The most common view is that the Middle English word Jew is from the Old French qiu, earlier juieu, from the Latin iudeus from the Greek corresponding to the Hebrew y'hudi, ultimately from Judah, name of a Hebrew patriarch and the tribe descended from him. The Old English equivalent was Iudeas. An alternative and much less common view is that Jew is from Jewry from the greek evrei meaning "Hebrews." Under the latter view, Abraham, Israel and other patriarchs are regarded as Jews while under the former only the descendants (ethnically or physically) of the Judaeans would be Jews, strictly speaking. Halakha, Jewish law, defines a Jew as someone who is either: the child of a Jewish mother; or A person who converts to Judaism in accord with Jewish law. The State of Israel allows any Jew to acquire citizenship; this is known as the Law of Return. For the purposes of the Law of Return, anyone with a Jewish grandparent or who converted to Judaism is considered Jewish, and Israeli law also allows the immediate non-Jewish family of immigrants to immigrate under the law. This definition is not the same as that in traditional Jewish law; it is a deliberately wider, so as to include those non-Jewish relatives of Jews who were perceived to be Jewish, and thus faced anti-Semitism.

For the first two periods the history of the Jews is mainly that of Palestine or Judea. It begins among those peoples which occupied the area lying between the Nile river on the one side and the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers on the other. Surrounded by ancient seats of culture in Egypt and Babylonia, by the mysterious deserts of Arabia, and by the highlands of Asia Minor, the land of Canaan (later Judea, then Palestine, then Israel) was a meeting place of civilizations. The land was traversed by old-established trade routes and possessed important harbors on the Gulf of Akaba and on the Mediterranean coast, the latter exposing it to the influence of the Levantine culture.

Jews descend mostly from the ancient Israelites (also known as Hebrews, from the Sumerian Ibiru), who settled in the land of Israel. The Israelites traced their common lineage to the biblical Sumerian patriarch Abraham through Isaac and Jacob. A kingdom was established under Saul and continued under King David and Solomon. King David conquered Jerusalem (first a Canaanite, then a Jebusite town) and made it his capital. After Solomon's reign the nation split into two kingdoms, the Israel (in the north) and the Judah (in the south). Israel was conquered by the Assyrian ruler Shalmaneser V in the 8th century BC. The kingdom of Judah was conquered by a Babylonian army in the early 6th century BC. The Judahite elite was exiled to Babylonia, but later at least a part of them returned to their homeland after the subsequent conquest of Babylonia by the Persians.

After the Persians were defeated by Alexander the Great, the Seleucid Kingdom was formed which sought to incorporate Greek culture into the Persian world. When the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes, supported by hellenized Jews, attempted to rededicate the Jewish temple to Zeus, the orthodox Jews revolted under the leadership of the Maccabees and created an independent Jewish kingdom known as the Hasmonaean Dynasty which lasted from 165 BCE to 63 BCE. This was followed by a period of Roman rule. In 66 CE, Judeans began to revolt against the Roman rulers of Judea. The revolt was smashed by the Roman emperors Vespasian and Titus Flavius. The Romans destroyed all but a single wall of the Temple in Jerusalem and stole the holy menorah. Judeans continued to live in their land in significant numbers, and were allowed to practice their religion, until the 2nd century when Julius Severus ravaged Judea while putting down the bar Kokhba revolt. After 135, Jews were not allowed to enter the city of Jerusalem, although this ban must have been at least partially lifted, since at the destruction of the rebuilt city by the Persians in the 7th century, Jews are said to have lived there.

Many of the Israeli Jews were sold into slavery while others became citizens of other parts of the Roman Empire. This is the traditional explanation to the diaspora. However, a majority of the Jews in Antiquity were most likely descendants of convertites in the cities of the Hellenistic-Roman world, especially in Alexandria and Asia Minor, and were only affected by the diaspora in its spiritual sense, as the sense of loss and homelessness which became a cornerstone of the Jewish creed, much supported by persecutions in various parts of the world. The policy of conversion, which spread the Jewish religion throughout the Hellenistic civilization, seems to have ended with the wars against the Romans and the following reconstruction of Jewish values for the post-Temple era.

Before the rise of Islam the Jews inhabited the entire Roman empire; with the Arab expansion, some of them would move as far as India and China. Some Jewish people are also descended from converts to Judaism outside the Mediterranean world. While the Avars Hebrew origins/conversion debate continues, it is known that some Khazars, Edomites, and Ethiopians, as well as many Arabs, particularly in Yemen before, converted to Judaism in the past; today in the United States and Israel some people still convert to Judaism. In fact, there is a greater tradition of conversion to Judaism than many people realize. The word "proselyte" originally meant a Greek who had converted to Judaism. As late as the 6th century the rump Roman empire (i.e. Byzantium) was issuing decrees against conversion to Judaism, implying that conversion to Judaism was still occurring.

Jews have historically been divided into four major ethnic groups:

Ashkenazi (Jews who lived in Germany or France before migrating to Eastern Europe)

Sephardic (Jews who lived in Spain or Portugal)

Oriental Jews (Jews who lived in the Middle East and North Africa, but later spread to Central Asia and South Asia). Note that in common usage, most Oriental Jews are called Sephardic, as the religious rites of Oriental Jews and Sephardic Jews is essentially the same.

The Yemenite Jews (also known as Teimanim). These are Oriental Jews whose geographical and social isolation from the rest of the Jewish community allowed them to develop a liturgy and set of practices sufficiently distinct from other Oriental Jewish groups so as to be recognized as a different group.

Smaller groups of Jews include the following:

The Ethiopian Jews, also known as the Falasha or Beta Israel.

the Bene Israel, i.e. Jews who lived in Bombay, India.

The Romaniotes, i.e. Greek speaking Jews living in the Balkans from the Hellenistic era until today (almost 6,000 people worldwide)

Following the Spanish Inquisition the Sephardic Jews were dispersed, some migrating to Europe, where they were assimilated into the Ashkenazi, others migrating to the Middle East where they were assimilated into the Oriental Jews. Most Oriental Jews practice Sephardic rite and are therefore sometimes referred to as Sephardic. Ashkenazi Jews practice Ashkenazi rite.

Out of these communities, the largest by far are the Ashkenazim, comprising ~80% of the Jewish total, with Oriental Jews comprising most of the remainder.

Sub-groups of Jews include the Gruzim (Georgian Jews from the Caucasus), Juhurim (Mountain Jews from Daghestan and Azerbaijan in the eastern Caucasus), Maghrebim (North African Jews), Abayudaya and (Ugandan Jews) Ref.

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Through the ages the Jews have been hated oppressed and murdered over and over again. So they had to use all their wits to get by and consequently got better and better in it. They had to, because otherwise they would have perished a long time ago. Seeing that the Jews, in spite of all oppression were managing to get by and even prosper in very bad times, people became jealous and started to hate them and blame them for everything that went wrong.  Hitler was anti-Semitic. He blamed the Jews for Germany's defeat in the Great War (WW1) and the treaty of Versailles, the revolution which followed, and the run-away inflation of 1923. He claimed that they profited from the misery of Germans and that they were part of an international conspiracy allegedly described in the "Protocols of Zion". He claimed that they were an inferior race as opposed to Aryan Germans he regarded as perfect. At schools students were taught how to recognise Jews using films and posters. This was nothing new. In the middle ages Jews had to ware special badges to show that they were Jews, they had to live as outcasts in ghettos, they were blamed for the black plague, for poisoning the Christians drinking water. Mobs consequently looted and burned the Jewish Ghettos along with the people living there. Today Islamic teachers are no different then the worst Nazis. In this video from Al-Jazeera TV (Qatar) January 28-30, 2009, Sheik Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi is shamelessly twisting the facts as if it were the Jews that attacked Germany and Germany acted in self defence resulting in the massacres of the Holocaust. The Sheik, here showing his true face, insulting Allah most merciful, claiming that what happened to the Jews in World War 2 was the will of Allah in spite of the fact that He is called most merciful in the Quran. Don't they know that God is a God of Love? The god of hatred is the Devil.  It is clear which god is the god of the Sheik.

The middle east problem in a nutshell

Aryan

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