Ethiopian Jews

This paper suggests that elaborating Winnicott's idea of ''potential space'' can provide a conceptual approach to psychotherapy across the cultural divide. The first part of the paper discusses the general problematic of intercultural psychotherapy. This is illustrated with an account of therapeutic work with Ethiopian Jews who have migrated to Israel. There is a significant gap between the Ethiopian cultural codes relevant to psychotherapy and those of the Israeli therapist, who is usually trained in the Western psychotherapeutic tradition. A meaningful and effective therapeutic process can take place if psychotherapist and client cocreate a ''mutual creative space.''

The volume "New Directions in Spiritual Kinship: Sacred Ties Across the Abrahamic Religions," edited by Todne Thomas, Asiya Malik and Rose Wellman, undertakes a comparative analysis of "spiritual kinship" (such as God-parenthood) in Christianity, Judaism and Islam. My chapter, "Kinship as Ethical Relation," starts by questioning the usefulness of spiritual kinship as a category for the understanding of Judaism and expands that critique into an alternate model that might be more useful for comparative purposes. I argue that the idea of "Spiritual Kinship" emerges precisely from an a set of Christian taxonomies that are often implicitly or explicitly anti-Jewish (kinship of the flesh vs. kinship of the spirit, the letter and the spirit of the law, etc.) which makes it unsuitable as an "Abrahamic" category. Moreover, the specific ways in which it is unsuitable for comparative purposes actually demonstrate the importance of this category for understanding of Christianity and of the anthropological kinship categories (affinal, consanguineal and fictive)  that were in large measure adapted from European Christian sources. Viewing kinship as a set of ethical relations, by contrast, does indeed allow for useful comparison across these religious divides and makes better sense of the ethnographic and textual data. Examples are brought from both modern and medieval Jewish life.

The Beta Israel, the Ethiopian Jews, have suffered from a negative or complete misrepresentation in the written and oral sources of pre-modern Ethiopia. The term “Jew” was deliberately chosen to stigmatize heretic groups, or any other group deviating from the normative church doctrine. Often no difference was made between Jewish groups or heretic Christians; they were marginalized and persecuted in the harshest way. The article illustrates how Jews are featured in the Ethiopian sources, the apparent patterns in this usage, and the polemic language chosen to describe these people.

For those with an interest in Nigerian claims to Jewish and Judaic traditions, Professor Fatai Ayisa Olasupo’s “Black African Jews, the Nigerian Question and the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel: A Comparison of Igbo and Yoruba Claims to Jewish and Judaic Traditions” (Vol. 7, No. 4, 2014, pp. 49-62) is intriguing.
As it is possible scholars attentive to the topic of Yoruba, Igbo, and smaller Nigerian ethnic groups tracing their roots or origins to the people of Israel may make use of Professor Olasupo’s article, it is useful here to address three errors and misconceptions contained therein, as well as offer some additional comments particularly related to Igbo Jewry.
The first of these misconceptions has to do with the relevance of the Queen of Sheba/Bilikisu Sungbo to Nigerian Jewish identity. It would be a grave misconstruction to interpret the state of Israel’s lack of interest in her supposed burial places as a “bias against blacks.” It is simply that she and the myth of Ethiopia’s Solomonic dynasty are largely outside the purview of Judaism and Jewish national identity. In fact, when the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel, Ovadia Yosef, declared in 1973 that the Jews of Ethiopia (the Beta Israel/House of Israel) should be brought to the state of Israel — thus paving the way for the community’s mass immigration to the Jewish state — he did so without any reference to King Solomon or the Queen of Sheba. Rather, the Chief Rabbi affirmed that the Beta Israel were “from the Tribe of Dan.”
A second error surrounds Professor Olasupo’s claim that the government of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin sent a team to Nigeria to search for the “Lost Tribes” in 1995, but that the outcome of the search has not been made public. In fact, no past or present Israeli governments have undertaken a search for the “Lost Tribes” in Nigeria and there is no search outcome to be made public by Israel’s government.
A third misconception in Professor Olasupo’s article concerns literature produced by Igbo Jews, which actually extends far beyond only one book on Igbo Jewish identity.
In such discussions there is good reason to be wary of “Lost Tribes” fetishists, and there is danger in politicizing Jewish identify. Mutual honesty — between Nigerians and World Jewry — is most important in this matter.

The manuscript tradition of the Betä Ǝsraʾel, the Jews of Ethiopia, has not been studied before. This article aims to provide a first tentative analysis of a number of features of the Betä Ǝsraʾel manuscript tradition, hoping to contribute to a new understanding of this phenomenon. The Betä Ǝsraʾel lived in close coexistence, albeit not always peaceful, with Christian Ethiopians. The Christian manuscripts must be seen as the starting point from which the Betä Ǝsraʾel developed their own tradition, by adopting and adapting scribal features. Previous scholarly works on the Betä Ǝsraʾel have focused mostly on their texts, leaving the carriers of these texts aside. When commenting on the manuscripts, scholars commonly made negative remarks about their quality: a misjudgment that this article hopes to overcome. Some 70 Betä Ǝsraʾel manuscripts have been examined for this study, resulting in new descriptions of their features and even discovering one genuinely new feature.

The Betä Ǝsraʾel (Ethiopian Jews) have a unique history and religious
tradition, one of the most fascinating aspects of which are the
mäloksewočč, commonly referred to as monks in scholarly and popular
literature. The mäloksewočč served as the supreme religious leaders of
the Betä Ǝsraʾel and were charged with educating and initiating Betä
Ǝsraʾel priests. They lived in separate compounds and observed severe
purity laws prohibiting physical contact with the laity. Thus, they
are the only known example in medieval and modern Jewry of ascetic
communities withdrawing from the secular world and devoting themselves fully to religious life.
This book presents the results of the first comprehensive research
ever conducted on the way of life and material culture of the ascetic
religious communities of the Betä Ǝsraʾel. A major part of this
research is an archaeological survey, during which these religious
centres were located and documented in detail for the first time.

A figura da Virgem Maria possui um local central na teologia, liturgia e devoção dos cristãos afro-orientais, membros de antigas comunidades de origem apostólica, que insistiram sempre mais em seu caráter de Mãe de Deus como forma de enfatizar a união hipostática das Naturezas humana e divina na Pessoa de Jesus Cristo. Essa centralidade se expressa também na arte religiosa e em numerosos textos, entre os quais se incluem canções populares, poemas devotos, homilias comemorativas, tratados teológicos e coletâneas de milagres atribuídos à Virgem. Um dos mais impressionantes destes escritos é a "Anáfora de Santa Maria", tradicionalmente atribuída a Abba Ciríaco (ou Heráclito) de Behnesa (el-Bahnasa ou Oxirrinco), utilizada na Divina Liturgia da Igreja Etíope algumas vezes por ano - nas mais importantes festas marianas, na véspera do Natal, na véspera e no dia da Anunciação e na comemoração do mesmo São Ciríaco. Como bem se sabe, a liturgia etíope deriva em larga medida da liturgia copta, em função da ligação milenar entre as Igrejas de Alexandria e da Abissínia, mas desenvolveu uma série de características originais a partir da absorção de elementos autóctones, do peso de sua herança semítica e de significativas influências siríacas. A "Anáfora de Santa Maria" de Abba Ciríaco de Behnesa é justamente uma das peças originais da Etiópia cristã, pois em nenhuma outra das liturgias hoje conhecidas preservou-se uma oração eucarística que faz menção à Virgem de modo tão específico. O objetivo deste artigo é, partindo de uma contextualização histórica, apresentar este texto e identificar como nele aparece figurada a Mãe de Jesus.

"The Kebra Nagast" i.e. the"glory of kings of Ethiopia." The work has been held in peculiar honor in Abyssinia for several countries, and throughout that country, it has been, and still is, venerated by the people ass containing the final proof of their descent from the Hebrew patriarchs, and of kingship of their kings of Solomonic line with Christ, the son of God. (Sir E.A. Wallis Budge, 2000)

This paper focuses on a number of cases of Ethiopian Israelis, and examines the context of the language used to describe them in the media. The aim of the study is threefold:
a) To review samples of media coverage of Ethiopian Israelis since their immigration to Israel, in order to discover if there is a biased/stereotypical description of them.
b) To determine – according to the electronic media and the press – whether Ethiopian Israelis are integrated into Israeli society or are marginalized and seen as the "other".
c) To show instances of successful Ethiopian Israelis who have become role models and a source of pride for the entire Ethiopian Israeli community. On television and in the press this group is still perceived as immigrants who are not fully integrated into Israeli society. This study scrutinizes instances of bias in reporting on Ethiopian Israelis and forces us to heighten our awareness of possible discrimination in the media.

Between 1984 and 1996, public health authorities in Israel maintained a secret policy of discarding blood donations made by Ethiopian-Israeli citizens and immigrants. Officials later attempted to justify this policy on the grounds that immigrants from Ethiopia were subject to high rates of infectious disease (especially HIV). In 1996, this led to an explosive and violent confrontation between Ethiopian-Israeli protestors and agents of the state, including police and public health authorities. This essay explores the cultural and political context of that confrontation, including the discourse of political violence which it occasioned. The conflict between Ethiopian-Israelis and the state was located within a wider set of political contexts, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which was linked to it through a shared trope of “spilled blood” common to both. Cultural analyses which ignore this dynamic political context are in danger of seriously misrepresenting the meaning of the “Blood Affair” to its participants. At the same time, this essay also engages a critical analysis of the public health policies which led to the crisis. Public health and nationalist discourse reinforced one another at the expense of Ethiopian immigrants in general, and so-called “Feres Mura” Ethiopians in particular.

La plupart des Israéliens s’entendent pour dire que l’été 2011 a été le théâtre d’événements sans précédent en Israël. De juillet à septembre, le chaos et l’incertitude ont régné, tandis que les masses envahissaient spontanément les rues pour exprimer leur mécontentement. Si de nombreuses revendications ont été — par exemple diminuer les inégalités sociales, réduire le coût de la vie, augmenter l’emploi, prêter assistance aux personnes vulnérables et améliorer les services —, force est de constater que les tenants du mouvement ont cherché à éviter les tensions internes, notamment en évitant de soulever les problèmes sociaux qui affligent les minorités ethniques. La présente analyse propose de contraster la réalité des manifestants ashkénazes, pour la plupart, avec celle de trois minorités établies à l’intérieur des limites d’Israël: les juifs éthiopiens, les Palestiniens citoyens d’Israël, plus particulièrement les Bédouins, et finalement les travailleurs migrants non-juifs.

This paper presents results of the first field trip aimed at locating and studying the remains of Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jewish) monasteries, as part of an ongoing research project aimed at shedding light on Beta Israel monasticism. Prior to this field trip, no Beta Israel monastery had ever been mapped, and no study focused on these monasteries has ever been conducted. On the trip, two former Beta Israel villages north of Lake Tana were examined: Amba Gwalit and Aṭeyä. At Amba Gwalit, the remains of a Beta Israel holy site, which may have been a monastery containing a synagogue and surrounded by an enclosure wall, were documented. In a nearby Beta Israel cemetery, the tomb of a well-known Beta Israel monk was found. At Aṭeyä, remains of well-preserved Beta Israel dwellings were examined. Both sites demonstrated that Beta Israel material culture in Ethiopia is sufficiently preserved to enable further research aimed at locating and examining Beta Israel monasteries.

Published in: Robert W. Jensen and Eugene Korn editors, Swords into Plowshares:  Reflections on Religion and Violence (Essays from the Institute for Theological Inquiry).  Center for Jewish and Christian Understanding and Cooperation (Kindle Edition 2014).


ABSTRACT


 
Don Seeman, the author of the chapter

“Violence, Divine Honor and the State,” has published a number

of studies touching on the relationship between the idea of divine honor and religious violence in different Jewish intellectual settings and he has also written as an anthropologist on the relationship between honor and political violence in modern Israel. Here, for the first time, he offers a synthetic reading that attempts to account for the close relationship between the anthropological and theological registers and to account in a systematic way for differences in approach between Jewish thinkers as diverse as Maimonides, R. Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto, Rav Kook, Moses Mendelssohn and Emmanuel Levinas. He begins with a phenomenological critique of the way honor and shame have been treated in recent

social science literature. He argues that honor and shame are “bridge concepts” that are applied in

classical conceptions to human beings as well as to God and that they therefore help to condition theological as well as political or anthropological conceptions of ethics and violence. After brief analyses of key biblical and rabbinic texts, Seeman argues that Jewish approaches to divine honor and violence can be divided into three dominant paradigms: vernacular, mystical and philosophical. The vernacular paradigm treats divine honor in anthropomorphic terms that are indistinguishable from those used to explain human social relations and recourse to violence. The mystical or kabbalistic paradigm builds, in a sense, on this robust vernacular sensibility, but adds a distinctive and subtle metaphysics of divine presence. This is the context in which the utter rejection of the vernacular sensibility by philosophical Judaism

—

exemplified by Maimonides and by modern thinkers such as Moses Mendelssohn

—

takes on such importance. Seeman argues that the very shape of Jewish modernity has been conditioned by arguments over the nature of divine honor and by the political ramifications of those differences. The rejection of vernacular divine honor is a central theme of

Mendelssohn’s



Jerusalem

to which contemporary Jews are still implicitly or explicitly responding. We cannot understand the complex relationships between religion, violence and the state without a much better understanding of these dynamics.


"

During the course of a study of the manuscript tradition of the Betä Ǝsraʾel (Ethiopian Jews), MS JER NLI Or. 87 came to light. This codex is a unique manuscript with several important elements contributing to the knowledge of the history of the Betä Ǝsraʾel. Its most important feature, by far, are two short additional notes that have been termed here
the Hoḫwärwa genealogy. This genealogy is the second piece of original pre-twentieth century Betä Ǝsraʾel historiography ever discovered, alongside the Religious Dispute.
Taking the manuscript as a starting point, this article is to embrace subjects such as the Betä Ǝsraʾel scribal tradition, aspects of its literature, monasticism, the history of the Hoḫwärwa monastery, and the history of the manuscript itself.

Based on ethnographic research I conducted as senior honors student, this paper examines the ways in which Ethiopians in Israel talk about race and color as elements of both distinction and shared identity in the context of meetings with African Americans, white Israeli and American Jews and Black Hebrews in Israel

The State of Israel was consolidated in the early twentieth century as the homeland of the Jewish people. While nominally secular, it also acknowledged in law and practice the complex , possibly inextricable relationship between ethnic, religious and national or genealogical forms of imagining what it means to be a Jew in the modern world. In one celebrated Supreme Court case, it was made clear that a "Jew," for purposes of immigration, could not include someone who clearly identified in a religious sense with Christianity. Yet the demography of Israel has been changing through mass immigration (especially from the USSR and Ethiopia) as well as strong foreign missionary efforts. In the Ethiopian case, tens of thousands of individuals immigrated over the last two decades who were considered by the state to be descendants of converts to Orthodox (or Protestant) Christianity: their case was normalized, from the state's point of view, by encouraging them to undergo a state-sponsored "return to Judaism" program that brought ethnic and religious grounds of identification back into synch. Yet this has remained contested and conflictual at both the policy level and the level of everyday, vernacular experience of Ethiopians. Moreover, a smaller but even more challenging group of Ethiopians, from the state's point of view, have begun, with other Jewish Israelis, to embrace various forms of Messianic Judaism and charismatic Christianity in Israel--making a frontal collision with the state's basic imaginary almost inevitable. My paper, grounded in ethnographic fieldwork among both groups of Ethiopian-Israelis,  begins to pry apart the  tortured relationship between Christianity and Jewishness in the Ethiopian case: its corollaries in everyday religion, distinctive practices of aversion or mimesis, and its explosive political implications for Israeli self-understanding.

İnternet-Görüş/Analiz:
“Etiyopya Yahudileri İsrail İçin Ciddi Bir İç Sorun”,
Anadolu Ajansı, 08 Temmuz 2019, <https://www.aa.com.tr/tr/analiz/etiyopya-yahudileri-israil-icin-ciddi-bir-ic-sorun/1525976>.

Ana dili Amharice olan, muhtevası bir ölçüde farklı kutsal metinlerini Ge’ez denen yerel bir dilde okuyan, diyet uygulamalarında diğer Yahudilerden farklılaşan, ibadetlerini “mescit” adını verdikleri sinagoglarda yapan bu toplumu kabullenmek hiç kolay olmadı

O estudo de história da África e das religiões e religiosidades africanas ainda é feito no Brasil quase que só de modo necessariamente vinculado à história das religiões e religiosidades afro-brasileiras e da diáspora africana no Brasil, o que é compreensível em função da história e da conjuntura particular deste tipo de investigação, mas também um tanto quanto limitador. Olhar para outros cenários socioculturais, políticos, econômicos e religiosos na história do continente que não exclusivamente os das sociedades afro-ocidentais envolvidas no ecúmeno imperial lusitano é um dos testes de maturidade para a consolidação cá entre nós dos estudos de história da África e das religiões e religiosidades africanas. Neste sentido, pode ser de grande auxílio o contato com uma obra como a do Prof. Amsalu Tefera dedicada à edição crítica e contextualização da "Dǝrsanä Ṣǝyon", "Homilia [em honra] de Sião", texto do século XV que nos remete a importantes questões referentes à tradição religiosa e à construção da autoridade política da Etiópia medieval.

The Beta Israel, the Ethiopian Jews, have suffered from a negative or complete misrepresentation in the written and oral sources of pre-modern Ethiopia. The term “Jew” was deliberately chosen to stigmatize heretic groups, or any other group deviating from the normative church doctrine. Often no difference was made between Jewish groups or heretic Christians; they were marginalized and persecuted in the harshest way. The article illustrates how Jews are featured in the Ethiopian sources, the apparent patterns in this usage, and the polemic language chosen to describe these people.

This article discusses the reactions of Israelis in the public space to 'mixed families' that include members of Ethiopian origin, written from the perspective of members of such families. The findings reveal that Israelis still react to the dark skin color of Ethiopians in mixed families and that, in most cases, 'black colors white', that is, behavior toward the mixed family is determined mainly by the presence of its black member. The three typical responses are as follows: (1) expressions of surprise at the presence of an Ethiopian in the family, evincing a stereotypical view of Ethiopian immigrants and their place in Israeli society; (2) invasions of privacy that are perceived by the family members as greatly exaggerated when compared with Israeli norms; and (3) declarations of appreciation for/admiration of the 'white' partner in the family for 'lifting up' the 'black' person through a (supposedly) altruistic act. The major conclusion is that Israeli society has yet to accept mixed families that include Jews of Ethiopian origin as a normative category.

How can we do counseling and psychotherapy across the cultural divide? A principle of "mutual creative space" is presented as a basis for a meaningful and effective encounter. The paper focuses on individual psychotherapy/counseling (separate paper on clinical group work). Seven sub-categories of that principle are given, with elaborate examples of how to use them effectively within the therapeutic and related contexts. The concept has been carried over to education, occupational therapy, physical therapy, and vocational training, among others.

This article, published in HaAretz, contextualizes recent protests by the Israeli Ethiopian community following the shooting of Solomon Teka, arguing that the ongoing stereotypical portrayal of Africa - for instance in travel columns - both reflects and perpetuates public attitudes towards Ethiopian Jews.

Manuscript NLi Ms. Or. 87  contains as an additional text the second original piece of Betä Ǝsraʾel historiography ever to be discovered. This historiographical text is a monastic genealogy for Abba Wärqe, a monk of Hoharwa – the most important Betä Ǝsraʾel monastery, located on one of the seven holy mountains of this religious group.

A full scholarly article devoted to this outstanding manuscript will appear in Aethiopica. International Journal for Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies 23, 2020.

O Corão, texto sagrado do Islã, parece desconfortavelmente hermético para os seus leitores ocidentais, de modo que a interpretação de sua narrativa continua dependente, por um lado, das leituras devotas dos muçulmanos ou, por outro, das abordagens demasiado interessadas dos orientalistas. Passando por alto as considerações de ordem teológica a respeito de sua formação e difusão, não se pode deixar de considerar que se trata da mais relevante das fontes documentais para se compreender o surgimento e o período formativo da terceira das religiões abraâmicas. Uma abordagem histórico-crítica adequadamente respeitosa de suas partes, portanto, faz-se necessária àqueles interessados no período e espaço sociocultural do qual ele dá notícias. O que se pretende fazer no presente trabalho é justamente uma incursão experimental neste sentido, focada na Sura 105, conhecida como sendo d’O elefante. Não se quer interpretar o texto por meio do texto, em perspectiva meramente exegética, em última análise estéril aos historiadores e críticos culturais, mas, partindo de alguns elementos localizáveis, direta ou indiretamente, neste fragmento, fazer referência ao intrincado contexto geopolítico da Península Arábica de fim do século VI/início do século VII d.C., horizonte de referência necessário para se entender o conteúdo específico da pregação de Muhammad e o desenvolvimento inicial do Islã.

The study focuses on Ethiopian Jewish women's struggles with language usage and social adaptation. The study aims to (a) evaluate the importance of knowledge and usage of Amharic in their daily lives, (b) evaluate the importance of knowledge and usage of Hebrew in their daily lives and (c) identify the differences in Israeli and Ethiopian Jewish cultures. The study was based on data collected and analyzed from a questionnaire that was distributed to a class of Ethiopian Jewish women who study English at a school in Netanya, Israel. The findings showed that while all of the participants speak Amharic, there are differences in literacy in Amharic among them. All of them have difficulties in Hebrew, but see Hebrew as the vehicle for upward mobility within Israeli society. They view Israeli culture as one that is lacking in politeness, respect and dignity, which is very much part of the fabric of the Ethiopian Jewish lifestyle. There is also a strong desire to preserve the past by preserving their language. This study promotes a new dimension to the study of Ethiopian Jewish women (Kayam & Hirsch, in press) in that it adds to the study of language acquisition in the immigrant setting.