Why do Christians think that Jews 'believe' in God?

Jewish answer: that's pretty lame.

"Hear, O Israel, the Lord is your Gd, the Lord is One." that is the prayer said twice a day by Jews.

Sorry, it's actually hard to type because your assertion is so ludicrous as to be mind numbing. Exodus is about proving the Gd of Abraham and freeing the Jews from bondage and receiving the word of Gd.

When Moses brought the law to the Hebrews they said: "We obey, we hear" - note the order of that. They agreed to obey Gd before even hearing what He was insisting on.

Leviticus is the laws on how to live according to the word of the Gd of Abraham and HOW TO WORSHIP Him in the Temple

The ENTIRE Torah is faith based, faith that has led Jews to refuse assimilation, suffer oppression, massacres, resistance against forced conversions, exiles and the Holocaust because Jews refuse to abandon their worship of the Gd of Abraham as He instructed.

How strong would your faith be facing a gas chamber or firing squad?

I don't think anyone who answered understood what you were saying.

Minor quips however --

Abraham first understood God through his own logic

This was not faith -- it was reasoning

Then he had several personal revelations of God.

Thus to follow your thread -- he did not have faith - he had personal knowledge

On the other hand, while our ancestors stood at Sinai,

we (modern Jews) did not have a personal revelation - we still require faith in our ancestral tradition.

Thus, while different from the Christian or Muslim faith in the missionaries and the book writers,

we DO need faith that our nation as a whole has transmitted the truth.

@Fitz - there was an initial national revelation and acceptance of the overal Sinaitic covenant.

Then the nation authorized Moses to go alone up the mountain to get the rest of the details.

Its all written up in there - take a look (I think in Exodus 19 or 20)

Exodus 20:5

You must not bow down to them or worship them, for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God who will not tolerate your affection for any other gods. I lay the sins of the parents upon their children; the entire family is affected--even children in the third and fourth generations of those who reject me.

-edit-

"God never asked the People of Israel to be believed in." -- My quote above says different.

"He didn't have to because they had witnessed the giving of the Torah at Mt Sinai." -- Only Moses saw this. He went up the mountain alone if you recall.

"Witness testimony is evidential proof accepted as fact, including in modern law practice, so there is no need to 'believe'." -- Only based on the reliability of the witness. Moses' reliabilitycannot be verified, in fact his very existence cannot be verified. It also speaks to nothing of science or history which is not validated by courts. They have no say. Some people insist the Earth is flat, does their testimony make it so?

"For this reason Shma is NOT a statement of 'faith', but an affirmation of this factual knowledge passed down from generation to generation." -- False conclusion.

"Abraham had not witnessed at Sinai, which is why he believed in God, which speaks volumes about him as a person." -- Abraham believed in god because god spoke to him. Same level of validity as Moses.

"Belief is falsifiable, evidence through witness testimony is not." -- Unless you can determine that person is lying. It's absolutely falsifiable. In fact, eyewitness testimony is the lowest form of evidence outside of a courtroom. Courtrooms do not determine reality.

"Yet every Christian I have ever met seems to think I need to believe in something I already know." -- You don't know it, you believe it. That's why it's called faith. If you knew it, you could prove it, and eyewitness testimony (as already mentioned) is not reliable evidence, it's just anecdotal.

Seriously?

If they call Abraham the father of their faith, they believe. Read Genesis 12:1-9. Abraham met with, talked to and followed God. Genesis 15:6 says that Abram (Abraham) believed in, trusted, had faith in the Lord and He (God) counted it to him (Abraham) as righteousness. Some things just go without saying. This sounds like a case of straining at gnats while swallowing camels.

I think you are obtaining your main premise by restricting the notion of belief to instances in which that particular word turns up in whatever translation you're using. Also, it's unclear whether you are really restricting your basis to the Torah, which is only one part of the Hebrew scriptures.

You should consider reworking this question to make sense.

I think most Christians believe the Jews worship the God of Abraham but don't believe Jesus is His Son...they're still waiting on the first coming of the Messiah. I know there are different sects of Jews and different viewpoint of Christians but I think this is a pretty good overview of Christian's understanding of the Jews.

That's not true. He cared a great deal when the Israelites built the golden calf to worship.

They do believe in God!

It's an instructional religion and instruction cannot be maintained without validation, rapport or trust.

He didn't? Yet God thumped them at times when they didn't trust him.

Maybe you didn't realize that they were past the belief part and into the confidence part already. You are still at square one, and they . . . well they didn't get too far passed square one either.

Some things just never change, right?

God asks them for their obedience and their obedience demonstrates their faith.