Judaism

Judaism
I have found that as a class, our recent study and survey of the Jewish faith has been quite enlightening for me. I have always heard about the hardships and adversity the Jewish people have faced throughout history, but until this class I had no idea about how arduous it had been for this ethnic group to rise above centuries of persecution and bondage to prosper as a people.
In the Roman era, the Jews faced exile and destruction, there was a revolt in the 130’s CE against the Emperor Hadrian. This event led to the martyrdom of a rabbinic sage, Akiva, who disobeyed the Emperor’s edict forbidding the study of the Torah. He was heavily encouraged to disobey by his wife.
By the middle ages, Jews had thrived in Islamic Spain (al-Andalus).   By 1095, Christian soldiers embarking on the First Crusade, massacred thousands of Jews living in the Rhineland. This event led Calixtus II to issue a protective order for the Jews, called the Sicut Judaeis.   This order imposed many restrictions, such as: forcing Jews into certain occupations, Jews in Spain were eventually forced to convert to Christianity, and the Spanish Inquisition to root out insincere converts.
In the modern era, Jewish people went through many reforms and forms of modernization. The beginnings of Zionism take root in the late 1700’s. In 1880, massacres or “pogroms” in Russia prompt Jewish emigration to North America, where in 1897 the first Zionist organization is formed.
Of course mostly everyone is familiar with the horrific events that took place during the Second World War, with the events of the Holocaust and the murder of six million Jews.   The Nuremberg laws of 1935 removed most civil rights of all Jewish people, this event led to the “Night of the Broken Glass” in 1938 that was a nationwide assault on Jews, which led the Nazis to the “Final Solution,” or the order to begin the mass extermination of the Jewish people.
Events such as these served as a catalyst for Jewish settlements...