Jew

Historical Jewish languages
Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, others
Liturgical languages:
Hebrew and Aramaic
Predominant spoken languages:

A Jew (Hebrew: יְהוּדִים, Yehudim; Ladino: ג׳ודיוס, Djudios; Yiddish: ייִדן, Yidn) is a member of the Jewish people who are an ethnic group originating in the Israelites of the ancient Middle East. The Jewish people or the Jewish nation also consists of others who converted to Judaism throughout the millennia. The ethnicity and the religion of Judaism are strongly interrelated, and converts are both included and have been absorbed within the Jewish people.

The Jews have suffered a long history of persecution in many different lands, and their population and distribution per region has fluctuated throughout the centuries. Today, most authorities place the number of Jews between 12 and 14 million, the largest number of whom live in the United States (40.5% in 2002) and Israel (34.4% in 2002), with the remainder distributed in communities of varying sizes in almost every country. The total world Jewish population, however, is difficult to measure and is subject to the controversy of secular, halakhic or other parameters of defining who is a Jew.