Falasha

"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.
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"This book is the inaugural volume in a new series on Jewish Ethnography called “Jewish Cultures of the World,” edited by Matti Bunzl and Jeffrey Shandler.

Synopsis: “One People, One Blood” is an ethnographic study of Ethiopian Jews whose ancestors converted to Christianity and are today clamoring for the right to ‘Return to Judaism’ and claim citizenship in the State Israel. It focuses on the lived experience of these refugees and on the complex moral and political controversy over their ongoing cultural and religious transformation. This is the first ethnography ever devoted to this group, or to the cultural politics of Ethiopian Judaism. I argue that epistemological limitations in the study of religious experience ought to be taken into account by Israeli policy makers who decide “who is a Jew” based on uncritical assumptions about the nature of religious conversion. I also use the ‘Feres Mura’ dilemma to raise broader questions about the nature of Jewishness and the political role of academic scholarship.
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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.

This paper investigates two types of terracotta figurine, both from East African cultures, which are unusual in their resemblance to ceramic statuettes from pre-Indo-European south-eastern Europe (Old Europe) and the Ancient Near East (6th-1st millennium BCE).  The first type consists of a “phallic female” style of fertility doll from the Samburu or Turkana peoples of northern Kenya, in which an obviously phallic body-shape is given unmistakably female attributes such as breasts (“Gudza doll;” Section 1). The result resembles the well-known Amlash idols from Iran of the early 1st millennium BCE. The second type consists of figurines that look like Neolithic to Iron Age fertility statuettes of Eurasian provenance and includes an Astarte-like bird-headed goddess nursing an infant (Section 2). These were made by Beta Israel (Falasha) women from the Gondar region of Ethiopia. In recent years, most of this Jewish community has relocated to Israel. Many surprises are encountered in unravelling the origins, creation, use and appreciation of these two groups of curious and challenging artifacts. Ranging from Australopithecus to Zimbabwe, from Baba Yaga to Beta Israel and from Yemen to semen, the over-arching narrative could equally well have been titled "The Sex-Lives of Statuettes."

The isolated mention of the existence of a powerful Jewish polity in the Horn of Africa by Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela in the twelfth century AD has generally been given such credence by the twentieth-century orientalistes that it is often considered the first mention of the people later to be known as Falasha. This short passage has indeed engendered a large amount of scholarly literature, which has partially obscured the wider historical and geographical context to which it refers and in which it was produced. Beyond his formulation of the hypothesis of this Jewish polity, which, it will be argued, probably never existed, this article suggests that Benjamin's Jewish viewpoint has much more to tell us about the regional scene than has been recognized. First, analyzed as an itinerary, Benjamin's text sheds new light on the trading routes of the time. Second, the comparison of this text with other sources from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries provides new perspectives on the religious, political, and economic intricacies of the time, a context in which, it is suggested, Benjamin's confusion about the identity of the polity he describes makes sense. Finally, while it probably does not constitute a reflection on a political entity that existed in actual fact, Benjamin's narrative, with all its ambiguities, may be considered a rather faithful mirror of the social complexity of the communities near the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa, which are at the crossroads of several worlds

"This liturgical book is preserved in Beta Israel (Falasha)'s usage but it is, basically, a Second Temple Jewish liturgical cycle encompassing the 52 (53 for the Sabbatical year) weeks of the 364-day year.

I proposed some calendrical and liturgical reconstruction.

Among the shared 2nd Temple traditions is various interesting stuff incl. the Apocalypse of Abraham.

I hope that this paper will be read as an invitation to explore more. The text is very dense and very rich.

Moreover, I missed completely the inclusions in Qemant (because I don't know this language at all)."