2. Historical origin of the first spread of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – For teachers

The spread of the three great monotheistic religions occurred through different motivations and methods.

Jewish diaspora: scientific denomination and meaning

 The expression "Jewish diaspora" (cfr. P. 1), refers to the dispersion of Jews among the Gentiles after the Babylonian Exil; or the aggregate of Jewish communities scattered “in exile” outside Palestine or present-day Israel. Although the term refers to the physical dispersal of Jews throughout the world, it also carries religious, philosophical, political, and eschatological connotations, inasmuch as the Jews perceive a special relationship between the land of Israel and themselves. Interpretations of this relationship range from the messianic hope of traditional Judaism for the eventual “ingathering of the exiles” to the view of Reform Judaism that the dispersal of  Jews was providentially arranged by God to foster pure monotheism throughout the world.
The first significant Jewish Diaspora was the result of the Babylonian Exile of 586 BC. After the Babylonians conquered the Kingdom of Judah part of the Jewish population was deported into slavery.
The most significant cultural and creative Jewish diaspora in early Jewish history flourished in Alexandria where in the 1st century BC 40 percent of the population was Jewish. Around the 1st century AD an estimated 5,000,000 Jews lived outside Palestine, about four-fifths of them within the Roman Empire but they looked to Palestine as the center of their religious and cultural life. Diaspora Jews thus far outnumbered the Jews in Palestine even before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. Thereafter the chief centres of Judaism shifted from country to country (Babylonia, Persia, Spain, France, Germany, Poland, Russia, and the United States), and Jewish communities gradually adopted distinctive languages, rituals and cultures, some submerging themselves in non-Jewish environments more completely than others. While some lived in peac, others became victims of violent anti-Semitism.
Jews hold widely divergent views about the role of Diaspora, desirability and significance of maintaining a national identity. While the vast majority of Orthodox Jews support the Zionist movement (the return of Jews to Israel), some Orthodox Jews go so far as to oppose the modern nation of Israel as a godless and secular state, defying God’s will to send his Messiah at the time he has preordained.
According to the theory of shelilat ha-galut (“denial of the exile”), espoused by many Israelis, Jewish life and culture are doomed in the Diaspora because of assimilation and acculturation, only those Jews who migrate to Israel have hope for continued existence as Jews. It should be noted that neither this position nor any other favourable to Israel holds that Israel is the fulfillment of the biblical prophecy regarding the coming of the messianic era.

Spread of early Christianity

The first part of the Christian history, during the lifetimes of the Twelve Apostles, is called the Apostolic Age. Early Christianity spread from city to city in the Hellenized Roman Empire and beyond into East Africa and South Asia. Apostles traveled extensively, establishing communities in major cities and regions throughout the Empire. The original church communities were founded by apostles and numerous other Christian soldiers, merchants, and preachers in northern Africa, Asia Minor, Armenia, Arabia, Greece, and other places. By the end of the 1st century, Christianity had already spread to Greece and Italy, some say as far as India, serving as foundations for the expansive spread of Christianity throughout the world.
For example, thanks to  apostolic preaching,during the first century after Christ  two eastern churches not very well known in the West  were born : the first is the church of Alexandria, according to historical sources handed down by Eusebius of Caesarea (260/265 – 339/340 AD a Roman historian of Greek descent), the church was founded by the apostle Mark. The second is Indian Malabar church, called the Church of St. Thomas. Indian Christianity connects his birth to the preaching of the Apostle Thomas arriving in the mid-first century in Malabar, where he preached until his martyrdom.
The developments during the second and third centuries were "multidirectional and not easily mapped". All the early Christian communities were minority, often persecuted. Yesterday like today. Persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire occurred intermittently over a period of about three centuries until the 313 Edict of Milan issued by Emperors Constantine the Great and “Religio Licita” when Christianity was legalized. Christians were persecuted by local authorities on a sporadic and ad-hoc basis, often more according to the whims of the local community than to the opinion of imperial authority.
This persecution heavily influenced the development of Christianity, shaping Christian theology and the structure of the Church. Among other things, persecution gave rise to many saint cults and may have contributed to the rapid spread of Christianity, sparking written explanations and defenses of the Christian religion.
Muslim Conquest
According to traditional accounts, Muslim conquests also referred to as the Islamic conquests or Arab conquests, began with the Islamic prophet Muhammad in the 7th century. He established a new unified polity in the Arabian Peninsula, which under the subsequent Rashidun (The Rightly Guided Caliphs) and Umayyad Caliphates saw a century of rapid expansion of Muslim power. This power grew well beyond the Arabian Peninsula in the form of a Muslim empire with an area of influence that stretched from the borders of China and India, across Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, Sicily, and the Iberian Peninsula, to the Pyrenees. Under the last of the Umayyads, the Arabian empire extended two hundred days journey from east to west, from the confines of Tartary and India to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.
The progress of Islam diffused over this ample space a general uniformity of cultural mores. The language and laws of the Quran were studied with equal devotion at Samarcand and Seville. The Arabian language was adopted as the popular idiom in all the provinces westward of the Tigris.
The Muslim conquests brought about the collapse of the Sassanid Empire and a great territorial loss for the Byzantine Empire. The reasons for Muslim success are hard to reconstruct in hindsight, primarily because only fragmentary sources from the period have survived. Most historians agree that the Sassanid Persian and Byzantine Roman empires were militarily and economically exhausted from decades of fighting one another.
The period of Islamic conquests and empire building marks the first phase of the expansion of Islam as a religion. Islam’s essential egalitarianism within the community of the faithful and its official discrimination against the followers of other religions won rapid converts. Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians were assigned a special status (dhimmi, dhimma means protection) as communities possessing scriptures and were called the “people of the Book” (ahl al-kitāb) and, therefore, were allowed religious “autonomy”. They were,however, required to pay a per capita tax called jizyah and other tax called kharaj.

Source analysis and comment

Source n. 1 Historical map of Israel in biblical time in particular the Land of Canaan during the Residence of the Israelites in the desert. The land promised for an everlasting inheritance to Abraham and his seed, and the scene of the principal events recorded in Scripture, has been known  by many names including the land of Canaan. Canaan area variously defined in historical and biblical literature, but always centered on Palestine. According to the Old Testament the Israelites occupied and conquered Palestine, or Canaan, beginning in the late 2nd millennium BC, or perhaps earlier; the Bible justifies such occupation by identifying Canaan with the Promised Land, the land promised to the Israelites by God. This name had reference only to that portion of land which lay between Jordan on the east and the Mediterranean Sea on the west.
Source 2. The Acts of the Apostles are the principal source of information for Early Christians. Pentecost is one of the Western and Eastern Christianity’s great feasts. From this moment recounted in the Act of Aposteles, Christianity began to spread in the world. The selected track speaks of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descends upon the apostles. They were all Galileans and yet, after the descent of the Holy Spirit they were able to speake many languages in order to  bring the teachings of Jesus Christ in the world.  What the text tells us is that early Christinity understood the spreading of the Christian message throughout the world as a holy mission, bestowed by God. In fact, in this narrative it is God itself that triggers such a behaviour by conferring the miracolous power of multilinguism (and other powers to make them adapt to convert other people).
Source 3 The map shows the spread of Islam: the different colors represent different periods of Islamic expansion, especially brown shows expansion under the Prophet Mohammad (622-632), pink shows expansion during the time of four Rashidun Caliphs (632-661) and yellow shows expansion during the Umayyad Caliphate (661-750).

Intercultural and interdisciplinary information

(social science)
The spread of Buddhism.
Buddhism is the religion spread to all parts of Asia, so as to be considered the Asian religion par excellence. See form Buddhism II. It is dedicated to its spread in Asia

Link to other modules
Introduction to Judaism  (History)
Introduction to Christianity (History)
Introduction to Islam (History)
Introduction to Buddhism II (diffusion in the world)