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One People, One Blood X Jewish Cultures of the World Edited by Matti Bunzl, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Jeffrey Shandler, Rutgers University

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One People, One Blood X Jewish Cultures of the World Edited by Matti Bunzl, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Jeffrey Shandler, Rutgers University One People, One Blood X Jewish Cultures of the World Edited by Matti Bunzl, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Jeffrey Shandler, Rutgers University Advisory Board Yoram Bilu, Hebrew University Jonathan Boyarin, University of North Carolina Virginia R. Dominguez, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, New York University Jack Kugelmass, University of Florida Riv-Ellen Prell, University of Minnesota Aron Rodrigue, Stanford University Mark Slobin, Wesleyan University Yael Zerubavel, Rutgers University One People, One Blood X Ethiopian-Israelis and the Return to Judaism Don Seeman rutgers university press new brunswick, new jersey, and london Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Seeman, Don, 1968– One people, one blood : Ethiopian-Israelis and the return to Judaism / Don Seeman. p. cm.—(Jewish cultures of the world) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–8135–4541–7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Jews, Ethiopian—Israel. 2. Jews—Ethiopia—History. 3. Judaism—Ethiopia. 4. Feres Mura. 5. Ethiopia—Ethnic relations. I. Title. DS113.8.F34S44 2009 305.892'4063—dc22 2007037880 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. A previous version of chapter two appeared in the Journal for Religion in Africa. A previ- ous version of chapter six appeared in the journal Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry. Copyright © 2009 by Don Seeman All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, elec- tronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our Web site: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America For Debra, and to the families whose lives I have shared. .ʭʣʠʬ ʭʣʠʤ-ʡʬ ʯʫ --ʭʩʰʴʬ ʭʩʰʴʤ ʭʩʮʫ ʦʫ ʩʬʹʮ (Proverbs 27:19) Loss, mourning, the longing for memory, the desire to enter into the world around you and having no idea how to do it, the fear of observing too coldly, or too distractedly or too raggedly, the rage of cowardice, the insight that is always arriving late, as defiant hindsight, a sense of the utter uselessness of writing anything and yet the burning desire to write something, are the stopping places along the way. At the end of the voyage, if you are lucky, you catch a glimpse of a lighthouse and you are grateful. Life, after all, is bountiful. —Ruth Behar, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 A Death in Addis Ababa 12 2 The Question of Kinship 41 3 Purity of Heart 62 4 Returning to Judaism 84 5 Absorption 109 6 Blood and Terror 150 7 The “Feres Mura” Dilemma 180 Notes 213 References 215 Index 233 vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS An ethnographic study of this nature can only succeed as a work of friend- ship. My warmest and most profound thanks go to the many individuals and families who have opened their homes and lives to me over the years, and who continue to do so today. This book could not have been written without each of you, although I cannot for your own sakes mention you by name. Those whose pseudonyms appear in this book—Desta, Rachel, Meles, Yossi, Yitzhak—you know who you are, my brothers and sisters. My fieldwork was also greatly facilitated by many other individuals whose role in these events is more public. Thanks to former member of Knesset Addisu Messele and founders of the South Wing to Zion organization Avraham Neguse and Yafet Alamo for many enlightening conversations; to Rabbi Menahem Waldman for allowing me to observe the “Return to Judaism” program up close with- out precondition; to Joseph Feit and Barbara Gordon at the North American Conference on Ethiopian Jews for access to the compound in Addis Ababa; and to Andy Goldman and Dr. Rick Hodes for their views of the situation in Addis. The controversy surrounding the policy of return to Judaism made my research uncomfortable for many, and I am grateful to those whose generosity overcame other considerations. I have had the privilege of membership in several academic communities of high quality and true collegiality. The medical anthropology group at Harvard built by Arthur and Joan Kleinman, Byron Good, and Mary-Jo Delvecchio Good remains a moral and intellectual touchstone for many who have been trained there. Arthur Kleinman’s voice has conditioned my own writing and teaching in ways subtle and profound—the model of interdisciplinary scholar- ship and humanity he set is why I became an anthropologist in the first place. Colleagues in the department of sociology and anthropology at Bar-Ilan Uni- versity and later at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem taught me how to live as ix x acknowledgments a scholar in a place where the ivory tower of academia is not so tall that research and teaching can be neatly separated from the desperate existential dilemmas of the surrounding society. Special thanks to Sam Cooper, Harvey Goldberg, Don Handelman, Tamar El-Or, and Yoram Bilu. Thanks also to Ethiopian Jewry specialists Steven Kaplan, Chaim Rosen, and Shalva Weil, whose insights and collegiality have benefited me at every stage. Thanks finally to all of my colleagues in the Department of Religion, the Graduate Division of Religion, and the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University, where I now teach. Together, you have helped me to see what ethnography can offer the study of religion, and how thinking in a sustained and critical but sympathetic way about religion can make me a better person as well as ethnographer. Laurie Pat- ton, Gary Laderman, Joyce Flueckiger, Deborah Lipstadt, David Blumenthal, Michael Broyde, Liz Bounds, Vince Cornell, Edward Queen, Dianne Stewart, and others have all gone above and beyond the call of duty in friendship and collegiality. The decision to use part of the Tam Institute’s generous endow- ment from the Blank Foundation to create a position in the Ethnography of Jewish Communities is one that I hope will be emulated widely at other cam- puses. The ethnography of Jews and Judaism seems finally to be coming of age in American anthropology, and I want to thank Matti Bunzl and Jeffrey Shandler for inviting me to inaugurate their new Jewish Cultures of the World book series with this volume. My many really extraordinary students at all levels are the main reason I keep writing and teaching. In the time it took this project to reach completion, some of you have gone on to become friends and scholars in your own right— Sarah Willen, Anat Rosenthal, Tsipy Ivry, Elly Teman, Wasfi Kailani, LeRhonda Manigault—thank you for your questions and critiques, and for becoming a really important part of my intellectual community. Thanks also to scholar- friends Tim Lytton, Erica Lehrer, and Sue Kahn. The Wexner Foundation and my fellows in the Graduate Fellowship program supported me not just finan- cially at an early stage, but also spiritually and emotionally, helping to reinforce the message that scholarship should benefit the many interlocking communities to which we belong. In a book about kinship and the questions it raises, I must acknowledge the steady, ongoing support of my parents, in-laws, and family. In the end, I cannot conclude without telling the truth—that my wife Debra and our two daughters, Racheli and Hadara, own the lion’s share of credit for helping me to carry this project through to fruition while remaining human in the process. Bringing my newest family members with me to the field to meet some of the people whose lives I have shared has been a profound joy and accomplishment. My blessing to them as a parent is that they always remember our common humanity in diverse settings, learn to laugh in many languages, and work to find the divine spark that can sometimes be seen on the faces of other people. One People, One Blood X X Introduction Before we proceed further, it would be well to note that there are ambiguities in the ordinary notion of understanding another person. —Alfred Schutz Qäs be-qäs—we ought to proceed with caution. Or to cite the whole familiar Amharic proverb, Qäs be-qäs, Ωnqulal be-ΩgΩrou yehedal, which means, “Little by little, an egg will come to walk upon its own leg.” Ethiopian Jews in Israel are fond of quoting this bit of folk wisdom whenever they talk about their own history and the slow, difficult pro- cess by which they came to fulfill their destinies so far from the Horn of Africa where they were born. In context, qäs be-qäs can serve either as admonition or as reassurance, as in “Have patience, defer the pleasures of the moment, and make careful plans. One day, you will prevail.” It is an apt summary of how Ethiopian Jews, or Beta Israel, have perceived themselves and their history in modern times. The early waves of immigrants during the middle 1980s, who trekked by foot across hundreds of miles of deadly wilderness in order to reach the refugee camps in Sudan from which they hoped (sometimes incorrectly) that they would be whisked surreptitiously to Israel, applied this aphorism to themselves quite literally. But it also continues to resonate with later waves of Ethiopian migrants—including the so-called Feres Mura immigrants of the 1990s and beyond, the descendants of Beta Israel whose ancestors converted to Christianity but who now wish to “return to Judaism” and who consequently face very different obstacles and threats.
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