The movement's rabbinic authorities and its official Torah commentary ( Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary ) affirm that Jews should make use of modern critical literary and historical analysis to understand how the Bible developed.

Antisemitism has been described as primarily hatred against Jews as a race with its modern expression rooted in 19th century racial theories, while anti-Judaism is described as hostility to Jewish religion, but in Western Christianity it effectively merged into antisemitism during the 12th century.

Given the great historical link between Persian and Jewish history, modern day Persian Jews are called " Esther's Children ".

* Debra Spark's 2009 Novel, Good for the Jews is a modern day retelling of Esther set in Madison, Wisconsin.

In earlier days, when Jews had a functioning court system ( the beth din and the Sanhedrin high court ), courts were empowered to administer physical punishments for various violations, upon conviction by far stricter standards of evidence than are acceptable in courts in modern democracies: execution, corporal punishment, incarceration, excommunication.

Reform Judaism and Reconstructionist Judaism both hold that modern views of how the Torah and rabbinic law developed imply that the body of rabbinic Jewish law is no longer normative ( seen as binding ) on Jews today.

Jews who hold by this view generally try to use modern methods of historical study to learn how Jewish law has changed over time, and are in some cases more willing to change Jewish law in the present.

Some modern commentators see this period as a civil war between hellenized and orthodox Jews.

Though by this time opposition to images was strongly entrenched in Judaism and Islam, attribution of the impetus toward an iconoclastic movement in Eastern Orthodoxy to Muslims or Jews " seems to have been highly exaggerated, both by contemporaries and by modern scholars ".

During this time, Jews have experienced slavery, anarchic and theocratic self-government, conquest, occupation, and exile ; in the Diasporas, they have been in contact with and have been influenced by ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, and Hellenic cultures, as well as modern movements such as the Enlightenment ( see Haskalah ) and the rise of nationalism, which would bear fruit in the form of a Jewish state in the Levant.

The Jews of Jesus ' day expected Elijah to come before the Messiah ; indeed, some modern Jews continue to await Elijah's coming as well, as in the Cup of Elijah the Prophet in the Passover Seder.

Jewish holidays, observed by Jews throughout the year, have three principal sources: Biblical mitzvot ( commandments ), rabbinical mandate, and modern Israeli history.

On the DVD audio commentary, they contend that the film is heretical because it lampoons the practices of modern organised religion, but that it does not blasphemously lampoon the God that Christians and Jews worship.

During medieval and modern times, Macedonia has been known as a Balkan region inhabited by ethnic Greeks, Albanians, Vlachs, Serbs, Bulgarians, Jews, and Turks.

Kaplan's theology held that in light of the advances in philosophy, science, and history, it would be impossible for modern Jews to continue to adhere to many of Judaism's traditional theological claims.

The modern Portuguese nation is a very old amalgam of formerly distinct historical populations that passed through and settled in the territory of modern Portugal: native Iberian peoples, Celts, ancient Mediterraneans ( Greeks, Phoenicians, Romans, Jews ), invading Germanic peoples like the Suebi and the Visigoths, and Muslim Arabs and Berbers.

It was the modern ' progressive ' Jews who first applied this name to ' old ', ' backward ' Jews as a derogatory term.

" While insisting on strict adherence to Jewish beliefs and practices, he held that Jews should attempt to engage and influence the modern world, and encouraged those secular studies compatible with Torah thought.

Karaite Jews and Samaritans use different versions of the Jewish calendar, which are often out of sync with the modern Jewish calendar by one or two days.

Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan believed that, in light of advances in philosophy, science and history, it would be impossible for modern Jews to continue to adhere to many of Judaism's traditional theological claims.

By contrast, in modern discourse, the term supersessionism arises as a criticism of a ( perceived ) Christian belief in Jewish exclusion, not as a Christian articulation of their own understanding of the relation between the Christians and Jews.

Most modern Sifrei Torah are written with forty-two lines of text per column ( Yemenite Jews use fifty ), and very strict rules about the position and appearance of the Hebrew letters are observed.

Some immigrated to France, where they formed a large Jewish community, that outnumbered Jews in the United States, but relatively small compared to European Jews.

The result was a great schism among the Jews of Spain and southern France, and a new impulse was given to the study of philosophy by the unauthorized interference of the Spanish rabbis.

On the expulsion of the Jews from France by Philip IV in 1306, Abba Mari settled at Perpignan, where he published the letters connected with the controversy.

The expulsion of the Jews from France by Philip IV (" the Fair "), in, caused the Jews of Montpellier to take refuge, partly in Provence, partly in Perpignan and partly in Majorca.

Numerous Polish Jews emigrated to France, Germany and America, founding Jewish communities in places where they had been expelled from during the Middle Ages.

In 1529, the city embraced Lutheranism, and Hamburg subsequently received Protestant refugees from the Netherlands and France and, in the 17th century, Sephardi Jews from Portugal.

* 1269 – King Louis IX of France orders all Jews found in public without an identifying yellow badge to be fined ten livres of silver.

* 1942 – Holocaust: Vel'd ' Hiv Roundup ( Rafle du Vel'd ' Hiv ): the government of Vichy France orders the mass arrest of 13, 152 Jews who are held at the Winter Velodrome in Paris before deportation to Auschwitz.

In October 1940, Gauleiters Josef Bürckel and Robert Wagner oversaw the almost total expulsion of the Jews into unoccupied France not only from the parts of Alsace-Lorraine that had been annexed that summer to the Reich, but also from their Gaues as while.

Despite the often fierce rivalry with the SS, the Foreign Office played a key role in arranging the deportations of Jews to the death camps from France ( 1942 – 44 ), Hungary ( 1944 – 45 ), Slovakia, Italy ( after 1943 ), and the Balkans.

In addition to Louis ' legislation against Jews and usury, he expanded the scope of the Inquisition in France.

In addition, Jews from as far as France, Austria and Germany were brought to Kaunas during the course of Nazi occupation and executed in the Ninth Fort. On 1943 the Germans operated special Jewish squads to open the massgraves and burn the remaining corpses.

The history of Potsdamer Platz can probably be traced back to 29 October 1685, when the Tolerance Edict of Potsdam was signed, whereby Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg-Prussia from 1640 to 1688, allowed large numbers of religious refugees, including Jews from Austria and Huguenots expelled from France, to settle on his territory.

It also bordered on the area inhabited by the Sephardim, or Spanish Jews, which ranged into Southern France.

After almost two millennia of existence of the Jewish diaspora without a national state, the Zionist movement was founded in the late 19th century by secular Jews, largely as a response by Ashkenazi Jews to rising antisemitism in Europe, exemplified by the Dreyfus affair in France and the Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire.

< imagemap > File: 1940s decade montage. png | Above title bar: events during World War II ( 1939 – 1945 ): From left to right: Troops in an LCVP landing craft approaching " Omaha " Beach on " D-Day "; Adolf Hitler visits Paris, soon after the Battle of France ; The Holocaust occurred during the war as Nazi Germany carried out a programme of systematic state-sponsored genocide, during which approximately six million European Jews were killed ; The Japanese attack on the American naval base of Pearl Harbor launches the United States into the war ; An Observer Corps spotter scans the skies of London during the Battle of Britain ; The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the first uses of nuclear weapons, killing over a quarter million people and leading to the Japanese surrender ; Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signs the Instrument of Surrender on behalf of the Japanese Government, on board USS Missouri, effectively ending the war.

** Holocaust: By order of the Vichy France government headed by Pierre Laval, French police officers round-up 13, 000 – 20, 000 Jews and imprison them in the Winter Velodrome.

* Jews are allowed to return to France and England.

* September 17 – King Charles VI of France orders the expulsion of all Jews from France.

Significant political developments in Europe included the lack of a Holy Roman Emperor for most of the decade, further erosion of the power of the monarchy in England and Portugal, the end of the failed Seventh Crusade in Egypt, and the expulsion of the Jews from France and the Moors from Portugal.

* 1254 – King Louis IX of France expels all Jews from France.