Comparitive Religions Essay

Submitted By dmorris34
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Ramon Morris
Dr. Tucker
Comparative Religions
4/30/12
Option 3

Judaism
Judaism is the original of the three Abrahamic faiths; these faiths include Christianity and Islam. Judaism started in the Middle East over 35000 years ago. There has been somewhat of an argument to who founded Judaism, many believe Moses was the founder, but Jews have traced their history back to see that Abraham could have been the founder. Jews believe and have faith that there is only one God and they feel they have a covenant with that God. What the Jews mean by covenant is “the covenant between God and Jews is the basis for the idea of the Jews as the chosen people.”
Roman Times There was a certain time period where the Jewish People pretty much governed themselves and were able to come to peace with the Roman Empire. “But internal divisions weakened the Jewish kingdom and allowed the Romans to establish control in 63 BCE.” After this the Jewish people were being taxed and “oppressed” by a series of rulers who pretty much forgot and did not care for the practice of Judaism. At the time the priests or “Sadducees” were friends or allies with the rulers and forgot who they really were. After this the Jews turned to the Pharisees or scribes, these people were also called Rabbis, which means teachers. When the Rabbis came in they encouraged the Jewish people to look at new ethical laws in all aspects of like, and look at a cycle of prayer and festivals in the home and at synagogues.
History from 1090 to 1600 In the beginning of the next millennium everything began with crusades, military operations by “Christian countries to capture the Holy Land”. The armies of the first crusade ended up attacking the Jewish communities while they were traveling to the Palestine especially in Germany. The crusaders ended up capturing Jerusalem after this they killed and enslaved thousands of Jews as well as Muslims. The 1100s was a pretty bad period for the Jews they were driven from southern Spain by a Berber invasion, numerous anti-Jewish incidents began to take place in Europe. When the Jews were in France they were accused of having a ritual in killing children, while in England the “Jews were murdered while trying to give gifts to the King at Richard I’s coronation”, “150 Jews were massacred in York”, and in 1215 the Catholic Church “ordered Jews to live in segregated areas and to wear distinctive clothes.” Though things were very tough for the Jews during this period later after this time the Jewish began to expand out, they were allowed to come back to England and their rights to have citizenship steadily increased. During the 19th century there were a lot of countries to which gradually started to ease up on the Jews and lift some of their restrictions over them. The UK finally allowed their Jewish citizens the same rights as pretty much everybody else by the 1860s. During this same time period the Jews started to come into central Europe and Russia with increasing pressure. “there were brutal pogroms against Jews in which they were ejected from their homes and villages, and cruelly treated. Some of this persecution is told in the musical show Fiddler on the Roof”. Back in Israel, Jewish culture had a for seeable amount of rebirth as the language being Hebrew was recreated from a “language of history and religion into a language that would be used during their everyday life.
Twentieth Century
While not only in Britain but also in America, this turned out to be the time for Jewish immigration, there were a great number of Jewish people coming to Britain and America to escape the pogroms in Poland and Russia. The population of Jews in Britain increased by 250,000 in a 30 year time frame. It was at this time that the “East End of London became a centre of Jewish life in Britain. However in 1905 the UK passed a law that slowed immigration to a mere trickle.”
The Holocaust The Jewish history is mostly know for one of the biggest devastations in