Jews
The Jews (Hebrew: יְהוּדִים, ISO 259-2: Yehudim, Israeli pronunciation:) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites of the ancient Near East, and whose traditional religion is Judaism. Jewish ethnicity, religion, and community are highly interrelated, as Judaism is an ethnic religion, although not all ethnic Jews practice it. Despite this, religious Jews regard individuals who have formally converted to Judaism as part of the community.

The Israelites emerged from within the Canaanite population to establish the Iron Age kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Judaism emerged from the Israelite religion of Yahwism by the late 6th century BCE, with a theology considered by religious Jews to be the expression of a covenant with God established with the Israelites, their ancestors. The Babylonian captivity of Judahites following their kingdom's destruction, the movement of Jewish groups around the Mediterranean in the Hellenistic period, and subsequent periods of conflict and violent dispersion, such as the Jewish–Roman wars, gave rise to the Jewish diaspora. The Jewish diaspora is a wide dispersion of Jewish communities across the world that have maintained their sense of Jewish history, identity and culture.

In the following millennia, Jewish diaspora communities coalesced into three major ethnic subdivisions according to where their ancestors settled: the Ashkenazim (Western Europe), the Sephardim (Iberian Peninsula), and the Mizrahim (Middle East and North Africa). While these three major divisions account for most of the world's Jews, there are other smaller Jewish groups outside of the three. Prior to World War II, the global Jewish population reached a peak of 16.7 million, representing around 0.7% of the world's population at that time. During World War II, approximately 6 million Jews throughout Europe were systematically murdered by Nazi Germany in a genocide known as the Holocaust. Since then, the population has slowly risen again, and as of 2021, was estimated to be at 15.2 million by the demographer Sergio Della Pergola or less than 0.2% of the total world population in 2012. Today, over 85% of Jews live in Israel or the United States. Israel, whose population is 73.9% Jewish, is the only country where Jews comprise more than 2.5% of the population.

Jews have significantly influenced and contributed to the development and growth of human progress in many fields, both historically and in modern times, including in science and technology, philosophy, ethics, literature, governance, business, art, music, comedy, theatre, cinema, architecture, food, medicine, and religion. Jews wrote the Bible, founded Christianity, and had an indirect but profound influence on Islam. In these ways, Jews have also played a significant role in the development of Western culture.
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