Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Where does the word "Jew" come from?

ORIGINS: Why Are Jews Called Jews? The word 'Jew' originates with the ancient Israelite kingdom of Judah, but what its name means is a matter of great controversy. It could even mean 'Thank God' (Elon Gilad, Haaretz). No one actually knows where the name of the Iron Age II Kingdom of Judah came from or what exactly the word originally meant, but this article discusses some of the possibilities. Then it proceeds to the history of the development of the word, which is the source of the word "Jew." Excerpt:
However Judah got its name, it didn’t last long. In 586 BCE, the kingdom was overrun and destroyed by the Babylonian Empire and the Israelite elites were exiled to Babylon.

In 538 BCE, Cyrus the Great decreed that the Israelite exiles could return to their land, which was restructured as a semi-autonomous Persian province named Yahud.

For the next 700 years, Jerusalem and its environs maintained some version of this name as the land passed from ruler to ruler. This ended when the Bar Kochba revolt was crushed in 135 CE. The Romans threw out the Jews and renamed the region Syria-Palestine.

But while the region was no longer designated by the Latin name IVDÆA, the ethno-religious group that traced its origins to it spread throughout the Roman Empire, and received an appellation designating them as people from there -  iūdaeus. This Latin word came from the equivalent Greek word ioudaios, which in turn came from the Aramaic yehudai, which in turn came from the Hebrew yehudi - Judean.

But what does all this have to do with the English word “Jew”?