Under Roman rule, Judea was reorganised as a client kingdom, then as a province. The Romans appointed Herod the Great as king, a man of extraordinary building ambition who expanded the Second Temple into one of the grandest structures in the ancient world, but who was despised by many of his Jewish subjects. After Herod's death, Roman governors administered the province with increasing contempt for its population. The tensions that had been building for a century finally broke in 66 CE, when the Jews launched what became known as the Great Revolt.

The Romans responded with overwhelming force. A future emperor named Vespasian crushed the rebellion in Galilee by 67 CE. His son Titus then led the siege of Jerusalem itself. The city fell in 70 CE. The Romans burned Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple. Titus paraded the temple's great menorah through the streets of Rome in a triumph, and it was put on display in the new Temple of Peace. The Flavian dynasty minted coins stamped "Judaea Capta" — Judaea captured — to celebrate their victory.

The destruction of the Second Temple was the defining catastrophe of Jewish history. With the temple gone, the entire system of sacrificial worship that had stood at the centre of Judaism for centuries was obliterated overnight. But out of the wreckage something new was built. A rabbi named Yohanan ben Zakkai, according to tradition, secured permission from the Romans to establish a centre of Torah study in the coastal town of Yavneh. Prayer, scripture study, and communal gathering in synagogues replaced the rituals of the temple. The Pharisees, one of the major Jewish sects, became the foundation of what would be called Rabbinic Judaism.

The Roman wars were not finished. From 115 to 117 CE, Jewish diaspora communities across Libya, Cyprus, and Egypt rose in what is called the Diaspora Revolt, driven by messianic hopes and the desire to return to Judea. The Roman suppression was savage. The Jewish communities of Alexandria and Cyrene, among the largest and most influential in the world, were nearly obliterated. Then, from 132 to 136 CE, came the last and most devastating revolt. A leader named Simon Bar Kokhba established a short-lived Jewish state in Judea, whose coins proclaimed "Freedom of Israel" in ancient Hebrew script. The Romans assembled six legions to crush it. Historical accounts report the destruction of nearly a thousand villages and the deaths of close to six hundred thousand Jews. The Romans renamed the province Syria Palaestina, a deliberate erasure of the Jewish name from the map.

After the Bar Kokhba revolt, the Jewish population of Judea collapsed. The centre of Jewish life shifted north to Galilee, and then east to Babylonia, where Jewish communities had existed since the exile of 597 BCE. By the first century of the common era, Babylonia already held an estimated one million Jews, a number that would grow to perhaps two million by the fifth century. It was there, in the great academies at Sura and Pumbedita, that Jewish scholars undertook the project that would hold the Jewish people together across the next fifteen centuries.

The scholars of Babylonia were called the Amoraim, meaning expounders. Over the course of several centuries, they debated, interpreted, and annotated the Mishnah, the written collection of Jewish oral law compiled in the late second century. Their discussions, arguments, and stories were gathered into the Babylonian Talmud, composed in Hebrew and Aramaic, completed around 500 CE. The Talmud is not a law code but a record of argument: rabbis disagreeing, questioning, telling stories, preserving minority opinions alongside majority ones. It became the portable homeland of a people without a fixed territory.

The academies themselves, known as the Geonic academies, operated for nearly five hundred years, from around 500 CE to 1038 CE. Their leaders, called Geonim, meaning either splendour or geniuses in Biblical Hebrew, were the recognised spiritual authorities of the worldwide Jewish community. Alongside them, the Exilarch, a secular leader whose lineage was traced to the royal house of Judah, held civil authority. Together they formed a system of Jewish self-governance inside successive empires: Sassanid Persian, and then, after the Muslim conquest of Persia in the seventh century, the Islamic caliphate.

In 638 CE, the Arab Islamic armies swept the Byzantines out of the Levant. The new Muslim rulers, beginning with the Caliph Umar, permitted Jews to re-enter Jerusalem after a lapse of five hundred years. Jewish tradition remembered Umar as a friend. The early Islamic world, for all its complexity, offered Jewish communities conditions considerably better than Byzantine rule, which had restricted synagogue building, banned Hebrew worship in some places, and attempted forced conversion. Under the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, Jewish thinkers engaged deeply with Arabic and Greek philosophy for the first time.

The highest flowering came in Spain. After Muslim armies crossed from North Africa in 711, the Iberian Peninsula became the site of what scholars have called the Golden Age of Jewish culture. Especially during the reign of the Cordoban caliph Abd al-Rahman the Third and his son in the tenth century, Jewish scholars, physicians, poets, and merchants flourished. The court physician and minister Hasdai ibn Shaprut was a patron of Jewish learning across the Mediterranean world. Figures such as the poet and philosopher Judah Halevi, the legal scholar Moses Maimonides, and the poet Solomon ibn Gabirol produced work that remains central to Jewish intellectual tradition. Córdoba became, as one historian put it, the meeting-place of Jewish scholars.

The Golden Age ended when a conservative North African dynasty called the Almohads invaded al-Andalus in the twelfth century. They were intensely intolerant of religious minorities. Jews faced conversion or exile. Maimonides himself fled south and east, eventually settling in Egypt. The communities that had thrived for three centuries were broken apart. The catastrophe that would end the Spanish Jewish world entirely was still three centuries away, but the fracture had begun.

In Christian Europe, the eleventh century brought disaster from a different direction. When Pope Urban the Second called for the First Crusade in 1095, some crusading armies decided before sailing east to attack the Jews living in their midst. The massacres began at Rouen in France and spread down the Rhine Valley into Germany. Jewish communities that had existed for centuries in the Rhine cities were annihilated. Many Jews chose death over forced baptism, a phenomenon that would recur in subsequent persecutions. A twelfth-century Jewish chronicle records that crusaders declared their intention to avenge the crucifixion before confronting what they called the Ishmaelites.

The massacres of the Crusades were followed by a long era of legal restriction, expulsion, and violence across Christian Europe. In 1290, Jews were expelled from England. In 1396, around a hundred thousand were expelled from France. In 1421, thousands were expelled from Austria. Jews who fled these expulsions found relative tolerance in Poland, where a Jewish community dating to the thirteenth century had grown into the largest in Europe, protected by royal charter and enjoying considerable autonomy for nearly four centuries.

The final act in Spain came in 1492. With the conquest of the last Muslim kingdom of Granada, the Catholic monarchs Queen Isabella the First and King Ferdinand the Second issued what became known as the Alhambra Decree, giving Spain's remaining Jews the choice between conversion and exile. An estimated hundred thousand converted, joining the large community of Conversos who had already converted after a massive pogrom in 1391. Around a hundred and seventy-five thousand left. Jews regarded this expulsion as the worst catastrophe between the destruction of Jerusalem and the Holocaust. The expelled communities scattered to the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, Italy, and Portugal, carrying with them the Ladino language and the memory of Sepharad, the Hebrew name for Spain.

The centuries after the expulsion from Spain saw Jewish communities consolidated into three broad ethnic groupings. The Ashkenazim had settled across Central and Eastern Europe. The Sephardim, descendants of the Spanish exiles, rebuilt in the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean. The Mizrahim had remained across the Middle East and North Africa. In the Ottoman Empire, Jewish communities enjoyed considerable prosperity. The city of Thessaloniki, in what is now Greece, became so densely settled by Spanish Jewish refugees that it functioned as the world's largest Jewish city for a time.

In Poland, the seventeenth century brought catastrophe. During the Khmelnytsky Uprising of 1648, Ukrainian Cossacks slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Polish and Lithuanian Jews. The Swedish wars that followed added to the devastation. The calm that had made Poland a refuge for European Jewry was shattered. Some Jews moved back westward, notably to Amsterdam, which had become a haven for Sephardic refugees from the Inquisition, and where the philosopher Baruch Spinoza would emerge from the community before being excommunicated by it.

The eighteenth century brought a new kind of challenge: the promise of equality. In Western Europe, the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, emerged as a movement pushing for emancipation from legal restrictions and integration into European society. Its leading figures, including the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn in Germany, argued that Jews could be citizens of their nations while remaining Jews. France became the first country to grant Jews full legal equality, during the Revolution of 1789. But the terms of that equality were revealing. A deputy named Clermont-Tonnerre stated the position plainly before the National Assembly: "We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals."

At the same time, a very different movement was spreading from the other direction. Hasidic Judaism, founded in eighteenth-century Eastern Europe by Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, rejected the rationalist emphasis of the Haskalah and offered instead an emotionally intense, mystical approach to faith. It preached the equality of the unlettered common person with the scholarly elite, celebrated joyful prayer and communal song, and spread rapidly through the Jewish communities of Poland and Ukraine. These two movements, the Haskalah and Hasidism, along with traditional Orthodox Judaism, formed the basis of the modern divisions within Jewish religious life.

In the nineteenth century, Jewish emancipation spread across Western Europe. Jews gained the right to own land, enter the civil service, and participate in political life. Jewish families such as the Rothschilds, whose banking dynasty Mayer Amschel Rothschild had founded in Germany in the 1760s, became symbols of Jewish financial success and, for antisemites, of Jewish power. Jewish scientists, lawyers, doctors, writers, and artists became prominent in European cultural life in proportions far exceeding their share of the population.

But in Eastern Europe, the picture was entirely different. In the Russian Empire's Pale of Settlement, the vast territory to which most Russian Jews were confined, the nineteenth century brought not emancipation but pogroms: organised massacres of Jewish communities, often carried out with the tacit approval of local authorities. The legal restrictions on Jewish life in Russia were severe. Jews could not freely choose where to live, what professions to enter, or how to educate their children.

The pogroms of the 1880s triggered two responses. The first was emigration on a massive scale. More than two million Jews left the Russian Empire and Galicia for the United States between 1881 and 1924, building new communities in New York, Chicago, and other American cities, largely free of the restrictions of Europe. The second response was a new political idea. If Europe would not accept Jews as equals, perhaps Jews needed a state of their own. In 1897, the journalist and playwright Theodor Herzl convened the first World Zionist Congress in Basel, officially founding the Zionist movement with the aim of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

After the First World War, the conditions seemed to shift. Britain had captured Palestine from the Ottoman Empire, and in 1917, in a letter to the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, the British Foreign Secretary issued the Balfour Declaration, promising a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. In 1920, Britain formally established the Mandate of Palestine. Jewish immigration to the region accelerated. The Arab population of Palestine grew increasingly hostile to the influx, and clashes between Jewish and Arab communities became frequent through the 1920s and 1930s. Jewish paramilitary organisations, including the Haganah and the Irgun, were formed to protect Jewish settlements.

In January 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. For German Jews, and then for Jews across Europe, what followed was a descent into a catastrophe without precedent. Racial laws stripped Jews of citizenship. Economic restrictions excluded them from professions. Violence escalated from state-sponsored humiliation to organised murder.

In 1939, Germany invaded Poland, where three million Jews were living, and the Second World War began. Two years later, following the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Nazi regime launched what it called the Final Solution: a systematic programme, organised on an industrial scale, aimed at the complete annihilation of the Jewish people. Mobile killing units followed the advancing armies into Soviet territory. Then came the death camps. At the Auschwitz camp complex in occupied Poland alone, approximately one million Jews were murdered in gas chambers. Across occupied Europe and North Africa, the machinery of genocide ran without pause.

When the war ended in 1945, the full scale of what had happened became clear. Approximately six million Jews had been murdered, around one third of all the Jews in the world. Entire communities that had existed for centuries in Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Greece were gone. The word chosen to name this event, the Holocaust, or in Hebrew the Shoah, meaning catastrophe or destruction, was inadequate to the reality it described. Nothing in Jewish history, not the destruction of the First Temple, not the expulsion from Spain, had produced death on this scale or with this deliberate intent.

Before and during the Holocaust, enormous numbers of Jews had made their way to Mandatory Palestine, often in defiance of British immigration restrictions. After the war, the Jewish resistance organisations in Palestine unified and launched a guerrilla campaign against both Arab paramilitaries and the British authorities. The British, exhausted and unable to manage the conflict, handed the question of Palestine's future to the United Nations.

On the twenty-ninth of November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem under international administration. The Jewish leadership accepted the plan. The Arab League and the Palestinian Arab leadership rejected it. Civil war broke out immediately.

On the fourteenth of May 1948, as the last British soldiers left, David Ben-Gurion, the chairman of the Jewish Agency, stood in Tel Aviv and declared the establishment of the State of Israel, a Jewish and democratic state in the Land of Israel. Within hours, the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and other neighbouring states invaded. The newly formed Israeli Defence Forces, drawing on fighters who had survived the Holocaust and years of guerrilla conflict, resisted the invasion.

The war ended in 1949 with Israel surviving, having extended its territory beyond the UN partition lines. The new state immediately began absorbing massive waves of Jewish immigrants: survivors from Europe's displaced persons camps, and hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled or fleeing from Arab countries across the Middle East and North Africa. Within its first years of existence, Israel more than doubled its Jewish population.

Since 1948, Israel has fought a series of major wars with its neighbours, including the Six-Day War of 1967, in which it captured the West Bank, Gaza, and the Sinai Peninsula, and the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a surprise attack that nearly broke the Israeli line before it was repelled. Diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, including the United States-brokered negotiations of the 1990s and beyond, have remained largely unresolved.

On the seventh of October 2023, fighters from Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups launched a large-scale attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing eleven hundred and thirty-nine people in a single day. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. More than two hundred and fifty hostages were taken. Israel responded with a military campaign in Gaza that displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians. The attack and its aftermath reopened questions about security, coexistence, and the future of the region that have defined the Middle East for more than a century.

Outside Israel, the largest Jewish community in the world is in the United States, built on the immigration waves of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Significant communities exist in France, Argentina, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Russia. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast, created during the Soviet period in Russia's far east, continues to exist as a recognised autonomous region, though its Jewish population today numbers only a few thousand.

In England and Wales, a Jewish community that has existed since the readmission of Jews under Oliver Cromwell in the seventeenth century numbered around two hundred and seventy thousand people at the last census in 2021. The community has grown in recent decades, driven in part by the higher birth rates of the Haredi, the strictly Orthodox, population.

The Jewish people are among the oldest continuously identifiable peoples on earth. Their story runs from the villages of Iron Age Canaan to the corridors of modern democracies, from the academies of Babylonia to the laboratories of twentieth-century Europe. Albert Einstein, who fled Nazi Germany and whose theory of relativity reshaped physics, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who transformed philosophy, are among the most celebrated of a community that has produced Nobel Prize winners in numbers far exceeding any proportional expectation.

What has held this people together across three thousand years of exile, persecution, dispersal, and reinvention is not a single thing but a combination: a body of text that travels anywhere its readers travel, a calendar of memory that re-enacts the defining moments of the past each year, and a question that each generation must answer for itself about what it means to be part of this particular human story.

The name Israel, given to a patriarch after a night of wrestling, means he who struggles with God. Every era of Jewish history has been a version of that struggle: with empires that sought to destroy or absorb, with modernity that promised equality and delivered genocide, with the question of whether a people defined by exile could build a state, and then what kind of state it should be. The wrestling has not stopped. That, perhaps, is the point. The name was always a description, not a destination.