Thanks for the clarification.
If I remember correctly, the reason why Islam takes its form the way it does is because Mohammed tried to be Jewish to begin with, but after being rejected by the Jewish sect he was attempting to join, he invented his own religion that took on the superficial shape of Judaism (dietary laws, strict monotheism, etc.).
Christianity, on the other hand, was an outreach of a Jewish radical to Gentiles, in order to keep Judaism from being eliminated from the Earth and avoidance of a return to the days of Noah.
Syncretism caused a bunch of problems, surely, but still the Jewish people survived because of these Gentile allies and the Gentile preservation of Jewish texts, which otherwise would have been lost to history.
Jesus, a simple carpenter who became a healer, accomplished what the Jewish priests and warrior Zealots could not: the spread of Judaism across the entire world.
Yes, I think we agree in much, but not all.
Judaism survived, though, not because of, but in spite of Christianity. No need to go here into the long and tragic history of Christian anti-Semitism, pogroms, etc. I assume you know that bitter history. Judaism was popular and thriving at the time of Jesus, with many converts throughout the Roman Empire.
With the continued learning of the holy texts and the redaction of the oral tradition, there was without any break a continuity of the diaspora Jewish people, now exiled from their land in the year 70 when the Second Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. In addition and, yes, eventually widely, Christianity spread the Five Books of Moses, the Prophets, and the Writings, and Psalms widely, albeit the mistranslations into 70 languages led in some cases to some mighty wrong ideas about the meaning of the actual text of the Hebrew originals.
The corpus of Judaism’s sacrosanct written works and the equally important oral tradition of Jewish law and learning and traditions survived the destruction in the Second Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 of the common era because a small group of leaders/scholars were given permission to move their learning apparatus
to Yavne with a core group of scholar teachers. From Wikipedia: “Yavneh is considered to be the most significant site for post-biblical Jewish history after Jerusalem, since it was here that modern Judaism was born after the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70 CE and the loss of the Second Temple, until then the centre of religious identity for the Jews.[4] The process started in Yavneh after 70 CE was essential for adapting Judaism to a new situation where there was no central Temple, in terms of laws, calendar, and liturgy.[4] This became the base for Jewish religious practice throughout the world until today.[4]
After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, Rabban Yochanan Ben Zakkai moved the Sanhedrin to Yavne.”