The difference of opinion on Jewish history revolves around the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE, which led to the earlier religion developing in new ways to survive.
When the Babylonians destroyed the kingdom of Judah and its First Temple, forcing the Israelite people into exile in Babylonia for nearly fifty years, it made it clear to the exiled people that religious law and history had to be put in written form, resulting in the Hebrew Bible.
A movement called Reform questioned and modernized traditional Judaism and helped produce the diverse branches within Judaism that exist today.
The Hebrew Bible records that the roots of Judaism go back far into the past to a landless people sometimes called Hebrews and more commonly called Israelites, who traced themselves to an ancestor named Abraham.
The Hebrew Bible is significant not only in terms of the history of the Hebrews but also in terms of its role in the development of Judaism over the past two thousand years.