Judaism: Torah, Talmud, Shabbat, the synagogue and the traditions from Ashkenazi to Sephardi

IA quick read in five sentences

One, Judaism has no founder in the sense of one person who established a religion. According to the tradition, the covenant began with Abraham and was completed when Moshe, that is, Moses, received the Torah on Mount Sinai. Two, the scriptures have two layers: the Written Torah, contained in the twenty-four books of the Tanakh, and the Oral Torah, later written down as the Mishnah and the Talmud. Three, religious life is governed by halakha, the body of law that covers everything from meals under the rules of kashrut to the Shabbat day of rest, from morning prayer to the burial of the dead. Four, from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the religion divided into several movements, the largest being Orthodox, Conservative and Reform, while Ashkenazi and Sephardi are not movements but two branches of tradition that followed the paths of dispersion, one through Central and Eastern Europe, the other through the Iberian Peninsula. Five, there are about fifteen million Jews in the world, roughly two in every thousand human beings, and almost all of them live in ten countries.

This page has fifteen sections and is written in a descriptive voice. What Judaism teaches appears in the boxes marked as the tradition's teaching, and what history and archaeology can verify appears in the boxes marked as the historical record, set side by side so that you can compare them yourself. Wherever two sources disagree, such as the year the First Temple was destroyed, the birth year of Maimonides or the number of Jews in the world, the library records both. The historical account runs to the end of the Middle Ages, and the modern period is covered only where it concerns religion. The library does not judge which movement is more correct, and does not place this religion above or below any other.

The religions that trace back to Abraham each have their own page: Catholicism, Protestantism and Islam. This page presents Judaism as the religion understands itself, not through the lens of the other two.

IICanaan and a people bearing a covenant

The land that gave birth to Judaism is a narrow strip along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, squeezed between Egypt and Mesopotamia, which the ancient books call the land of Canaan. The surrounding religious world was polytheistic, with crowded pantheons and statues of gods set in temples. Against that background, what set this religion apart, as the religion itself tells it, was the worship of one single God and the absence of images. How much of this was there from the beginning and how much was the result of a long process is where the tradition and historians tell different stories.

From the religion of the Temple to the religion of the rabbis

The ancient religious history of Judaism revolves around the Temple in Jerusalem, the only place where sacrifices could be offered. According to the tradition, the First Temple was built by King Solomon. It was destroyed when Babylon captured Jerusalem and the upper classes were deported to Babylon, then the Persian king Cyrus allowed them to return and the Second Temple was rebuilt. During the Second Temple period several groups coexisted: priests in charge of the sacrifices, the Pharisees who emphasised the oral law, the Sadducees who accepted only the written law, and ascetic communities living apart.

In the year 70, the Second Temple was destroyed by the Roman army and never rebuilt. Without the Temple there were no more sacrifices and no more role for the priesthood, only the Torah and those who studied it. According to the traditional account, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai founded an academy at Yavne, and from then on the religion shifted its axis from temple to book, from sacrifice to prayer and study. Every movement of Judaism today descends from that shift.

IIIAbraham, Moshe and the covenant at Sinai

Judaism has no founder, because as the religion understands itself, a covenant is not founded but received. The two figures at its root are the patriarch Abraham and the prophet Moshe. The library does not depict the appearance of either figure, and in this religion that rule coincides with the teaching itself, since the second commandment forbids making statues and images for worship.

IVThree thousand years on a timeline

The further back one goes, the wider the margin of dating, and wherever sources disagree the library says so plainly. The Jewish calendar counts years from the moment of creation as calculated by the rabbis, so the year running when this page was written is 5787, which began on the evening of 11 September 2026. Ancient dates follow Britannica.

• around 1208 BCThe Merneptah Stele
  The earliest Egyptian text to mention Israel as the name of a people living in Canaan.
• 10th century BCThe First Temple according to the tradition
  According to the Book of Kings, King Solomon built the Temple in Jerusalem. Archaeology has not found direct traces of this building.
• 587 or 586 BCThe First Temple destroyed, the Babylonian exile
  Both years appear in serious works because of differences in converting the Babylonian chronology. The exile was the period when many parts of the scriptures were gathered and re-edited.
• 538 BCThe edict of the Persian king Cyrus
  The people of Judah were allowed to return home. A large part stayed, and the Babylonian community later became the religion's greatest centre of learning.
• around 516 BCThe Second Temple completed
  The start of the Second Temple period, which lasted until the year 70. Some sources give the year 515.
• 3rd century BCThe Septuagint, the translation of the Seventy, in Alexandria
  The Torah was translated into Greek for the Greek-speaking Jewish community in Egypt. This translation later became the basis of the Christian Old Testament.
• 164 BCThe Temple rededicated
  The event is commemorated by the eight-day festival of Hanukkah. The Talmud adds the story of a jar of oil enough for one day that burned for eight days.
• 70The Second Temple destroyed
  The end of sacrifices and of the role of the priesthood. The Yavne academy of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai opened the era of rabbinic Judaism.
• around 200The Mishnah edited
  Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi gathered the oral law into six orders and sixty-three tractates. For the first time the oral law had a standard text.
• around 400, and 500 to 600The two Talmuds
  The Jerusalem Talmud was compiled in Galilee around the year 400, and the Babylonian Talmud was gradually completed during the sixth and seventh centuries. The Babylonian Talmud became the standard of later Jewish learning.
• 1040 to 1105Rashi
  Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki of Troyes, France, wrote the commentary on the Torah and the Talmud that is still printed in the margins of almost every edition today.
• 1135 or 1138 to 1204Maimonides
  Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, born in Córdoba, died in Egypt. Sources differ on his year of birth. He compiled the law code Mishneh Torah around 1180, and the thirteen principles of faith.
• 1492 and 1497Jews forced to leave Spain, then Portugal
  The Sephardi communities dispersed to North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, Italy and later Amsterdam.
• 1933 to 1945The Holocaust, called the Shoah in Hebrew
  About six million European Jews were murdered, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

VThe dispersion and the two branches, Ashkenazi and Sephardi

This religion did not spread through the world by missionary work, but because wherever Jews went, they brought the religion with them. From the time of the Babylonian exile there were communities living outside the ancestral land, and Greek calls this phenomenon diaspora, meaning a scattering of seed. Each community kept the same Torah, Talmud and legal framework, but over the centuries pronunciation, prayer melodies, festival foods and customs divided into distinct branches, named after regions in medieval Hebrew: אשכנז, transliterated Ashkenaz, for the Rhineland, and ספרד, transliterated Sepharad, for the Iberian Peninsula.

How Ashkenazi and Sephardi differ

The two branches believe the same things, read the same Torah and keep the same framework of halakha. The differences lie in custom and style.

VITanakh, Torah and Talmud

The word תורה, transliterated Torah, whose root meaning is instruction, has two senses. In the narrow sense it is the first five books of the scriptures, written by hand on a parchment scroll kept in the synagogue. In the broad sense it is the entire teaching of the religion, both the written and the oral parts, together with the commentary accumulated over two thousand years.

The Tanakh, twenty-four books

The written scriptures of the Jews are called the תנ״ך, transliterated Tanakh, a word formed from the initial consonants of its three parts: the Torah, the five books of law, the נביאים, transliterated Nevi'im, the books of the prophets, and the כתובים, transliterated Ketuvim, the books of poetry, literature and history. In all there are 24 books, with the same content as the 39 books of the Protestant Old Testament, because Protestants divide into separate books what Jews keep together. The Catholic Old Testament has 46 books, because it also accepts seven books found in the Greek translation.

The Torah scroll in the synagogue is written by hand on parchment by a scribe called a sofer, and a single wrong letter makes the scroll unusable until it is corrected. The five books are divided into 54 portions, one read aloud each week on Shabbat, and the cycle of readings closes and begins again at the festival of Simchat Torah every autumn.

What a page of Talmud looks like

In the middle of a page of Talmud is a short passage of Mishnah, followed by the גמרא, transliterated Gemara, which records the debates of rabbis across many generations: a question, opposing opinions, proofs, rebuttals, and not infrequently an ending with no conclusion. Around it runs the commentary of Rashi on one side and of the Tosafists on the other, then later commentaries in the outer margins. A single page is a conversation among people who lived a thousand years apart.

That layout says something essential about this religion: minority opinions are also recorded and preserved, and serious debate about the law is regarded as an act of worship. Traditional Talmud students sit in pairs called chavruta, reading aloud and arguing over every line, which is why Talmud study halls have always been noisy places.

VIICore teachings

Anyone looking for a short creed of Judaism will find it hard. This religion places more weight on doing than on professing: the usual question is not what you believe but what you observe. There is a famous list of principles of faith by Maimonides, but that very list was disputed as early as the Middle Ages. This section therefore follows concepts rather than a creed, one concept per subsection.

One God, the Shema

The name of God in the Torah is written with four Hebrew consonants, transliterated in Latin letters as YHWH. Since the Second Temple period, Jews have not pronounced that name aloud. When it appears in the reading of scripture, they read it as Adonai, meaning my Lord, and in everyday conversation they say HaShem, literally the Name. Out of respect for that custom, this page does not print the four original letters. Because of the same custom, some Jews writing in English write the word God with one letter missing, so that paper bearing the name of God is not casually thrown away.

The covenant and the chosen people

ברית, transliterated brit, meaning covenant, is the backbone of the whole religion. According to the tradition, God made a covenant with Noah for all humanity, then with Abraham and his descendants, and the covenant was fulfilled at Sinai: God promised protection, and the people undertook to keep the commandments. The religion uses the phrase chosen people to describe this relationship, and as the rabbis explain it, being chosen means being given additional duties, not being placed above other peoples. The rabbinic texts teach that non-Jews need only keep the seven basic laws of the descendants of Noah, such as not worshipping idols, not murdering, not stealing and establishing just courts, to have a share in the world to come. For this reason the religion does not hold that others must become Jews in order to be saved, and does not engage in missionary work.

Mitzvot, the 613 commandments

Religious life is built on the מצוות, transliterated mitzvot, singular mitzvah, meaning commandments. According to the tradition recorded in the Talmud, the Torah contains 613 commandments, made up of 248 positive commandments and 365 prohibitions. Many are tied to the Temple or the priesthood and so cannot be carried out today. The commandments cover every area of life, from prayer and keeping holy days to paying wages on time, not speaking ill of others and treating strangers kindly. In everyday speech, the word mitzvah also means a good deed in general.

Halakha, the way

הלכה, transliterated halakha, derives from the verb to walk, so its meaning is close to the path one walks. It is the whole body of law that tells how a commandment is carried out in practice. Halakha does not stand still: in every age, rabbis answer new questions in letters called responsa, drawing on the Talmud and earlier law codes. When electricity arrived, people had to ask whether flipping a switch counts as kindling a fire on Shabbat. When elevators arrived, people had to ask how to ride an elevator on Shabbat. Those questions were answered by the same method the rabbis had used since the time of the Mishnah.

How the movements view halakha is the greatest difference among them. The Orthodox movement regards halakha as binding and as changing only within the framework of its own principles. The Conservative movement also regards halakha as binding but stresses that it has always developed through history. The Reform movement regards halakha as a source of guidance rather than an obligation, and leaves the decision to individual conscience.

Free will and teshuvah

The religion teaches that human beings are free to choose between good and evil, and it has no concept of an original sin passed down as in Christianity. When one does wrong, the way to set it right is called תשובה, transliterated teshuvah, literally returning, which involves recognising the wrong, feeling remorse and resolving not to repeat it. For wrongs done to another person, one must first apologise to that person and make amends, because Yom Kippur atones only for wrongs against God.

Tzedakah, justice rather than charity

צדקה, transliterated tzedakah, is usually translated as charity, but the root of the word means justice. The religion regards helping the poor not as optional kindness but as a duty, like paying a debt of justice. Maimonides ranked eight levels of giving, the lowest being to give grudgingly, and the highest being to help another stand on their own feet by lending, providing work or going into business together, so that the person no longer needs to receive. The phrase תיקון עולם, transliterated tikkun olam, meaning repairing the world, has its roots in the liturgy and in Kabbalah, and is now used by many Jews to speak of social responsibility in general.

The Messiah and the afterlife

משיח, transliterated mashiach, meaning the anointed one, is the root of the word Messiah. According to traditional teaching, the Messiah is a human being of the line of King David who will come in the future, gather the Jewish people, rebuild the Temple and open an age of peace for the whole world. This is a fundamental difference from Christianity: Judaism does not accept Jesus as the Messiah, and does not regard the Messiah as divine. Maimonides wrote that the sign by which the Messiah will be recognised is what that person accomplishes in the world, not miracles.

About the afterlife, Judaism says less than many other religions. The rabbinic texts speak of olam ha-ba, the world to come, and of the resurrection of the dead, but the descriptions are not consistent, and the focus of the religion remains on this life. The Reform movement and some within the Conservative movement understand this part symbolically.

The thirteen principles of Maimonides

According to traditional halakha, a Jew is a person born of a Jewish mother, or a person who has converted according to the proper procedure before a court of three people learned in the law. Since 1983 the Reform movement in North America has also accepted a person with a Jewish father if raised in the religion, while the Orthodox and Conservative movements do not. A person born Jewish remains Jewish under halakha even without observing the religion, so the Jews are both a religious community and a people. This overlap is the main reason counting adherents is difficult.

VIIIKashrut and Shabbat, the table and the day of rest

Two things set an observant Jewish family apart from its neighbours: meals and Saturday. Both recur every day and every week, and turn the home into the main place of religious observance. This section describes practice as most Orthodox Jews keep it, while the Conservative and Reform movements observe it to varying degrees.

Kashrut, the dietary laws

כשרות, transliterated kashrut, is the body of dietary law, and food that conforms to it is called כשר, transliterated kasher, which English speakers pronounce kosher. The word means fit, not clean or blessed. The core laws are in Leviticus chapter 11 and Deuteronomy chapter 14, and were then developed in great detail by the Talmud and the law codes.

The Torah does not give reasons for most of the dietary laws. Many later writers offered explanations based on hygiene or health, but the rabbis make clear that the basis of kashrut is the commandment, and any health benefit is only secondary. In Vietnam, the Chabad centres provide kosher meals for Jewish residents and travellers.

Shabbat, the seventh day

שבת, transliterated Shabbat, derives from the verb to rest, to cease. According to the Book of Genesis, God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, and the Ten Commandments command that the day be kept holy. Because the Jewish day begins at sunset, Shabbat lasts from before sunset on Friday until full darkness on Saturday night, about twenty-five hours.

Shabbat begins when the woman of the house lights two candles. Friday dinner is the main meal of the week: the father recites the sanctification called קידוש, transliterated kiddush, over a cup of wine, and then the family breaks two braided loaves called challah. Saturday morning brings the longest service of the week at the synagogue, with the reading of the weekly Torah portion. On Saturday evening, Shabbat closes with the ceremony of הבדלה, transliterated havdalah, meaning separation, which divides the holy day from the ordinary week ahead.

The Mishnah lists 39 categories of work that are forbidden, called melakhot, derived from the tasks needed to build the Tabernacle in the desert, from sowing, reaping and kneading to writing, kindling a fire, putting out a fire and carrying objects from a private domain to a public one. From these the rabbis derived the modern applications, so Orthodox Jews do not drive, cook, switch lights on or off, use the telephone or handle money on Shabbat. They prepare in advance: food cooked the day before, lights on timers.

IXThe Jewish calendar, the major festivals and the rites of life

The Jewish calendar is lunisolar, like the traditional Vietnamese calendar in that the months follow the moon while the year must keep pace with the seasons. In each nineteen-year cycle there are seven leap years with an extra month of Adar, so that Passover always falls in spring. The day begins at sunset, following the verse in Genesis that there was evening and there was morning, so every festival begins on the evening before. The year 5787 is a leap year, and the table below gives the Gregorian dates of the major festivals in that year.

The ten Days of Awe

The two festivals that open the year, ראש השנה, transliterated Rosh Hashanah, and יום כיפור, transliterated Yom Kippur, are ten days apart, a period called the ten Days of Awe. According to the tradition, on Rosh Hashanah each person's fate for the coming year is written in the book, on Yom Kippur the book is sealed, and the days in between are a time for teshuvah, prayer and good deeds. Yom Kippur is the day when even many Jews who observe little come to the synagogue, healthy adults abstain entirely from food and drink, and the service lasts almost the whole day.

Rites of the life cycle

A baby boy is circumcised on the eighth day after birth, in the rite of brit milah, and is named at that ceremony. On reaching adulthood under the law, thirteen for boys and twelve for girls, a young person becomes a בר מצווה, transliterated bar mitzvah, or a בת מצווה, transliterated bat mitzvah, meaning a child of the commandment, that is, from then on personally responsible for keeping the commandments, and usually reads a Torah passage before the community for the first time.

A wedding takes place under a four-poled canopy called the חופה, transliterated chuppah, the two parties sign a marriage contract called the ketubah, and the groom breaks a glass underfoot to remember the lost Temple at the moment of greatest joy. When someone dies, burial takes place as soon as possible. The family sits in mourning for seven days, called שבעה, transliterated shiva, the children recite the קדיש, transliterated kaddish, prayer in Aramaic for eleven months, and every year on the anniversary of the death, called yahrzeit, a candle is lit that burns for a full day and night. Vietnamese readers familiar with the custom of giỗ, the death anniversary, will find a point of contact in remembering the dead on the exact date of death in the lunar calendar.

XThe synagogue and the rabbi

The place where Jews gather for religious life is called בית כנסת, transliterated beit knesset, literally house of assembly, in English the synagogue, and in Vietnamese usually hội đường. Ashkenazim also call it shul, and the Sephardim of Amsterdam call it esnoga. A synagogue is not a temple: according to the tradition there was only one Temple, in Jerusalem, and it is gone. The synagogue replaces it with three activities, prayer, study and assembly, and can be set up anywhere there are enough people.

What a synagogue contains

Communal prayer requires ten adults, called a מניין, transliterated minyan. The Orthodox movement counts only men, while the Conservative and Reform movements count women as well. There are three prayer services each day, in place of the daily sacrifices of Temple times. In the morning men wrap themselves in a prayer shawl called a tallit, and the blue and white of that shawl is the very colour the library chose for this page.

The rabbi is a teacher, not a priest

The words רב, transliterated rav, and rabbi mean my teacher. A rabbi is a person who has studied Torah and halakha deeply enough to be given authority to rule on the law, through an ordination called semikhah. A rabbi is not a priest, is not an intermediary between people and God, has no power to forgive sins, and in principle every ritual in the synagogue can be led by someone who is not a rabbi. Rabbis marry. The hereditary priestly line is that of the kohen, descendants of Aaron, the brother of Moshe, and since the loss of the Temple their role survives only in a few rituals. Women serving as rabbis is a modern development: Regina Jonas was ordained in Germany in 1935, and today the Reform and Conservative movements both have women rabbis, while most of the Orthodox movement does not.

XIMovements within Judaism

Before the eighteenth century, almost all Jews lived within a shared framework of halakha under the guidance of local rabbis. The division into movements in the modern sense, each with its own seminaries, synagogues and position on halakha, belongs to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, driven by two movements that arose almost at the same time at the two ends of Europe.

Hasidism in the east, Haskalah in the west

In Podolia, Rabbi Yisrael ben Eliezer, known as the Baal Shem Tov, who lived from about 1700 to 1760, taught that God is present everywhere, and that even an unlearned person can draw near to God through sincerity, joy, song and dance. The movement of חסידות, transliterated Hasidut, meaning piety, spread across Eastern Europe around masters called rebbes. The opposing camp, led by the Gaon of Vilna, 1720 to 1797, defended rigorous Talmud study as the centre. The two sides later drew closer and today both belong to the Orthodox world.

In Berlin, the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, 1729 to 1786, launched the השכלה, transliterated Haskalah, meaning enlightenment. He translated the Torah into German in the years 1780 to 1783 and argued that Jews could both keep their religion and take full part in European culture. Out of the question of what to keep and what to change on entering modern society, the movements arose one after another as different answers.

In the United States, a Pew Research Center survey published in May 2021 found that among Jewish adults 37 percent identify with Reform, 17 percent with Conservative, 9 percent with Orthodox, 4 percent with other movements, and 32 percent with no movement. The library has no worldwide count.

Chabad, the movement present in Vietnam

Chabad, also called Chabad Lubavitch, is a Hasidic branch founded by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, 1745 to 1812. The name Chabad is formed from three Hebrew words meaning wisdom, understanding and knowledge. The movement's distinctive feature is sending young rabbinic couples to cities all over the world, including places with very few Jews, to open Chabad houses as places of prayer, teaching and kosher meals. This work is aimed at Jews, not at spreading the religion to outsiders. Every point of organised Jewish religious life in Vietnam that the library has found belongs to Chabad.

Kabbalah, the mystical dimension

קבלה, transliterated Kabbalah, meaning that which is received, is the mystical tradition of the religion, a layer of reflection present in many movements rather than a separate movement. It explores how the infinite God is manifested through ten attributes called sefirot, and how human actions help repair the brokenness of the world. Its central text is the זוהר, transliterated Zohar, and the most influential later school is that of Rabbi Isaac Luria of Safed, 1534 to 1572.

XIIThe number of Jews and why they are hard to count

According to the Pew Research Center report on global religious change from 2010 to 2020, published on 9 June 2025, there were 14.8 million Jews in the world in 2020, about 0.2 percent of the world population, up from about 13.8 million in 2010. In terms of distribution, 46 percent lived in the Middle East and North Africa region, 41 percent in North America, about 1.3 million in Europe, and about 390,000 in Latin America and the Caribbean. According to the same report, 96 percent of Jews live in ten countries.

The estimate of demographer Sergio DellaPergola of the Hebrew University, published in the American Jewish Year Book, gives a higher figure: 15.7 million at the start of 2023. The two figures use two different definitions, as the subsection below explains, and the library records both.

Why every figure is an estimate

First, the Jews are both a religious community and a people. Some people are born into Jewish families and identify as Jewish, but when asked their religion answer that they have none. Pew notes that in the United States, if Jews in the cultural and ancestral sense are included, the 2020 figure rises to about 7.5 million, well above the figure counted by religion. Second, sources use different criteria. Pew counts by religious self-identification so that it can compare with other religions, using official data based on halakhic criteria for Israel alone, while DellaPergola uses a broader core definition. Third, many countries do not ask about religion in their census, so the figures for those countries are inferred from sample surveys. Fourth, the movements do not count by the same standard, since the Reform movement accepts the children of Jewish fathers while the Orthodox movement does not. What all sources agree on is that the total hovers around fifteen million, and that more than eight in ten live in two countries.

XIIIIn Vietnam

Judaism is present in Vietnam on a very small scale. This section records only current organised activity, legal status as far as the library has been able to find, and numbers.

The Chabad centres

Organised Jewish religious life in Vietnam today is run by the Chabad movement. According to the Chabad Vietnam website, the first centre opened in Hồ Chí Minh City in 2006, founded by Rabbi Menachem Hartman and his wife, with a place of prayer and kosher meals, and in 2012 it opened a ritual bath, called a mikveh. The second centre opened in Hà Nội in 2014. The Chabad Hà Nội website lists four Chabad houses in Vietnam, in Hà Nội, Hồ Chí Minh City, Hội An and Sa Pa.

Two sources disagree about Hội An, now part of Đà Nẵng city after the administrative reorganisation of 1 July 2025: the Chabad Vietnam website records that the house there opened in 2018, while the community newspaper The Jewish Link wrote in July 2021 that it had closed during the COVID 19 pandemic. The library has not been able to verify its current status and so records both.

Legal status and numbers

According to official figures cited by the newspaper VietNamNet on 20 July 2025, Vietnam has sixteen religions recognised by the State, and Judaism is not on that list. The library has found no document granting legal status to any Jewish religious organisation in Vietnam, nor any figures on Jews in the publications of the Ban Tôn giáo Chính phủ (the Government Committee for Religious Affairs), and records this only as a fact.

As for numbers, there is no official count. The article in The Jewish Link of July 2021 records about 350 Jews living in Vietnam, concentrated in Hồ Chí Minh City and Hà Nội, originating from many countries. An overview article in an open encyclopedia gives about 300 people for 2007. Both are community estimates, not census data.

XIVThrough the eyes of feng shui

Judaism does not teach feng shui. The Torah forbids divination, as in Leviticus chapter 19 verse 26, לא תנחשו ולא תעוננו, transliterated lo tenachashu ve-lo te'onenu, usually translated as do not practise divination or soothsaying, and Deuteronomy chapter 18 lists the forbidden arts of foretelling. The Talmud debates back and forth whether fate is governed by the stars, and one rabbi answers with the saying אין מזל לישראל, transliterated ein mazal le-Yisrael, meaning Israel is not ruled by the stars. Maimonides rejects astrology outright. Whether a Jew should consult the orientation of a house in the traditional manner is a question for that person's rabbi, not for this library page.

Facing Jerusalem

The only rule of orientation for a synagogue is to face Jerusalem, toward the site of the ancient Temple. Its root lies in King Solomon's prayer in the Book of Kings, that those far away would pray toward this city, and in the Book of Daniel, where the main character opens his window toward Jerusalem to pray. The Talmud and the law codes turned this into a rule: those praying face Jerusalem, and the ark is placed on the wall on that side. For Jews in Europe that direction is east, so the wall holding the ark is often called the mizrach, meaning east.

That direction is determined by geography, not by the lie of the land, the flow of water or the age of the builder. Here it resembles the mosque in Islam, oriented toward Mecca: both religions align their buildings to a real point on the earth's surface, while the traditional Vietnamese approach judges orientation by the compass and the lie of the land on site.

Three customs of the home

The mezuzah on the doorpost. Following the commandment in the Shema passage, Jews fix to the right-hand doorpost, as one enters, a small case called a מזוזה, transliterated mezuzah, containing a handwritten parchment with two passages of the Torah. Ashkenazim fix it at a slight slant, reconciling the two opinions of Rashi and his grandson, while Sephardim usually fix it upright. People used to couplets, house-protecting talismans or bagua mirrors over the door may easily read the mezuzah as a protective object, but Maimonides himself opposed that understanding, writing that whoever treats the mezuzah as an amulet has turned a commandment into a tool for personal gain. According to the tradition, it is a reminder of God at every coming and going.

The unplastered patch of wall. The Talmud records a custom that later law codes preserved: when plastering a house, people leave a small area opposite the entrance unplastered, about a cubit on each side, called זכר לחורבן, transliterated zecher la-churban, meaning in remembrance of the destruction of the Temple. The traditional Vietnamese approach favours completeness at the main door, while this custom deliberately leaves a corner incomplete, for the sake of memory and not of qi.

A tall synagogue with windows. According to the law codes, a synagogue should be taller than the surrounding houses where conditions permit, and the prayer hall should have windows, following the example of Daniel. The reason lies in scripture, not in any method of reading the land.

Three layers to keep apart

The first layer, what the religion teaches. A single rule of orientation, facing Jerusalem, the commandments concerning the mezuzah and the unplastered patch of wall, and the verses forbidding divination. There is no provision about dragon veins, the house owner's destiny palace or dates for breaking ground chosen by the stars.

The second layer, what local builders did in response to climate. The Amsterdam synagogue stands on wooden piles like every building in that city, North African synagogues have inner courtyards and thick walls against the sun, and the old Kaifeng synagogue was built in the Chinese architectural style. That is craft and climate, not law.

The third layer, the library's own reading. The two ways of seeing meet in treating the entrance door as a meaningful threshold: the traditional Vietnamese approach places a house guardian there, while Jews place a reminder of the covenant there. The forms are alike, the reasons differ. This is the library's interpretation, not a teaching of the religion.

XVCommon misunderstandings

This last section gathers the questions Vietnamese people most often ask about Judaism. Because this religion is almost absent from Vietnamese life, most misunderstandings come from translated books and articles, films, or from reading Judaism through the lens of Christianity. The four most common slips: confusing the people with the religion, confusing a newer symbol with an ancient one, confusing a rabbi with a priest, and thinking the Tanakh is merely the Old Testament under another name.

?Quick Questions

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