ABSTRACT
The history of the Jews, or as they were known in ancient times, the Hebrews, began almost 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. The Jewish diaspora that had begun with the Babylonian Captivity forced the Jews to deal with a much broader complexity of rulers and peoples than they had heretofore encountered. The concept of a Jewish Messiah evolved after the Babylonian Captivity and initially centered on belief in a strong spiritual figure that would rid Israel of its foreign rulers and restore the Kingdom of David. Jewish uprisings and massacres of Christians frequently occurred in the Middle East in the fourth and fifth centuries. As the Protestant Reformation spread to other parts of Europe, opponents of the Protestant dissidents accused them of being Judaizers, a term that harks back to the early Christian church and implies pro-Jewish religious sentiment. The Middle Ages, a period of growing anti-Jewish prejudice in Europe, followed the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
