Talk:Jew

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Ive been asked a question called who is a jew. i needhelp here

— This unsigned comment was added by 81.76.87.180 (talk • changes).

You can get all kinds of different answers. But in my opinion, the best one is to look at where the name started out first.

It started out with a man named Judah. (Yehuda). This man is in the Bible, he was one of the twelve sons of Jacob, also known as Israel, who started the twelve tribes of the Israelites. So this man Judah's children and grandchildren started the original Tribe of Judah.

This grew to be one of the most important tribes, because the capital of Jerusalem was in their territory, and later it had its own kings, while other tribes of Israel to the north had a different king. When the Assyrians came in, they took away the other ten tribes and they never came back, leaving only the Kingdom of Judah, which also included another tribe, Benjamin. They were known as "Jews". They were taken away by the Babylonians, but many of them did come back. The Romans called the area Judea, but later sent them out of the country again and changed the name to Palestine.

The Hebrews or Israelites had always allowed other people to convert to their religion, even if they were not related to them by blood. After the Romans scattered the Jews in many different countries, they continued to get more people who converted to their religion. So a lot of people today are called "Jews", in some cases because they follow the Jewish religion, in some cases because they are from a Jewish family, and in many cases, for both reasons. Blockinblox 14:49, 19 March 2006 (UTC)