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Judaism
In the Old Testament, Jews are the names of the members of the tribe or the inhabitants of the southern kingdom of Judah. After the Babylonian captivity, Jews was initially the designation for the members of the entire people of Israel, in the later Diaspora also a Jewish self-designation. Since that time, religious and ethnic references have been linked in the term "Jew".
According to rabbinic tradition, a Jew is someone who is descended from a Jewish mother or who has converted to Judaism. This connection between nationality and religion is no longer undisputed. Today`s liberal currents of Jewish thought define Judaism solely as the religious community of those who confess the one God Yahweh, who are committed to the Jewish religious law. The representatives of conservative-orthodox Judaism, which dominates in Israel, cling to the traditional unity of Jewish nationality and religion.
