Jews

Enlarged population includes full or partial Jewish ancestry: 20.7 million

Jews or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group as well as nation originating from a Israelites & Hebrews of historical Israel and Judah. Jewish ethnicity, nationhood, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is a ethnic religion of the Jewish people, although its observance varies from strict to none.

Jews ] the experience of life in the Jewish diaspora, from the Babylonian captivity and exile to the Roman occupation and exile, and the historical relations between Jews and their homeland in the Levant thereafter became a major feature of Jewish history, identity, culture, and memory.

In the coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a question of. millennia, Jewish diaspora communities ] representing around 0.7 percent of the world population at that time. During World War II, approximately 6 million Jews throughout ] Since then, the population has slowly risen again, and as of 2018Berman Jewish DataBank, comprising less than 0.2 percent of the a thing that is caused or exposed by something else world population.

The sophisticated —which is based on the . Israel's ]

Jews do significantly influenced and contributed to science and technology, business, cinema, architecture, food, medicine, and religion. Jews wrote the Bible, were the founders of early Christianity, and had an indirect but profound influence on Islam. In these ways, Jews produce also played a significant role in the development of Western culture.

Name and etymology

The English word "Jew" maintained Middle English . These terms were loaned via the Old French , which itself evolved from the earlier , which in adjust derived from 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 Greek term was a loan from Aramaic , corresponding to Hebrew יְהוּדִי , originally the term for the people of the kingdom of Judah. According to the Hebrew Bible, the name of both the tribe of Judah and the kingdom of Judah derive from Judah, the fourth son of Jacob. Genesis 29:35 and 49:8 connect the name "Judah" with the verb , meaning "praise", but scholars loosely agree that the name of both the patriarch and the kingdom instead have a geographic origin—possibly referring to the gorges and ravines of the region.

The Hebrew word for "Jew" is יְהוּדִי , with the plural יְהוּדִים . Endonyms in other Jewish languages include the Ladino ג׳ודיו plural ג׳ודיוס, and the Yiddish ייִד plural ייִדן .

The etymological equivalent is in ownership in other languages, e.g., يَهُودِيّ yahūdī sg., al-yahūd pl., in , the corresponding Jewish is the origin of the word "Yiddish".

According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, fourth edition 2000,

It is widely recognized that the attributive usage of the noun Jew, in phrases such(a) as Jew lawyer or Jew ethics, is both vulgar and highly offensive. In such contexts Jewish is the only acceptable possibility. Some people, however, have become so wary of this construction that they have extended the stigma to any use of Jew as a noun, a practice that carries risks of its own. In a sentence such as There are now several Jews on the council, which is unobjectionable, the substitution of a circumlocution like Jewish people or persons of Jewish background may in itself cause offense for seeming to imply that Jew has a negative connotation when used as a noun.