Judaism as it is now practised is the product of a reconstruction. Until 70 CE the religion had a physical centre: the Temple in Jerusalem, a hereditary priesthood and a sacrificial cult prescribed by the Torah. Rome destroyed the Temple during the revolt of 66 to 73 CE, and none of that apparatus survived.
What replaced it was the achievement of the rabbis, heirs of the Pharisees, who relocated the religion into study, prayer and the household. The synagogue took the place of the sanctuary, the table the place of the altar, and recitation of the sacrificial order the place of the sacrifice. The Mishnah, compiled about 200 CE, set out the oral law in six orders. The debate that grew around it produced the Jerusalem Talmud by about 400 and the much larger Babylonian Talmud over the following two centuries. The Babylonian text became the authoritative one, and Jewish law has been argued through it ever since.
Medieval Jewry divided geographically rather than doctrinally. Communities under Islamic rule, the Sephardi world, produced Maimonides, a substantial philosophical literature and Hebrew poetry. Those of Christian Europe, the Ashkenazi world, produced Rashi, the Tosafists and, from the thirteenth century, the Zohar and kabbalah. Expulsions from England in 1290 and Spain in 1492 pushed populations east and around the Mediterranean.
The eighteenth century brought Hasidism, a popular mystical revival that met fierce opposition from the Lithuanian rabbinic establishment before the two reached coexistence. The Enlightenment and civil emancipation then forced a harder question: how a legal tradition built for a self-governing community should meet a society that no longer governed Jews as a separate body. The modern movements are the competing answers, and the fault line still runs between those who hold halakhah binding as given and those who hold it developing.