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Eighteen accounts of what is real, each set out in its own terms and each with its own page.
All World Views Does God Exist?The Secular Judaism stream of the Judaism timeline.
Streams: All of Judaism Orthodox Judaism Conservative Judaism Reform Judaism Reconstructionist Judaism Secular Judaism
Tradition places Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in this period: the covenant, the promise of descendants and land, and the family's journeys between Mesopotamia, Canaan, and Egypt. The narratives are received as sacred history; their events are not historically verifiable as narrated.
Tradition dates the Exodus from Egypt and the giving of the Torah at Sinai to this period; the event is the founding act of Israel's covenant and law. Scholarly debate continues over its date, scale, and historical character.
David unites the tribes, takes Jerusalem as his capital, and founds the dynasty to which later messianic hope attaches; the united monarchy under David and Solomon is the biblical ideal of Israelite kingship.
Solomon builds the Temple in Jerusalem, the single house of sacrifice for Israel's God; the dedication prayer in 1 Kings 8 frames the Temple as the place toward which prayer is directed, in Israel and in exile alike.
Assyria conquers Samaria and deports the northern kingdom of Israel's population; the ten northern tribes vanish from history as a polity, and Judah remains alone in the south.
Nebuchadnezzar's Babylonians burn Jerusalem and the First Temple and exile Judah's leadership to Babylon; the catastrophe becomes the theological crisis out of which exilic and post-exilic Judaism is formed.
Cyrus of Persia, having taken Babylon, permits the exiles to return and rebuild the Temple; the edict, recorded in Ezra and echoed on the Cyrus Cylinder, begins the Second Temple period.
The returned exiles complete the Second Temple under Zerubbabel, with the prophets Haggai and Zechariah pressing the work; the modest house stands, enlarged by Herod, until 70 CE.
Antiochus IV's suppression of Jewish practice provokes the revolt of Mattathias and his sons; Judas Maccabeus rededicates the Temple in 164 BCE, the event Hanukkah commemorates, and the Hasmonean dynasty follows.
Pompey enters Jerusalem and the Holy of Holies, ending Hasmonean independence in substance; Judea passes under Roman power, the condition that frames the next century and a half.
Titus's legions burn the Second Temple and destroy Jerusalem after a brutal siege; sacrifice ends for good, and Judaism reconstitutes itself around Torah, synagogue, and prayer. Rabbinic Judaism begins here.
The sages gathered at Yavneh under Rabban Gamaliel II consolidate the canon and the order of prayer after the Temple's fall; later tradition remembered the gathering as a council, and modern scholarship reads it as a gradual consolidation.
Judah ha-Nasi redacts the Mishnah, the first great codification of the Oral Torah, in six orders of law; it becomes the foundation document of rabbinic Judaism and the base text of both Talmuds.
The academies of Palestine and Babylonia produce the two Talmuds, vast commentaries on the Mishnah that join law and lore; the Babylonian Talmud becomes the central text of rabbinic study for the next fifteen centuries.
The Geonim, heads of the Babylonian academies of Sura and Pumbedita, answer legal questions from across the Jewish world; their responsa and Saadia Gaon's works make Babylonia the center of Jewish authority.
Anan ben David's rejection of rabbinic oral law, as later tradition tells it, seeds Karaism, the scripturalist movement that reads the Hebrew Bible without the Talmud's authority; Karaism becomes rabbinic Judaism's enduring internal alternative.
Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes, called Rashi, writes the commentary on the Torah and the Talmud that becomes inseparable from the texts themselves; nearly every printed edition since carries his voice in the margin.
Moses Maimonides, physician and philosopher in Fustat, codifies all of Jewish law in the Mishneh Torah and reconciles faith and Aristotelian philosophy in the Guide of the Perplexed; no medieval Jewish thinker shapes the tradition more.
The Alhambra Decree orders Spain's Jews to convert or leave; tens of thousands depart for Portugal, North Africa, Italy, and the Ottoman world, ending the great Sephardic civilization of Spain and scattering it across the Mediterranean.
Joseph Karo's Shulchan Aruch, printed at Venice with Moses Isserles's Ashkenazic glosses, becomes the standard code of Jewish law; its authority structures Orthodox practice to the present day.
The Cossack uprising under Bohdan Chmielnicki destroys hundreds of Jewish communities in Ukraine; the massacres, among the worst catastrophes of early modern Jewry, are remembered in chronicle and liturgy.
The Jewish Enlightenment, centered on Moses Mendelssohn in Berlin, argues for secular learning, civic integration, and the reform of Jewish life; the Haskalah opens the modern period and the movements that follow from it.
Pogroms across the Russian Empire after Alexander II's assassination, and the May Laws that follow, drive the great migration; some two million Jews leave Eastern Europe by 1914, most for the United States, remaking world Jewry's center of gravity.
Theodor Herzl convenes the First Zionist Congress at Basel, which adopts the Basel Program for a Jewish home in Palestine secured by public law; political Zionism begins here, and Herzl writes that at Basel he founded the Jewish state.
Britain's foreign secretary Arthur Balfour declares his government's support for a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine; the declaration, later written into the League of Nations mandate, gives Zionism an imperial sponsor.
Nazi Germany and its collaborators murder some six million Jews, a third of the Jewish people, in ghettos, mass shootings, and extermination camps; the Shoah destroys the civilization of European Jewry and stands behind every Jewish decision since.
On 14 May 1948 David Ben-Gurion proclaims the State of Israel as the British mandate ends; the War of Independence follows at once, and Jewish sovereignty returns to the land for the first time in nearly two thousand years.
Rabbi Sherwin Wine founds the Birmingham Temple in Michigan and then the Society for Humanistic Judaism, organizing secular Jews around Jewish culture, history, and ethics without theistic belief. Stream milestone.
In six days Israel defeats Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and takes the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, and the Golan; the capture of the Old City brings the Temple Mount and the Western Wall under Jewish control, and the occupation that follows frames the conflict to this day.
