The following is a short primer on Palestinian religious evolution during the past two millennia dedicated to my unfortunately uneducated Christian Zionist friends who buy into the myth that God gave Palestine to Zionists.  All of this material was obtained in a quick, AI assisted search on the Internet and thus is easily verifiable.

Contrary to the claims of Zionists that “they” were promised Palestine, Jewish groups over a millennia following the purported time of Abraham and Moses, at the beginning of the Common Era, were highly varied and fragmented, lacking any single centralized religious authority. Instead, much like modern Christian sects, of which thousands of competing variants exist, many condemning their competitors as heretics, the “Jewish” population was divided into competing sects, political factions, and diaspora communities.

The primary ideological and social groups in first-century Judea included:

• Pharisees: A group of scholars and laymen who emphasized rigorous adherence to both the written Torah and an extensive oral tradition. They believed in the resurrection of the dead and angels, and their teachings laid the groundwork for modern Rabbinic Judaism.

• Sadducees: The wealthy, conservative elite, largely comprised of priests, who controlled the Jerusalem Temple and the Sanhedrin. They rejected the oral law, believed only in the literal written Torah, and did not believe in an afterlife or resurrection.

• Essenes: Ascetic, separatist communities (such as those associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran) who withdrew from mainstream society. They practiced strict purity rituals and communal ownership, believing the Temple establishment in Jerusalem had become corrupt.

• Zealots and Revolutionaries: Militant, nationalistic factions that fiercely opposed Roman taxation and rule. Groups like the Sicarii (daggermen) resorted to violence and guerrilla warfare against both the Romans and Jewish elites they viewed as collaborators.

• Herodians: A small, politically motivated group of Jews who supported the royal dynasty of Herod the Great and, by extension, Roman authority.

• The “Common” Jews: The vast majority of the population who did not officially belong to any sect. They sought to maintain basic Jewish practices like observing Shabbat, keeping kosher, and practicing circumcision while living their daily lives.

• Diaspora Jews: Communities living outside the Land of Israel in major Hellenistic centers like Alexandria (Egypt) and Rome. These groups adapted significantly to Greco-Roman culture while maintaining their religious and ethnic identity.

Beyond the major factions, the beginning of the Common Era featured numerous minor, highly specialized, and localized Jewish groups. Historians like Josephus and early textual records identify several smaller groups that emerged from specific theological, geographical, or political pressures:

1. Ascetic and Mystical Offshoots

• Therapeutae: Based in Egypt (especially near Alexandria), this was a communal group of Jewish ascetics described by the Jewish philosopher Philo. Similar to the Essenes, they abandoned their property, lived in isolation, and dedicated their lives to intense prayer, fasting, and the allegorical study of scripture. Notably, unlike the Qumran Essenes, their community included women.

• Bana’im (The Builders): Mentioned briefly in rabbinic literature, they were an Essene-like group in Palestine. They were obsessively preoccupied with ritual purity, particularly ensuring their clothes remained entirely free of mud stains or contaminants.

• Hemerobaptists: A minor group whose defining characteristic was daily morning baptism. They believed that immersing themselves in water every single morning was necessary to wash away sins and maintain absolute ritual purity before prayer.

2. Radical and Political Factions

• The Fourth Philosophy: This is the term Josephus used to describe an ideological movement started by Judas the Galilean. While they agreed with the Pharisees on religious matters, their defining political belief was a radical refusal to call any human “lord” or king, viewing Roman taxation as direct blasphemy against God. This philosophy birthed the later Zealot and Sicarii movements.

• The Sicarii (Daggermen): A radical, covert splinter group of revolutionaries. They hid small daggers (sicae) under their cloaks to assassinate high-ranking Jewish elites and priests whom they accused of collaborating with the Roman occupiers.

3. Early Messianic and Borderline Groups

• The Nazarenes / Early Christ-Followers: In the first decades of the Common Era, the followers of Jesus of Nazareth existed strictly as a minor sect within the broader Jewish framework. They continued to worship at the Temple, keep kosher, and follow the Torah, but they held the distinct conviction that the Messiah had already arrived.

• The Samaritans: Though distinct from mainstream Jews, they shared a common Israelite heritage. They rejected the Jerusalem Temple entirely, holding that Mount Gerizim was the only divinely chosen place of worship, and accepted only their own version of the Torah (the Samaritan Pentateuch).

The reality is that Christianity also emerged as a Jewish group, expanded by Saul of Tarsus to include non-inhabitants of the Levant, and later, Islam emerged as a fusion of Judaism and Christianity with the remnants of inhabitants of the Levant, the ancient “Jews”, converting to Christianity or Islam, or, in some cases, coalescing into an evolving form of orthodox Judaism, albeit unlike modern Reform Liberal or Conservative Judaism and certainly unlike Zionism, founded by European converts to Judaism who rejected its religious aspects in favor of atheism with cultural Jewish trappings.

Modern “Judaism”

Modern Judaism evolved from Rabbinic Judaism which coalesced out of catastrophic historical crises. Practically all major forms of Judaism practiced today, including Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform, share a similar foundational lineage.  The transition from a fractured, temple-based religion to the diverse structures of non-monolithic modern Judaism occurred across two monumental phases:

Phase 1: The Cataclysm and the Blueprint (70 CE – 600 CE)

Before 70 CE, most but not all of Jewish life revolved around the Jerusalem Temple, animal sacrifices, and the priesthood. A major division had already occurred when Samaritan Jews had rejected the centralization of Judaism in Jerusalem with the Temple there as the purported focal point of Judaism.  When the Roman Empire destroyed the Temple in 70 CE, the economic and spiritual heart of Jerusalem centered Judaism was obliterated.  But Judaism survived and coalesced due to a series of radical transformations:

• The Shift to Yavneh: According to tradition, a Pharisaic leader named Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai was smuggled out of the Roman siege of Jerusalem. He negotiated a deal with the Roman general Vespasian to establish an academy in the coastal town of Yavneh.

• Ritual Substitution: At Yavneh, the surviving sages detached Judaism from a physical building. They decreed that communal prayer would replace animal sacrifice, the synagogue would replace the Temple, and rabbis (teachers) would replace priests.

• The Compilation of the Talmud: Over the next several centuries, Jewish scholars debated and codified these laws into written texts: the Mishnah (c. 200 CE) and the Talmud (c. 600 CE). This created a portable, text-centered religion that could survive in the global diaspora.

Phase 2: The Enlightenment and the Modern Denominations (1700s – 1800s)

For over a thousand years, the rabbinic system was the undisputed norm. However, the European Enlightenment and Jewish Emancipation in the 18th and 19th centuries granted Jews civil rights, shattering the walls of the traditional Jewish ghetto and forcing a new question: How do you remain Jewish while integrating into modern Western society? This crisis split Rabbinic Judaism into the modern movements we recognize today:

• Reform Judaism: Emerging in Germany, this movement aimed to modernize the religion. They translated prayers into local languages, introduced organs into synagogues, and viewed Jewish law (Halakha) as an evolving ethical guide rather than a binding set of divine mandates.

• Orthodox Judaism: This arose as a direct counter-reaction to Reform Judaism. Leaders like Samson Raphael Hirsch argued that traditional Jewish law was immutable and fully divine. “Modern Orthodoxy” emerged to show that one could strictly observe the Torah while engaging with secular culture and education.

• Conservative Judaism: Formed as a middle ground, this movement argued that Jewish law is dynamic and must adapt to the times, but its core traditions and historical practices must be conserved and respected.

None of the foregoing have direct links to any form of primitive Judaism with direct interaction with Moses, or Abram or YHWH, any more than do any Christian or Islamic sects, nor, of course, does Zionism.

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.