Black, Poor and Jewish: The Ostracism of Ethiopian Jews in Modern Israel

Abstract

The Beta Israel (House of Israel), who currently number 130,000 citizens within Israel (Flum and Cinamon 2011, 373), are a unique Jewish community with a continuous history of Jewish practice in Ethiopia dating prior to the birth of Christ (for more information on the formation of the Beta Israel, see Santamaria 1993, 405–407). Because the Ethiopian community remained separated from other major Jewish communities in modern-day Israel, Iraq and Iran, the Beta Israel have developed their own traditions of Sabbath observance and legal interpretation. For instance, the Beta Israel have existed without many of the texts and traditions that currently are a part of normative Jewish practice, including a lack of knowledge of the Talmud, the Oral Torah, or law, of Judaism, preserved in written form during the Diaspora.¹ (Santamaria 1993, 406). Furthermore, the Beta Israel inherited the Jewish scriptures in Greek from the Egyptian communities in a translation known as the Septuagint, a translation including extra books such as Jubilees not present in the Hebrew canon (Santamaria 1993, 407). Due to this lack of awareness of Jewish practice post-Second Temple, Ethiopian Judaism theoretically is much closer in practice to Biblical and Second Temple Judaism than Rabbinic and Modern Judaism. Because they do not recognize core religious traditions within Judaism, their status as Jews, especially in the legal sense for purposes of Israeli citizenship, has been called into question by many communities within Israel who seek to define Jewishness as Orthodox Judaism.