The Torah is the primary document of Judaism, and is the source of all Biblical commandments, in an ethical framework. There are about 15 million Jewish faithful in the world. The torah primarily refers to the first section of the Tanakh–the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, but the term is sometimes also used in the general sense to also include both of Judaism's written law and oral law, encompassing the entire spectrum of authoritative Jewish religious teachings throughout history, including the Mishnah, the Talmud, the Midrash, and more.
According to Jewish tradition, these books were revealed to Moses by God. Modern historians affirm that the Torah was gradually recorded as the Hebrew Bible between the 5th century BC and the 2nd century BC. Some sources state that the entire Torah was given all at once on Mount Sinai. In the maximalist view, this dictation included not only the "quotes" which appear in the text, but every word of the text itself, including phrases such as "And God spoke to Moses...", and included God telling Moses about Moses' own death and what would happen afterward. Other classical sources hold that the Torah was revealed to Moses over many years, and finished only at his death. Another school of thought holds that although Moses wrote the vast majority of the Torah, a number of sentences throughout the Torah must have been written after his death by another prophet, presumably Joshua.
Zionism is a political movement and ideology that supports a homeland for the Jewish People in the Land of Israel, where the Jewish nation originated over 3200 years ago and where Jewish kingdoms and self-governing states existed at various times in history. While Zionism is based in part upon religious tradition linking the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, the modern movement was originally secular, beginning largely as a response to rampant antisemitism in Europe and parts of the Muslim World during the 19th Century. After a number of advances and setbacks, and after the Holocaust had destroyed Jewish society in Europe, the Zionist movement culminated in the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
Anti-semitism arose during the Middle Ages, in the form of persecutions, pogroms, forced conversion, social restrictions and ghettoization. This was different in quality to any repressions of Jews in ancient times. Ancient repression was politically motivated and Jews were treated no differently than any other ethnic group would have been. With the rise of the Churches, attacks on Jews became motivated instead by theological considerations specifically deriving from Christian views about Jews and Judaism.