Quiz: Judaism facts and Jewish religion trivia

A quiz is the most superficial type of 'test'. It's easy to grade, but doesn't catch nuance very well. This quiz suffers from that same problem. This means that in order to make a good score, and fill in the answers correctly, is partly a matter of knowing language nuance, and connecting those nuances with the facts you know.

The following are some of the underlying facts, behind the most controversial of the questions:

Sabbath: the day of worship for Jews, starts on Friday at sundown, and lasts through most of Saturday. So it's not merely Saturday as the quiz suggests. However, among the options given, Saturday is the best answer.

The most significant event in Jewish history would be the destruction of the temple for religious Jews, the foundation of the state of Israel for most Israelis, and the holocaust for most secular Jews. I went with the first, because the destruction of the temple is a historic landmark that went on to define Judaism.

Yom Kippur is the most important holiday in Judaism, in the way that Christmas is the most important holiday in Christianity. That is: looked at from the side of popular turnout, instead of religious significance. Specifically, Yom Kippur gets the most synagogue turn out in the US and the most PR but religiously it does not come close in significance to the three pilgrimage festivals in Judaism: Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot. Note that officially, in Christianity, Easter (which is the Christian form of Pesach) is also the most important festival.

In my quiz I went for the social reality of popularity, as would most Jews.

Where do most Jews live? Worldwide the highest number of Jews live in the Americas. According to a Jewish website there are about 13.3 million Jews worldwide (as of 2001), of which 4.95 million live in Israel and 6.8 million live in North America (mostly the US), 1.6 million live in Europe (Eastern and Western) and 0.6 million live in South America.

In Israel they form the majority, while everywhere else they are a minority.

http://www.simpletoremember.com/vitals/world-jewish-population.htm
[I got the numbers from that site, but they don't seem very good at addition, so I adapted some of them. If you care about the details of a few hundred thousand here or there, you'll have to go elsewhere. For the purpose of this quiz however, what matters is that it's clear that the US hosts the largest number of Jews in absolute numbers.]

The foundation of Judaism is a very difficult question to answer. It depends, in part, on how you define Judaism. Scholars on the topic consider there to be a difference between the Abrahamic Faith, and Judaism proper - the latter starting with the destruction of the the Temple in Israel. Before that destruction Judaism had a center like Islam has: rituals which depended on place, the temple of Jerusalem (comparable to Mecca for Muslims). After the last destruction of their temple, Judaism had to reinvent itself, and synagogues, Rabbis etc. developed.

However, the basis of Judaism in a people: born and converted Jews, did not change. Conversion did become less and less common as the centuries went by. Only since the second world war has conversion become an accepted practice again, among certain groups within Judaism. This is why none of the possible answers on what defines a Jew are valid for ALL of them.

The distinction between Abrahamic Faith and Judaism is not one that most Jews would accept, so in the quiz I went with the start of the Abrahamic Faith, which is based on the life of Abraham, who lived in Mesopotamia.

Belief in God. I think the question says it all, but this is the question I got most comments on. Most Jews believe in God, however, there are born Jews who become atheists. They are still Jews, because they have a Jewish mother and were brought up in the community, but they simply do not believe. I think most of them would consider themselves secular Jews, atheist Jews, or agnostic Jews.

I met one of them during the Judaism class I took in College. She was very clear: she was Jewish because that's just who she was. Born and raised. However, she did not believe in God. I don't know if she visited temple.

The traditional pattern is that a scholar turned atheist, who still did all the Jewish rituals, would continue to be considered Jew.