What is the difference in Israelites and Judaism?

Answer 1

Judah was the small, southern Hebrew kingdom centred on the city of Jerusalem. Israel was the much larger and more prosperous, northern Hebrew kingdom with Samaria as its capital.

Throughout much of their history, both kingdoms were frequently overrun and were often required to pay tribute to be allowed to continue to exist as dependencies of their more powerful neighbours. Samaria was finally conquered by the Assyrians in 722 BCE, after which the nation of Israel ceased to exist. Judah was less important economically and strategically, but Jerusalem was finally overrun by the Babylonians in 586BCE, and the population taken captive. The Judahites were allowed to return after the Persian conquest of Babylon.

Answer 2

'Israelite' is the term used to describe Jews, prior to our getting the Torah at Mount Sinai.

Today there are no 'israelites', apart from a few highly bizarre Christian evangelical sects.

Israeli = nationality of anyone of ANY faith who is born in Israel


Judaism = religion.

Jews are members of the Jewish family and Judaism.

Answer 3

The Israelites are the people who came to Canaan with Moses and Joshua, according to religious texts. They were, apart from the Levites, who were Egyptians, Semitic people from the Coastal Arabian plain, where they had worshipped a Volcano God called Jahweh until Moses converted them to his religion which was derived from the Egyptian Atenism, formulated in the Reign of Aknaten. (Source, various, especially Sigmund Freud). The Israelites set up their main location at Shechem, now called Nablus, in the West Bank, where they still mostly remain: there are only about 700 or so, and they are Palestinian Citizens. (See Samaritan version of entry for Samaritans in Wikipedia)

The Jews are a breakaway group, who left because of disagreements over whether the Torah could be added to and developed. They left and set up a new capital at Shilo, later moving it to Jerusalem. The land that they occupied became called Judea, and it broke away from the mini empire of Israel to the North.

The Jews hated and detested the Israelites, and called them the people of the rule, or Samaritans, and the land in which the Samaritans lived became called Samaria (not the other way round). Obsessed by racial purity, the Jews accused the Israelites of intermarrying with the various local populations, such as Hittites and Babylonians, and as the Christian Bible tells us, they would not cross the road to help a Samaritan, hating them worse than all other peoples.

The Israelites represent the ten lost tribes of the Jews, since only two broke away.

Today, Jews try to minimise the importance of Samaritans by claiming that they are a breakaway sect of Judaism, based solely on an analysis of the age of documents. (See Wikipedia entry for Samaritans, Jewish version). However, this ignores the split and development of the religion. The Jews use the Talmud, whilst the Israelites - Samaritans - do not.

Answer 4

Jews today use the term Israelite and Children of Israel to refer to themselves. In The Bible, the terms Hebrew and Children of Israel are commonly used for the descendants of Jacob (known as Israel later in life) all the way up until the Babylonian Exile. After that time, the term Jews comes to dominate (the book of Esther, set during the Babylonian Exile, marks the transition. Before the Exile, the term Jews (or more accurately, Yehudi) refers specifically to members of the tribe of Judah. After the Exile, the term refers to any Jew, regardless of former tribal affiliation. For example, in the book of Esther, it says that Mordechai, Esther's uncle, was a Jew, while it also identifies him as a member of the tribe of Benjamin. Today's Jewish community can trace its development back to the Jews of biblical times.