Judaism is different from Christianity and Islam in that it doesn’t have one single historical founder or a clear “start date.” It’s something that grew and developed over thousands of years as a shared faith, culture, and national identity of the Jewish people, with roots going back over 3,000 years to the ancient Israelites in the Levant.
It came with a shared moral and legal framework for everyday life, bringing people together through common laws, worship, and festivals. Those traditions became the backbone of Jewish identity and helped the Jewish people survive dispersion, persecution, and even periods when many weren’t religious at all, while still keeping that connection to their history. Personally, I think that’s a beautiful story of endurance and resilience.
Christianity started as a movement within Judaism, centred on the belief that Jesus was the Messiah and Son of God. Islam was founded by the Prophet Muhammad, sees both Judaism and Christianity as earlier revelations, and considers itself the final and complete message from God.
People either accepted those new and "updated" beliefs or didn’t - and a lot of history since then has been shaped by the struggle over who’s “right.” And a great deal of blood has been shed too obviously.
I’m not really religious myself, but I do see meaning in all of them. I think religion began as a way for people to make sense of a scary, unpredictable world and to form communities with shared values. I found studying the birth of Christianity to be quite moving really on some level -because the people all that time ago were really looking for answers to the things that scared them. Like "what happens when I die?".
Unfortunately of course much of it became polluted, and over time, it also became a tool for gaining power and control, especially once empires came into the picture - and that’s when it often got used for the wrong reasons, which is a shame. Today, in my view this is certainly the case with radical Islam which is a complete perversion of the Abrahamic moral standards.
I'm not an expert of Islam, I focussed completely on Judaism and Christianity, but in the modern world, religion can still be twisted for violent ends. Radical Islam is one example - it takes selective, extreme interpretations of Islamic texts and uses them to justify terrorism, oppression, and intolerance, often targeting both non-Muslims and Muslims who don’t share their views.
This isn’t representative of Islam as a whole, which has a long history of scholarship, art, and peaceful practice, but it shows how dangerous religion can become when hijacked by political agendas and extremist ideologies. The line between a group which unifies people and supports communities and basically a cult, is quite a fine one!
I think our modern politics actually mirrors this too - we can be unified in causes like human rights, or women's rights and then these very good things can become quite perverted when people try and claim people who are committing acts of violence and intimidation as allowed to do it because..."the cause".