Beta Israel

The Simien Mountains in northern Ethiopia are not a place that invites small ideas. The escarpment drops two thousand metres in a single breath, gelada baboons bark from the clifftops, and the sky above the plateau is so close and clear that on certain mornings the light itself seems to have authority. It is in this landscape - and in the farmlands and towns of the Gondar region below it - that a community called Beta Israel kept the Torah, observed the Sabbath, and remained what they were for well over a thousand years, known to no one beyond their own highland world. They called themselves the House of Israel. They were right.

Beta Israel is the community's own name for themselves. The name other Ethiopians used - Falasha - is an Amharic word, from the verb meaning to migrate, carrying the sense of wanderers or those without land. It was applied to them over centuries as a social label, often in contempt. Beta Israel themselves consider it derogatory, and the preference of the community is clear and should be followed. The House of Israel it is.

Their account of their own origins is among the most ancient and particular in all of Jewish history - not exile from Babylon, not flight from Rome, but something entirely their own. Beta Israel tradition holds that they are descended from the retinue that accompanied Menelik, son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, when he returned to Ethiopia after visiting his father in Jerusalem and - in the account preserved in the Kebra Nagast, the great Ethiopian royal chronicle - brought the Ark of the Covenant home with him. Whether or not one reads this as literal history, it is an identity claim that places the community squarely within the founding story of both Ethiopia and Israel simultaneously. This is not a community that came to Ethiopia from elsewhere and had to negotiate a relationship with its traditions. This is a community whose deepest story says they were there at the beginning of those traditions. The landscape is not the context for their faith. The landscape is inside the faith.

The Orit: a Torah in a different tongue

Here is the first thing that stops you short when you look carefully at Beta Israel practice: their scripture is not in Hebrew. Their Torah - which they call the Orit, a word from the Ge'ez rendering of the Aramaic for "law" - is a Ge'ez translation of the Five Books of Moses and additional sacred texts. Ge'ez is the ancient Semitic liturgical language of Ethiopia, still used in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, as learned and specific in its religious function as Latin once was in the medieval West. It is not a language one speaks at market. It is the language in which one addresses God.

And the Orit is not merely the Pentateuch. The Beta Israel canon includes books that are absent from the standard Jewish canon but which turn out, on examination, to be extremely ancient: the Book of Jubilees, 1 Enoch, the Book of Tobit. These texts were known in the Second Temple period - fragments of Jubilees and 1 Enoch appear among the Dead Sea Scrolls - but they dropped out of the rabbinic canon that was crystallised after the Temple's destruction in 70 CE. Beta Israel preserved them. They had been reading these books continuously, in their Ge'ez translations, while the rest of the Jewish world had set them aside. What this tells you, if you read the evidence carefully, is that Beta Israel's practice preserves a layer of Jewish tradition older than Rabbinic Judaism - a form of the religion as it existed before the rabbis of Yavne and Babylon made the decisions that shaped the Judaism we now call normative.

There is no Talmud in Beta Israel practice. There is no Mishnah. There is no knowledge of Hanukkah - a festival that commemorates events in 165 BCE and could only have reached a community that maintained contact with the wider Jewish world after that point. There is no Purim. What there is: Pesach, observed as Fasika. Shavuot. Sukkot. Yom Kippur. The festivals of the Torah, kept faithfully, understood through their own traditions and their own liturgy. The structure of the covenant, intact. The form of Sinai, held.

Monks, nuns, and purity: a Judaism unlike any other

Beta Israel developed institutions that have no real parallel in any other branch of the Jewish world. The most striking of these is monasticism. Beta Israel monks and nuns - celibate, dwelling apart, devoted to prayer and the study of scripture - were a recognised and respected feature of community life in Ethiopia for centuries. Monasticism is central to Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, and it is possible that the institution developed in Beta Israel as a form of engagement with or adaptation of the surrounding Christian world; it is also possible that it has older roots. Scholars differ. What is certain is that monastic life was genuinely theirs: the monks served as teachers, scribes, and guardians of the community's textual tradition during the long centuries when no contact with the outside Jewish world existed.

Purity law in Beta Israel practice was elaborate and strictly observed. Women entering a state of ritual impurity withdrew to separate huts; the laws governing contact with the dead and with non-Jews were maintained rigorously; ritual washing was central to daily religious life. Some of this parallels rabbinic halakha; some of it has no rabbinic equivalent and appears to derive directly from the purity system laid out in the books of Leviticus and Numbers, observed without the rabbinic interpretive layer that modified the same rules for other Jewish communities.

This is a community that kept the written Torah and kept it faithfully - and in keeping it directly, without two thousand years of rabbinic commentary mediating the relationship, produced a practice that was in some ways stricter and in some ways simpler than what Ashkenazi or Sephardi visitors expected when they first made contact. The differences were real. So was the covenant underneath them.

Sigd: a festival no other community has

Fifty days after Yom Kippur - on the 29th of the Hebrew month of Cheshvan - Beta Israel communities throughout Ethiopian history would observe a pilgrimage festival called Sigd. The word comes from the Ge'ez root for "prostration" or "worship." What the community did was this: they rose before dawn, dressed in white, and climbed a mountain. The priests and elders led the way, carrying the Orit. At the summit they gathered - fasting, praying, reading the Torah aloud - and re-enacted the receiving of the Law at Sinai. Then they descended, broke their fast, and celebrated together. The whole arc of the day - the ascent, the receiving, the descent back to communal life - was the point. You went up to meet the Law. You came back down to live it.

Sigd has no equivalent anywhere else in Jewish tradition. Other communities do not observe it; it did not travel with the Sephardi expulsions or the Ashkenazi migrations. It is, as far as scholarly research has established, a creation of Beta Israel itself - a festival developed in and for the Ethiopian highland landscape, drawing on the topography of mountains and the theology of covenant renewal. That it has now been officially recognised by the Israeli government as a national holiday (since 2008) says something about what happens when a community brings its particular inheritance into contact with a wider world that has enough sense to pay attention.

The central Sigd celebration now takes place in Jerusalem, at Haas Promenade, on the 29th of Cheshvan each year. Tens of thousands attend. The elders still carry the Orit. The community still dresses in white. They do not climb a mountain in the Simien range anymore. But the prayers are the same, and the theology is the same - the ascent toward the Law, the covenant renewed, the descent back to daily life transformed by having stood, once more, at Sinai.

The long silence, and the reconnection

For the better part of a millennium, Beta Israel had no contact with the wider Jewish world. The exact length of the isolation depends on when one dates the last point of contact, which scholars continue to debate; but by any reckoning, by the medieval period Beta Israel was developing its tradition in complete independence, with no knowledge of what was happening in the Ashkenazi communities of the Rhineland, no access to Maimonides, no awareness of the great Sephardi flowering in Spain, no exchange with the Yemenite communities that were geographically closest. They were, in the most literal sense, a Jewish community that had worked everything out for themselves.

Contact began to be re-established in the 1860s, when the Alliance Israelite Universelle - the Paris-based organisation founded in 1860 to work for Jewish civil rights globally - sent representatives to Ethiopia. What those representatives found both confirmed and complicated European Jewish expectations. Here was a community with Torah, with Shabbat, with the festivals - and without Talmud, without Hebrew, without the Rabbinic tradition. The question of status - were Beta Israel halachically Jewish? - became a formal and sometimes difficult debate.

The answer came, importantly, not from new research but from old. In the sixteenth century, the great Sephardic legal authority David ibn Zimra - known by the acronym Radbaz - had already addressed the question of Ethiopian Jews in a responsum, ruling that they were Jews and specifically identifying them as descendants of the Tribe of Dan. In 1973, Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef published his own responsum citing the Radbaz and confirming that Beta Israel were halachically Jewish under existing rabbinic law. The Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi issued a compatible ruling. The question of recognition was, at last, settled in the affirmative - not by invention, but by the recovery of a ruling that had been sitting in the legal literature for four hundred years.

The airlifts: scale and determination

Recognition in law was one thing. Getting people out was another. Through the 1970s and 1980s, Ethiopia was governed by the Derg - a Marxist military junta that had deposed Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 and was conducting its rule with considerable violence. The country was also in the grip of famine. Beta Israel, concentrated in the north, faced the full force of both. Israel began covert operations to bring community members out through Sudan; Operation Moses, in 1984 and 1985, evacuated approximately 8,000 people before it was shut down when news of the operation leaked and Arab political pressure caused the Sudanese government to halt it.

Operation Solomon, on 24 and 25 May 1991, was something else entirely. The Derg was collapsing; rebel forces were closing on Addis Ababa; there was a window, and Israel used it. Thirty-five aircraft were deployed. In just under 36 hours, 14,325 people were flown from Addis Ababa to Israel. On one aircraft - a Boeing 747 belonging to El Al - the crew removed the seats to maximise capacity; that single flight is reported to have carried well over a thousand passengers, among the highest counts ever recorded in a single commercial aircraft. Several babies were born during the operation, in the air, between Ethiopia and Israel. The operation ran on logistics, on political negotiation that had been conducted at the highest levels, on the willingness of pilots and ground crews to keep flying - and on the determination of 14,325 people to make the journey their tradition had been moving toward for centuries.

Operation Solomon did not end the story. A community known as the Falash Mura - Ethiopians whose ancestors had converted to Christianity under various pressures over the past two centuries and who wished to return to Judaism and make aliyah - remained in Ethiopia in large numbers, and their status has been the subject of ongoing legal and religious debate ever since. The question of full recognition and aliyah rights for remaining community members has not been finally resolved, and the situation of those waiting in Ethiopia has been a persistent issue in Israeli public and religious life.

The community today

Approximately 175,000 Ethiopian Jews and their descendants now live in Israel. They are concentrated in cities - in Netanya, in Rehovot, in Hadera, in the southern neighbourhoods of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The community is, by now, significantly Israeli-born: young people whose parents or grandparents made the journey, who grew up speaking Hebrew, who served in the army, who sit in universities. The integration has not been without difficulty - discrimination in housing and employment, tensions over rabbinical recognition of marriages and conversions, a persistent gap in economic outcomes - but the community has also produced members of the Knesset, military officers, artists, academics, and athletes. Both things are true at once.

The Sigd celebration at Haas Promenade brings them together once a year on that escarpment overlooking Jerusalem - the closest approximation available to the highland summit where the festival was born. The elders who remember Ethiopia are fewer now. But the ceremony continues, and the young people who attend it are, in the same gesture their ancestors made in Ambober and the Simien Mountains, ascending toward the Law and then coming back down to live in the world below.

The Orit they read from is in Ge'ez. The Torah it contains is the same Torah. The same story, in a language that no one else used for it - in a landscape that shaped its telling, on a highland where the covenant found a form it could wear for over a millennium and carry, intact, to wherever the next mountain would be.