] as well as for Ashkenazic Jews in Azerbaijan,[215][216] Georgia,[217] and Tajikistan.

[233] Adrian Hastings argued that Jews are the "true proto-nation", that through the model of ancient Israel found in the Hebrew Bible, provided the world with the original concept of nationhood which later influenced Christian nations.

In addition, there is a differentiation made between Sephardi migrants who established themselves in the Middle East and North Africa after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s and the pre-existing Jewish communities in those regions.

As a result of their emigration from Europe, Ashkenazim also represent the overwhelming majority of Jews in the New World continents, in countries such as the United States, Canada, Argentina, Australia, and Brazil.

[243] Scholars such as Harry Ostrer and Raphael Falk believe this indicates that many Jewish males found new mates from European and other communities in the places where they migrated in the diaspora after fleeing ancient Israel.

"[13][245][246] A study showed that 7% of Ashkenazi Jews have the haplogroup G2c, which is mainly found in Pashtuns and on lower scales all major Jewish groups, Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese.

Outside Israel, the highest percent of Jews in a metropolitan area was in New York (10.8%), followed by Miami (8.7%), Philadelphia (6.8%), San Francisco (5.1%), Washington (4.7%), Los Angeles (4.7%), Toronto (4.5%), and Baltimore (4.1%).

[272] A trickle of immigrants from other communities has also arrived, including Indian Jews and others, as well as some descendants of Ashkenazi Holocaust survivors who had settled in countries such as the United States, Argentina, Australia, Chile, and South Africa.

[273] The waves of immigration to the United States and elsewhere at the turn of the 19th century, the founding of Zionism and later events, including pogroms in Imperial Russia (mostly within the Pale of Settlement in present-day Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus and eastern Poland), the massacre of European Jewry during the Holocaust, and the founding of the state of Israel, with the subsequent Jewish exodus from Arab lands, all resulted in substantial shifts in the population centers of world Jewry by the end of the 20th century.

[287] Since at least the time of the Ancient Greeks, a proportion of Jews have assimilated into the wider non-Jewish society around them, by either choice or force, ceasing to practice Judaism and losing their Jewish identity.

Then there occurred the largest expulsion of all, when Spain and Portugal, after the Reconquista (the Catholic Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula), expelled both unbaptized Sephardic Jews and the ruling Muslim Moors.

The one described by Bernard Lewis as "most degrading"[303] was the requirement of distinctive clothing, not found in the Quran or hadith but invented in early medieval Baghdad; its enforcement was highly erratic.

[299] According to a 2008 study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, 19.8 percent of the modern Iberian population has Sephardic Jewish ancestry,[312] indicating that the number of conversos may have been much higher than originally thought.

[320] Jews and Roma were crammed into ghettos before being transported hundreds of kilometres by freight train to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, the majority of them were murdered in gas chambers.

Additionally, while in principle Reform Judaism favours seeking new members for the faith, this position has not translated into active proselytism, instead taking the form of an effort to reach out to non-Jewish spouses of intermarried couples.