Abraham wasn’t a Jew. The word didn’t exist yet.

The Torah’s first label for Abraham is ha-Ivri — “the Hebrew,” traditionally read as “the one from the other side,” who crossed over. Joseph too calls himself a Hebrew (Genesis 40:15), and Potiphar’s household calls him “this Hebrew” (Genesis 39:14). The word “Jew” is nowhere in their world — yet the tradition still holds Abraham as the founding father of the people, the first to enter God’s covenant. The name is younger than the man; the lineage is not in doubt.

Why ha-Ivri, “the Hebrew”? The plain sense is geographic — ever is a side or a bank, and Abraham is the one who came from across the river. But the Midrash hears a second meaning folded into the same word: the whole world stood on one side and Abraham on the other. Ivri becomes the name of a man willing to stand apart for what he knew — “the other side” turned from a place into a posture, long before it was ever a people’s name.

“Judah” — Yehudah, the source of Yehudi, “Jew” — is born from Leah’s cry odeh, “I will give thanks, I will praise.” Long before it named a people, it named gratitude. Later Jewish teaching can hear that thanksgiving folded inside the name Yehudi too.

This is among the first times the word Yehudim appears in the narrative of Tanakh — and it still means simply “Judeans,” people of the kingdom of Judah, set against their neighbours. The wider sense we use today is not yet here; its scope broadens as Judah becomes the surviving center of Israelite life, through exile and return.

Asked why Mordechai is called “a Jew” though he came from the tribe of Benjamin, not Judah, the Sages offer an aggadic reading — a homiletical deepening, not a rule of who counts as Jewish: the name Yehudi fits anyone who repudiates idols, they say, citing Daniel, where the exiles in Babylon who would not bow are called Yehuda’in. Alongside the name of a people, the word gains a spiritual resonance: a stance toward the one God.