the name jew, as everybody knows, comes from jerusalem, but that seems to be an addition to the city's name which was anciently ursalem or rusalem. the ur part of this seems to be of importance.
the hebrew legend is of course that abraham came from sumeria and while this is difficult to impossible to corroborate the ur part of jerusalem does seem to actually be sumerian, rather than semitic. that seems to be correct.
the best we can do with archaeology is point out that something happened after cyrus. there may or may not have been an assyrian destruction horizon. it's not entirely clear. but something happened with the persians, and the people that we call the jews after about -550 showed up with them, from iraq, under heavy zoroastrian religious influence, and apparently adopting phoenician language when they got there.
what exactly happened to the sumerians is a really foundational question because we know now that they were so important. they weren't semites - they weren't babylonians, assyrians or arabs. they weren't elamites or any of the early indo-european groups. they seem to have come from the caucasus mountains, where kartvelian and armenian people live today.
and they may have kind of become jews, sort of, in a way we don't really understand. that seems to be what happened to them, somehow.