Diversity at the time of the Second Temple
At the time of the Second Temple, Jewish people were subject to several movements and trends regarding religion and regarding the Roman occupiers. We must keep in mind the centrality of the Jewish people’s worship at the Temple in Jerusalem at that time.

The Sadducees, Tzadikim in Hebrew, were a political and religious group living in Judea from the second century BC until the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD. Their origin is uncertain, but they were named after the great priest Zadok, who lived at the time of King David.
The Sadducees were considered representatives of the aristocracy, and close to political and spiritual power. Many of them had functions at the Sanhedrin (high court of justice) and were named Cohen gadol (high priests). However, they had little influence over the population.
The Sadducees were faithful to the Torah, but they were in conflict with the Pharisees about the Oral Law, that seemed different and less developed among Sadducees than among Pharisees. The Sadducees were known for their rigour and severity in the application of the law.
According to the historian Flavius Josephus (Jerusalem 37 AD – Rome 100 AD), the Sadducees, unlike the Pharisees, did not believe in the immortality of the soul and in the resurrection of the dead. Their influence vanished with the destruction of the Second Temple.

The Pharisees, Perushim (separated) in Hebrew, were an influential group on the spiritual level. Their roots could date back to the fifth century BC, but this datation is uncertain, like for the Sadducees. Their doctrine was based on the centrality of the Torah and the development of the Oral Law. They created main academies of study, like those of Hillel and Shammai, or those of the city of Yavne, a city that replaced Jerusalem as a centre of study and spiritual direction after the destruction of the Temple. The influence of the Pharisees was also important in the Diaspora, particularly in Babylonia.
The Pharisees were at the source of rabbinic Judaism, i.e. Judaism that survived the destruction of the Temple, when worship at the Temple and sacrifices were not possible any more. They founded the roots of the movement before the destruction of the Temple: institution of the synagogue, formulation of the prayer of the Amidah at the heart of the Jewish liturgy, requirement of the daily study of texts, development of the Oral Law to find answers to the main issues encountered by Jews.
Current Biblical studies show that the opposition between Jesus and the Pharisees was probably not as acute as described in the Gospels: the interpretation of texts about Jesus was close to the interpretation made by the Pharisees.

The Essenes, Isiyim in Hebrew, lived between the second century BC and the first century AD as a semi-monastic sect, whose main settlements were located on the west bank of the Dead Sea. Their organisation was hierarchical, with an admission that was subject to a probationary period of three years, and a teaching that had to remain secret. Only men were allowed, and they were imposed chastity, a contradiction with the principles of Judaism. The Essenes attached great importance to ritual purity and wore white clothes. Community life was the norm, income and clothing were shared, and meals were eaten in common.

Like other Jews, the Essenes attached great importance to the study and interpretation of the Torah, but they had their own writings. They are credited with the writing of the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947. No trace of the Essenes was left after the destruction of the Temple, and no other Jewish monastic tradition survived them.

The Zealots, Qannaim (jealous, exalted) in Hebrew, were a group of armed opponents to the Roman occupation. They were closer to the strict school of Shammai than to the more open school of Hillel. They differed from the Pharisees because they refused any contact with the Gentiles and they violently fought both against the Romans and against the Jews compromising with the occupiers. From their view, to get rid from the oppressors would hasten the arrival of a Messianic time. The Romans called them sicarii (assassins), because they fought with a knife named sica. They were known for the resistance they opposed to the site of Metsada (Masada), where they chose to commit mass suicide rather than surrender.

Ethnic diversity
Ethnic diversity came from centuries of exile experienced by the Jewish people. The two main components were the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim, with different minhag (customs) depending on the various communities, as well as different customs within the Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities. The liturgical songs, the pronunciation of Hebrew, the clothing habits, the menus for days of celebration were influenced by the environment they lived in. But there were many intellectual exchanges and mutual influences between the two communities, which helped to maintain the unity of Judaism.

The Ashkenazim:
In the Torah, Ashkenaz is the name of a son Gomer, son of Japheth, son of Noah. By analogy between Germania and Gomer, Achkenaz became the name given to German-speaking countries, a region where many Jewish communities lived in the Middle Ages, especially in the Rhine Valley. By extension, the Ashkenazim were the Jews living before the Crusades in different places: northern France, England, Flanders, the Rhineland, Switzerland and northern Italy. The repeated expulsions in England (1290) and France (1306 and 1394) sent the Jews to the Holy Roman Empire, and then to Poland.
There has been some controversy among historians to know whether part of the Khazar community, a semi-nomadic Turkic people, was actually converted to Judaism in the ninth century, and whether this conversion influenced the creation of the Ashkenazi population.
The many persecutions in the history of Europe led to a greater mobility of Jews. The main communities managed to stay in Eastern Europe: Poland, Lithuania, Romania, Hungary and Ukraine. These Jews kept Yiddish as a vernacular and literary language. Written in Hebrew characters, Yiddish was a medieval High German language inherited from Rhenish communities, with some input from Hebrew and from Slavic languages. Unlike other communities, Jewish communities from Alsace and the Rhine Valley never moved away.
Although the Ashkenazi community was the most affected by the Holocaust, the Ashkenazim now form the majority of the Jewish population in the world, including in the United States, in England and in Israel.

The Sephardim:
The name “Sepharad” is mentioned only once in the Bible as a place of exile (Ovadia 20). The place of the Biblical Sepharad was first disputed – Persia or Hispania - before referring to Spain until the present times. The Sephardim were thus both Spanish people and Jews who were descendants of Jews expelled from Spain (in 1492) and Portugal (in 1496). After living in the Iberian Peninsula for centuries, Jews moved throughout the Mediterranean basin: the Ottoman Empire, Greece, the Balkans, the Maghreb, Egypt, Palestine, as well as the Netherlands, Hamburg, England, Bordeaux, Bayonne and the New World. Those who moved to Mediterranean countries spoke Judezmo, a Castilian language from the fifteenth century laced with Hebrew. And they went on using this language while in exile until the twentieth century. By extension, Jews from all Mediterranean countries were called Sephardic, despite many cultural differences. The Sephardim included Jews from North Africa speaking an Arab or Berber language, Jews from Languedoc expelled in the fourteenth century, Jews from Provence expelled in the sixteenth century, and Jews from Orient: Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Egypt.
A numerous Sephardic population lived in Greece and in Bosnia before the Holocaust. Then Jews fled from Arab countries after the decolonization of the Maghreb. Nowadays countries with the largest Sephardic population are Israel (1.4 million) and France (0.3 to 0.4 million).

Other communities have developed outside these two main branches.
In Europe, Jews from Italy have a specific story. As descendants of Jews living in Rome and the peninsula since ancient times, they welcomed persecuted Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews while keeping their own customs.
In Africa, the Ethiopian Jews, also referred to as Falasha (exiles), an Amharic pejorative term, named themselves Beta Israel (House of Israel). Their Bible corresponded to the Christian Canon, so they only celebrated the Jewish holidays mentioned there and not those from post-Biblical times. They did not know the Oral Law.
The Beta Israel tought they were the descendants from Menelik, the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. It is likely that some of their ancestors were Jews or were descendants of converted Christians, with Ethiopian Christian practices being quite similar from Jewish practices.
The Ethiopian Jews adopted rabbinic Judaism since the eleventh century. The majority of them now live in Israel.
Other African ethnic groups claim a Jewish ancestry: the Lemba from southern Africa, the Igbo from Nigeria and the Dan or Yacouba from the Ivory Coast. Some of their customs differ from the customs of their neighbours, and are close to Jewish religious practices.
In Asia, the Jews from India are grouped mainly in Bombay, Calcutta and Cochin, and are divided into three groups: the Bene Israel (Children of Israel), the Baghdadi, who are the descendants of Jews from Iraq, and the black Jews from Cochin.
The Jews from Central Asia, also known as Bukharan Jews, in Uzbekistan, were probably the descendants of the Jews from the first Babylonian exile who settled on the eastern side of the Empire of Cyrus.
The few Jews from China were gathered in the city of Kaifeng. While being integrated into the local population, they retained Jewish rituals such as reading the Torah. They nearly disappeared in the early twentieth century, but nowadays some families seek to reconnect with Judaism.
Other communities developed much later, at the end of the nineteenth century, in Shanghai, with Bagdadi Jews joined by European refugees in the 1930s, and in Harbin, with Russian Jews fleeing pogroms in the early twentieth century. These communities emigrated to other countries at the beginning of the Maoist era.

Diversity since the Emancipation
Since the late eighteenth century, two events had main repercussions on the Jewish world: the Haskalah and Emancipation.

• The Haskalah (education or culture in Hebrew), also called the Jewish Enlightenment, was founded in Germany in the eighteenth century under Moses Mendelssohn’s leadership. Then the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism) was developed in 1819 in Berlin to study Judaism with the help of “modern” research in literature, linguistics, philosophy or economics. Modern Jewish movements were also founded in Germany in the nineteenth century.
• Emancipation was initiated in France in 1791 by granting full citizenship to Jews in Europe, and spread in Europe throughout the nineteenth century. Jews were no longer different from their fellow citizens, except for their religious practices, abandoned or revised by some of them to follow their personal aspirations and not be defined solely by their belonging to a religious community.

These two events brought different religious approaches with them as well as a detachment from religious practices in favour of a cultural attachment to Judaism.

The Orthodox Jews:
Orthodox Judaism considers itself as both the heir of the tradition before the Emancipation and the expression of timeless Judaism, independent from surrounding historical and political circumstances. Judaism believes that “the law of the State is law” (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Baba Kamma, chapter 10, page 113a), meaning that it does not fundamentally contradicts the Jewish law, which allows the integration of Jews in democratic countries where human rights are respected. This is not in contradiction with Orthodox Jews wishing to maintain a traditional way of life based on the values of Judaism. Their choice of clothing, for example, expresses their wish not to be integrated to the point of being alike the national population, despite their political and economic integration.

The ultra-Orthodox Jews:
The ultra-Orthodox Judaism, or Haredi (fearing God), truly distrusts modernity, supposedly diverting Jews from the Torah, its study and its strict implementation. Haredim want to maintain a traditional way of life, do not seek their integration into society and often live in separate neighbourhoods, including in Israel. There is no uniformity in the ultra-Orthodox world. Originally founded in Eastern Europe - Lithuania and Ukraine -, the different rabbinical schools each have their disciples, who are attached to the peculiarities of these schools. The Hasidim (Pious) emphasise communion with God through joy, singing and dancing. Among the Hasidim, the Lubavitch (named after the village of Lioubavitci, Russia) believe in the return of Jews to religious practices. In contrast, the Misnagdim (Opponents) insist on the need to study in a yeshiva (religious school) and are wary of any sign of mystical exaltation. Both movements have influenced each other. Their main common point is their devotion to their rabbi or to the head of their yeshiva.

The liberal Jews:
Liberal Judaism, also called progressive Judaism, was born in Germany in the early nineteenth century. Inspired by “modern” research around the Wissenschaft des Judentums, liberal Judaism has sought to adapt Judaism to the modern world so that Jews could fully integrate into society. In the early times of the movement, there were some excesses, such as moving the Sabbath on Sunday or abandoning the dietary laws of kashrut. Liberal Judaism has since developed a truly independent thinking within Judaism. It believes in equality of men and women for religious functions, recognizes the transmission of Judaism by the father - and not only by the mother - as part of the family Jewish education, and is more interested in the spirit of the Biblical or Talmudic text than in taking the texts literally. Liberal Jews have large communities in the United States and in Great Britain, and much smaller communities in France and Israel, with members who do not identify with the Orthodox religious coercion but do not consider themselves hilonim (secular).

The neo-Orthodox Jews:
As a response to the development of liberal Judaism in Germany, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (Hamburg 1808 - Frankfurt am Main 1888) founded the Neo-Orthodoxy and advocated the Torah im Derech Eretz - the Torah respecting the commandments and the Jewish law, and applied to the local professional and cultural way of life, i.e. be Jewish at home and be a citizen in the outside world. The Anglo-Saxons call it a “modern orthodox” movement to express their choice not to give up modernity and openness to the surrounding society while maintaining a lifestyle respecting Jewish laws and religious practices.

The “conservative” Jews:
The “conservative” Jewish movement - also called the Masorti movement, from the Hebrew word masorti (traditionalist) - was founded by Rabbi Zacharias Frankel (Prague 1801 - Breslau 1875). This rabbi defended a “positivist historical” approach to Judaism, less rigid than orthodoxy but more in line with the tradition that the reformist movement. Its purpose was to adapt the Jewish law to modernity in a dynamic vision, and to take into account the scientific discoveries about Jewish history and Jewish texts. Most “conservative” Jewish communities have now given to women the same rights than men in worship. This movement has largely developed in the United States, hence the common use of the English term "conservative”, because it corresponded to the needs of the many Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who had abandoned orthodoxy without abandoning Jewish practices. The “conservative” movement has been a minority in other countries.

Many Jews are not attached to any of these movements. They consider themselves merely as traditionalists respecting one or more Jewish practices - kosher, celebration of festivals, endogamous marriage - without trying to fit into a particular movement.

The secular Jews:
With roots in Jewish culture and Jewish history, secular Judaism claims a cultural heritage detached from religious practices. Thus the Jewish secular groups of study want to study texts of the Torah and even the Talmud without considering them under the angle of a revealed text or a religious obligation. Secular Judaism focuses more on the universal character of Jewish values ​​than on their particularism, and sees in these values the expression of a civilization that has adapted itself to historical circumstances. In Eastern Europe, some secular movements such as the Bund, a Jewish socialist union, considered Jews as citizens of their respective nations, and defended the use of Yiddish as the national language of Jews. Other secular movements, considering assimilation as a dead end in front of the rise of anti-Semitism, focused on Zionism. The Zionist movement of kibbutzim, for example, fathered a non-religious Jewish culture.

The Zionists [See Judaism module I section 5.]:
The Zionists do not form a specific movement, but are found in all the different movements in Judaism. The desire to return to Zion – Zion being another term for Jerusalem, from the name of one of its hills - was constant during the exile of the Jewish people. The genesis of the Zionist movement was the movement of the Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion), founded in Russia in the late nineteenth century in response to anti-Jewish riots. At the First Zionist Congress held in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland, the Zionist movement was founded by Theodor Herzl as a national liberation movement of the Jewish people, largely inspired by the rise of nationalisms in Central Europe in the nineteenth century. Theodor Herzl (Pest 1860 - Edlach 1904) was a journalist concerned with the growing anti-Semitism in France at the time of the Dreyfus affair. He was the author of Judenstaat (The Jewish State).
Zionism was more popular among the persecuted Jews coming from Eastern Europe than among the well integrated Jews living in Western Europe or in the United States. The latter considered this movement with some suspicion before the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. Zionists were very different: they could be religious or secular (those who structured and founded a new State were often in conflict with orthodoxy and religious practices); they could be rightist or leftist (like the founders of the State of Israel); they could support or reject territorial compromise. But all of them recognized the need for a State that would be a haven for the Jewish people and that could provide a new boom to Jewish culture.

Anyone who was born a Jew is recognized as such, regardless of religious practices or not. For example Orthodox Jews lament the non-compliance of the commandments by secular Jews, or assume that liberal Jews practice a “light” Judaism. Nevertheless, the different movements regularly discuss with one another, and all of them believe in a common destiny.