Ethiopian Jewry and New Self-Concepts Hagar Salamon
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15-C1539 9/4/2001 4:21 PM Page 227 chapter 15 Ethiopian Jewry and New Self-Concepts Hagar Salamon Although Jews in Israel and Jews in America often experience and shape Judaism in different ways, some issues arise that connect them. One such issue is the Jews of Ethiopia who became known to the Eu- ropean Jewish world in the middle of the nineteenth century. With the encouragement of American Jewish organizations, they reached Israel en masse in the 1980s and early 1990s. These Jews differed widely from other Jewish groups because their religious tradition was not affected by rabbinic Judaism and because their skin pigmentation is “black,” making them different in appearance from the majority of contempo- rary Jews of European provenance. Since they became known to the wider Jewish world, and particularly since their arrival in large num- bers in Israel, the Jews of Ethiopia have stimulated many questions about Jewish identity, both with respect to them and to Jews all over the world. In the selection that follows, Hagar Salamon probes these questions, showing how they entail components of religion, race, and the relationships between Israeli and Diaspora Judaism. Judaism between Race and Religion: The Case of the Ethiopian Jews The establishment of the State of Israel brought together Jews from many lands who differ widely from one another in stature and skin color.1 Jewish identity, which in the various Diaspora communities 227 Copyright © 2001. University of California Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses Copyright © permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/4/2017 9:07 AM via EASTERN KENTUCKY UNIV AN: 108470 ; Goldberg, Harvey E..; The Life of Judaism Account: s8356098 15-C1539 9/4/2001 4:21 PM Page 228 228 HAGAR SALAMON was defined primarily vis-à-vis a non-Jewish other, assumed new dimen- sions with the ingathering of the exiles when, for the first time, Jews coming to the Promised Land found themselves living side by side with Jews so utterly different from them, both physically and culturally. While actually wide in variety, Jewish ethnic diversity in Israel is offi- cially simplified into an East/ West dichotomy.2 Jews originating from Asia and Africa are lumped into the single category of Sephardim or “Oriental” (in Hebrew “mizrahim”), while European and American Jews fall under the collective term “Ashkenazim.” Within these two sweeping categories—“Ashkenazim” and “Oriental” are countless pop- ular subdistinctions and accompanying stereotypes. Throughout the history of the State of Israel, relations between “Oriental” and “Ashke- nazic” Jews have been charged with tension, based on strong senti- ments regarding the privileged position of Ashkenazic Jews in Israeli society. A dynamic of paternalism and power relations, ubiquitous in encounters between East and West, rears its head across the public sphere in education, economics, and politics—and emerges at many levels of social relations and cultural expression. Interethnic diversity and Jewish “otherness” was a confounding phe- nomenon for Israeli Jews and encouraged the search for an “other” lo- cated outside the group boundary. While Jewish-Israeli identity has taken shape, inter alia, vis-à-vis various Jewish “others,” the diametri- cally opposed Arab “other” thus conveniently deflected tension from troubling interethnic relations. The question of boundaries between the Jewish majority and the Arab other, which overshadows and blunts the effects of inter-Jewish difference, penetrates the inter-Jewish discourse in many and diverse ways. Harvey Goldberg (1985) makes the lucid observation that this pat- tern is exemplified by the way in which stereotypic characteristics as- sociated with Jewish ethnic groups are symbolically related to the dis- tinction between Jew and Arab. Because of similarities, both cultural and physical, between “Oriental” Jews and Arabs, these groups are per- ceived as somehow akin to each other in the Israeli consciousness, and so Arab stereotypes are applied to “Oriental” Jews. But to equate the groups absolutely would erode the boundaries between them and, as Goldberg suggests, would be tantamount to the realization of a lurking and ever-present fear: the “Arabization” of Israel. The Arab stereotype, a synthesis of perceptions and associations, was therefore fragmented, such that each “Oriental” Jewish subgroup was assigned a different ste- reotypical characteristic—the Moroccans were perceived, particularly Copyright © 2001. University of California Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses Copyright © permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/4/2017 9:07 AM via EASTERN KENTUCKY UNIV AN: 108470 ; Goldberg, Harvey E..; The Life of Judaism Account: s8356098 15-C1539 9/4/2001 4:21 PM Page 229 ETHIOPIAN JEWRY AND NEW SELF-CONCEPTS 229 in the 1960s and 1970s, as “aggressive,” the Yemenites as “authentic,” the Kurds as “primitive” and so forth.3 The arrival of sixty thousand Ethiopian Jews to Israel during the last two decades has offered a new frame of reference for defining Jewish- Israeli identity—a Jewish “other.” Since the qualities that determine interethnic boundaries are dynamic, and largely a factor of historiocul- tural conditions, the social divisions in Israel, up to the arrival of Ethi- opian Jewry, were constantly shifting across Jewish ethnic lines, with a decided Arab other from which Jewish society distinguishes itself. In- tergroup tensions, throughout the years in Israel’s immigrant society, centered, aside from ethnicity, on class, and newcomer-versus-veteran- citizen status—but only with the arrival of the Jews of Ethiopia did long-submerged tensions between race and religion in Judaism well to the surface. Hitherto dormant race issues have become the new focus of the interethnic discourse, presenting new material for considering Ju- daism on the axis of race and religion. Ethiopian Jews are the only group perceived as both Jewish and black, Jewish and racially other and have thus attracted far more atten- tion than other groups of a similar size in the Jewish state. The very ex- istence of this community presents paradoxes to Jewish identity, and thus Ethiopian Jews serve as a prism through which symbolic dimen- sions of Jewishness are refracted in many directions. background Originally, the Beta Israel (Falasha), lived in northwestern Ethiopia in approximately five hundred small villages scattered across a vast territory, dispersed throughout a predominantly Christian society.4 Though no difference in physical appearance distinguished these Jews from their neighbors in this African country, as skilled—albeit low status—craftspeople, they were an occupational as well as a religious minority. Moreover, they clearly saw themselves as a distinct group, maintaining a faith that the majority of Ethiopians had forsaken for the younger and now dominant creed of Christianity. Strongly identifying themselves with the Torah (Orit, the Old Testament written in Ge‘ez), which was the central focus of their beliefs, they meticulously observed its laws and dreamed of the coming of the Messiah and their return to the legendary Jerusalem.5 The modern identification of the Beta Israel as part of the Jewish world was a consequence of the missionary activities of the Protestant Copyright © 2001. University of California Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses Copyright © permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/4/2017 9:07 AM via EASTERN KENTUCKY UNIV AN: 108470 ; Goldberg, Harvey E..; The Life of Judaism Account: s8356098 15-C1539 9/4/2001 4:21 PM Page 230 230 HAGAR SALAMON “London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews of Ethi- opia,” beginning in 1858.6 This, more than anything else, marks the point at which the Ethiopians came to the attention of world Jewry, first in Europe and later in the United States. Until world Jewry “discov- ered” them, the Beta Israel had shaped and expressed their identity within the context of the wider stream of Ethiopian history. Missionary activity made them aware of a more universal form of Jewish identity. The new awareness of the larger Jewish world outside Ethiopia was a dramatic turning point in their history. A number of prominent Jewish leaders, attracted by the exotic nature of Jewish life in the “land of Kush,” responded to the missionary threat and began to lobby for aid to be sent to the Beta Israel, then known as the Falasha.7 Attempts were made to bring them closer to other Jewish communities by publicizing their story, finding similarities between their rituals and beliefs and those of normative Judaism, and even reforming religious practices to bring them closer to those of other Jews (by in- troducing, for example, the lighting of Sabbath candles, the symbol of the Star of David, and the idea of abolishing animal sacrifices). Such ef- forts continued into the present era, when the Jewish Agency and other organizations worked to strengthen the ties of the Beta Israel to world Jewry and Israel. Jerusalem, which had been primarily a symbol of a lost era for these Jews, became a reality with the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. The aspiration to reach “Zion” provided yet another motive for strug- gle and for survival. The new state quickly enacted the Law of Return, ensuring open immigration for all Jews and affirming the position of the Jewish state as sanctuary and homeland. Initially, however, the Beta Is- rael, despite their self-definition and their struggles in Ethiopia as Jews, were not recognized as Jews under this law. In addition to questions about their Jewishness, political, social, and medical considerations were deterrents to the Ethiopians’ aliyah to Israel during the early years of mass immigration to the country.