That Judaism is "a major world religion" is begging the question, isn't it? Not much influence on the majority of the world's peoples (Asia), and as a nonevangelical tradition, it didn't really have a "message" to sell non-Jews until liberal Jews became major exponents of civil rights in the US.

I would ask, instead, how Judaism managed to survive at all. They took on the Romans three times between 66 CE and 136 CE, ending in decisive Roman victory and Jewish destruction. Maintaining a coherent social group in exile after that kind of stomping is an interesting achievement; perhaps someone knows a supportable explanation?

It's important to note that today's rabbinical Judaism is distinct from the religion of the ancient Israelites. While there is a direct relationship, the practice of the Israelites was greatly changed and adopted during the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BCE. It transitioned from a religion centered around animal sacrifice and pilgrimage to the Temple Mount, to one of scholarly practice dedicated to prayer and study of the scripture. This period of history still has a lot shrouded in mystery, but it's clear there was a concerted effort to preserve the practices of the Israelites and adopt them to a more "modern" context. It is during this period, that the Jews formed a rigid set of guidelines around what was canon, how it could be recorded, and how it could be disseminated. Of all of the semitic languages surviving today, the "block" text of biblical and modern Hebrew is by far the closest and most mutually intelligible of scripts with the ancient Aramaic that was the lingua franca of the region. Persian, Arabic and many non-Cyrillic central Asian scripts all rose from the ancient Aramaic alphabet. The extremely strict rules around what constitutes a religiously viable copy of the Torah most likely contributed to a continuity of belief, language and practice that helped Judaism resist some of the cultural erosion that would come with being a minority in a multi-denominational region of the world.

The Levant was also an important cultural and economic center throughout the Hellenic period. Jews were well-known and involved in the world economy, particularly as Judea lay at the crossroads of many ancient trade routes.

The Catholic church definitely had a huge role to play in the dissemination of Jewish awareness and thought as well.

There are many ways to examine and answer this question. The question "Why did the Israelites thrive while other Semitic traditions died out?" I think would be based on a misconception. First, the Israelites did not thrive. They had a brief golden-age monarchy, but they were pretty solidly wiped out by the Romans. Second, A lot of Semitic traditions were placed on a continuum of languages spoken, dieties worshiped, and beliefs held. The delineations of this religion vs that were not so clear, but more which regions worshiped which deities. You will still find remnants of other Semitic traditions in the teachings of Judaism, including the various names used to refer to God and tales of angels or demons which shared names with figures worshiped or revered in other regions.

Can you clarify why you assert that Judaism became a prominent major world religion? Do you mean through its "successors" of Christianity and Islam?