Judaism Expanded

1. This mod is not intended to be a political statement or social commentary – simply more content for a historically very important faith.

2. AI had a heavy hand in helping create this mod, but I’ve spent a good amount of time building, testing, and creating a workflow to hopefully keep this mod from just being AI slop and instead something with substance. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to use it. This is a mod, not a masterpiece.

Inspired by two things; A personal trip to Dohány Street Synagogue in Budapest and the film Fiddler on the Roof, Judaism Expanded is an overhaul to the Jewish faith in Europa Universalis V.

Judaism in vanilla Europa Universalis V is a thin minority faith — a handful of scattered pops and little else. Judaism Expanded rebuilds it into a fully realized religion: its own societal values, laws, privileges, advances, schools, buildings, holy sites, and a grand narrative arc that ends with the rebuilding of the Third Temple in Jerusalem.

Play a Jewish realm — or convert into one — and the religion becomes a mechanical identity, not just a spec on the map.

A Jewish religious identity
Two custom societal-value sliders — Tzedek ↔ Chesed (insular order vs open growth) and Halakha ↔ Aggadah (the Law vs the spirit) — steered by your laws, privileges, and religious schools. Several vanilla axes pull on the Jewish poles too, so choices you make outside Judaism still shape it. Religious schools work as identity, not correction — pick the one that matches who you are.

Nine Jewish schools and traditions
Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and Mizrahi as regional traditions within Rabbinic Judaism; Talmudic, Kabbalist, Hasidic, Mussar, and Gemilut Chasadim as theological and ethical schools within it; and Karaite as the distinct stream that holds to the written Tanakh alone. Each carries its own modifiers and societal-value pull. Adopting the Karaite path is a structural commitment — synagogues become kenesot, yeshivot become batei midrash karaite, the rabbinic Diaspora Ingathering and Hevra Kadisha are replaced by Karaite equivalents, and the realm gains the closed-community Karaim Quarter town right.

Laws, privileges, advances
Four Jewish-themed law groups (Beth Din courts, Tzedakah welfare, Diaspora Administration, Diaspora Economics), estate privileges including a Diaspora/Zealotry stance, a full advance tree across all six ages, and eleven religious aspects.

Buildings & ten holy sites
Synagogue (replaces the cathedral), Yeshivah, Mikveh, Great Synagogue, diaspora Jewish Quarter. Holy sites: Jerusalem, Mount Sinai, Hebron, Safed, Nablus, Cairo, Baghdad, Worms, Hamadan, and Gonder.

Events & religious actions
Conversion-to-Judaism chain, festivals, Bar / Bat Mitzvah at the religious ages (13 / 12), diaspora ingathering, the Portuguese Nation of Amsterdam, wandering rabbis and refugee scholars. Actions to consecrate synagogues, establish the faith in a province, call communities back to Abraham, and — when holding conquered Christian territory — dissolve the monasteries for a gold windfall and a real stability hit.

The Jewish intellectual tradition
Three flavor events surface the great internal debates: the Shulchan Aruch reception (Sephardi, Ashkenazi, or Mizrahi-Yemenite paths), the long shadow of the Maimonidean controversy (endorse, restrict, or disavow philosophical study), and the 1772 Herem of Vilna (Mitnagdim, Hasidim, or third-way refusal).

The diaspora in peril
Jewish communities live under the Jewish Charter in Christendom and the Dhimma under Islam — both granted by default, both shielding from forced conversion. A zealous realm can revoke that protection; without it, a realm may issue Expel the Jewish Community. The historical expulsions — France 1394, the Alhambra Decree of 1492, Portugal 1497, Sicily, Provence, Naples — play out as dated events you can shape.

Semien — the Beta Israel realm
Semien, the realm of the Beyte Yisrael of the Ethiopian highlands, exists at the 1337 start as a small Jewish nation, vassal of Christian Ethiopia. The natural choice to begin a Judaism Expanded campaign as.

Embrace the First Faith
Eighteen realms with a historical or counter-historical tie to Judaism — Yemen, France, Castile, Aragon, Navarre, Portugal, Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, Mamluk Egypt, Avaria, plus the Lowlands (Flanders, Holland, Brabant) and Italy (Venice, Florence, Genoa, Naples) — can embrace Judaism once in the opening decade. A heavy stability shock either way. Avaria’s AI embraces by design; the rest are a player’s choice.

Centers of the Nation
Fourteen historic Jewish cities tracked as long-term goals: Salonica, Constantinople, Venice, Livorno, Prague, Kraków, Lublin, Vilna, Buda, Safed, Cairo, Baghdad, Fez, Aleppo. Hold one as a Jewish-majority core and it becomes a Center of the Nation — Jewish Quarter, a local boost, and a permanent thematic bonus (Salonica’s looms, Venice’s Hebrew presses, Fez’s goldsmiths, Vilna’s yeshivot).

The Restoration of the Holy Land
The capstone. Hold Jerusalem as a core long enough and a multi-decade chain begins — the diaspora stirs, the realm is proclaimed Judea, and the Third Temple is raised as a work of years across three construction stages, hastenable at double price. At completion: the Dedication choice — restore the ancient sacrificial service, or hold to the rabbinic age of prayer. A unique government reform (Exilarch, Sanhedrin, or Kahal) crowns the new kingdom, and Judea-only advances follow. The standing Temple draws sharp religious antagonism with the wider Christian and Muslim worlds.

More events and cross-realm interactions; proper art (most icons and illustrations are placeholder); eventually Samaritanism as a sister-religion expansion; ongoing balance tuning from your feedback. No timelines promised — just where the mod is heading.

• Built for game version 1.2.5.
• Overrides the vanilla judaism religion entry (re-themed and expanded).
• Overrides a handful of vanilla entries: the cathedral, monastery, and slave-market buildings, the jewish_district building, several estate privileges, the invite_foreign_cleric price, the change_main_school action, and several parliament issues.
• Conflicts with mods that re-define the same vanilla entries; coexists with add-only mods.
• Rise of the Norse — coexists cleanly; the cathedral gate excludes both Jewish and Norse realms in our override, and a monthly sweep catches any cathedral that slips through.

Active development. Mechanics are in and playtested; most art is still placeholder.

Please comment below with bugs, oddities, balance feedback, or feature requests. Reports with the what nation / what year / what happened are especially helpful.

Modders welcome — use this mod as inspiration, reference, or base for your own work. Credit appreciated but never required.

With thanks to the Improved Culture Dynamics mod, whose Jewish charter mechanic inspired this mod’s own; the Rise of the Norse mod, whose Norse-faith overhauls led to thinking about overhauling other faiths; and the Workshop commenters whose careful reads — particularly on Jewish thought and tradition — have shaped this mod’s framing more than once.

If you enjoy the mod, a rating and a favorite help others find it. Thank you for playing.