REL 2225 - The Jews: Iron Age to Facebook

Credits: 4
This course surveys the history of Judaism’s practitioners, the Jews, as they lived their religion in a variety of circumstances and locales from very ancient times to the present. The Jews as a religious and ethnic minority are one of humanity’s enigmas. Instrumental to the births of Christianity and Islam, their endurance has posed historic doctrinal and social challenges to the beliefs of others. As a dispersed minority Jews are a reminder that tolerance and human rights are critical to social order and progress. The course examines the origins from which the Hebrews/Israelites/Jews grew from a distinct Middle Eastern people into a religious, political, and cultural community spread throughout the world. Wider dispersion and adaptation to cultures and civilizations in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas are covered down through the modern period of the nation-state, emancipation, Holocaust, and the re-emergence, after 2,000 years, of a Jewish state in today’s Middle East.

McDaniel Plan: International