Judaism, religious culture of the Jews (also known as the people Israel); one of the world's oldest continuing religious traditions.
The terms Judaism and religion do not exist in premodern Hebrew. The Jews Spoke of Torah, God's revealed instruction to Israel, which mandated both a world view and a way of life (Halakah); the “way” by which to walk—Jewish law, custom, and practice. Premodern Judaism, in all its historical forms, thus constituted (and traditional Judaism today constitutes) an integrated cultural system encompassing the totality of individual and communal existence. It is a system of sanctification in which all is to be subsumed under God's rule, that is, under divinely revealed models of cosmic order and lawfulness. Christianity originated as one among several competing Jewish ideologies in 1st-century Palestine, and Islam drew in part on Jewish sources at the outset. Because most Jews, from the 7th century on, have lived in the cultural ambit of either Christianity or Islam, these religions have had an impact on the subsequent history of Judaism.
Judaism originated in the land of Israel (also known as Palestine) in the Middle East. Subsequently, Jewish communities have existed at one time or another in almost all parts of the world, a result of both voluntary migrations of Jews and forced exile or expulsions. In the late 1980s the total world Jewish population was some 13 million, of whom about 5.7 million lived in the U.S., more than 3.6 million in Israel, and more than 1.4 million in the Soviet Union, the three largest centers of Jewish settlement. About 1.2 million Jews lived in the rest of Europe, most of them in France and Great Britain. About 310,000 lived in the rest of North America, and 33,000 in the rest of Asia. Nearly 440,000 Jews lived in Central and South America, and about 142,000 in Africa.

Basic Doctrines and Sources
As a rich and complex religious tradition, Judaism has never been monolithic. Its various historical forms nonetheless have shared certain characteristic features. The most essential of these is a radical monotheism, that is, the belief that a single, transcendent God created the universe and continues providentially to govern it. Under girding this monotheism is the teleological conviction that the world is both intelligible and purposive, because a single divine intelligence stands behind it. Nothing that humanity experiences is capricious; everything ultimately has meaning.