The Beta Israel in Ethiopia and Israel

Studies on the Ethiopian Jews

Tudor Parfitt, Emanuela Trevisan Semi

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780700710928
• eBook ISBN: 9781136816680
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

For decade the Falashas - the Black Jews of Ethiopia - have fascinated scholars. Are they really Jews and in what sense? How can their origins be explained? Since the Falashas' transfer to Israel in the much publicised Israeli air lifts the fascination has continued and and new factors are now being discussed.

Written by the leading scholars in the field the essays in this collection examine the history, music, art, anthropology and current situations of the Ethopian Jews. Issues examined include their integration into Middle Eastern society, contacts between the Falasha and the State of Israel how the Falasha became Jews in the first place.

1
Rabbi Nahoum's Anthropological Mission to Ethiopia

Tudor Parfitt

From its inception in 1860 the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) had an interest in the Beta Israel community of Ethiopia. After all the Alliance had been founded with the express intention of helping 'backward' communities such as these – particularly in the area of vocational and other training. Thus it was that in 1868 the remarkable Joseph Halévy was sent on a fact-finding mission to Ethiopia. In his report he gave a telling account of the languages, literature and religious customs of the Beta Israel, estimated their number at between 150,000 and 200,000 and generally enthused about their attainments, morality and intelligence. Perhaps most important he opined that the Beta Israel were indeed Jews.¹ He advised the AIU to open a school in Ethiopia where among other things the Beta Israel could learn the Hebrew language and thereby have access to bibles free of Christian influence. The AIU, however, still far from convinced that the Falashas were genuine Jews did not go along with this plan. With the exception of an abortive trip in 1896, for the next thirty-six years nothing further was done. Then in 1904 Dr. Jacques Faitlovitch set out on a mission similar to that of Halévy. Although Faitlovitch put the Falasha population at only 100,000 his subsequent report supported broadly the findings of Halévy. He too advised the AIU to establish schools in Ethiopia for the Beta Israel. Once again the AIU refused to do so. Between 1905 and 1906 Faitlovitch energetically started to seek support for the Beta Israel both through existing institutions and through the setting up of Pro-Falasha committees. His work came to the attention of the AIU who responded by sending out a further expedition to Ethiopia with the declared intention of 'studying the Falashas and finding out what could most efficiently be undertaken in order to bring help to this population'.² The man chosen by the Alliance to lead this important mission was a thirty-five year old Turkish Jew called Hayyim Nahoum.

Nahoum was born in Manisa, Turkey in 1872 and had been educated in Beirut and Tiberias before going on to the Government high school in Smyrna. He studied law in Constantinople and from 1893 to 1897, helped financially by the Baron Edmond de Rothschild and the Alliance, was able to study at rabbinical seminary in Paris as well as at the College de France.³ He graduated in 1897 with the title Rav Gadol and was sent by the Alliance to the seminary in Constantinople where he became vice-principal. He also received a Government appointment as history teacher in a Turkish military academy. Why did the Alliance chose Nahoum for this journey in a difficult and little-known country where the only means of transport was the horse? In some respects he was the sort of candidate often favoured by the Alliance for this kind of mission: he had an intimate knowledge of oriental countries; he was a very considerable linguist with a knowledge of Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Italian and French. And he was an Alliance employee. On the other hand he had poor eyesight, was something of a hypochondriac and prior to the ten lessons furnished by the Alliance in Paris before he left, had never previously mounted a horse. In addition, he had no knowledge either of Ethiopia or of its languages and was accompanied by a young man whom Nahoum himself described as 'of a delicate constitution and somewhat rheumatic'. To make up for some of these shortcomings the Alliance had at first been very keen to send Jacques Faitlovitch along too because of his mastery of Ethiopian languages.⁴ Faitlovitch, even though he was a younger man by seven years, refused to serve under Nahoum and subsequently set off on a parallel expedition, funded by the Pro-Falasha Society of Florence, which crossed Nahoum's path in June 1908.⁵ Why did Nahoum consent to undertake what he called 'this difficult and sacred mission.'? If we can take his own explanation at face value it was to 'work for Judaism and to contribute ... to the regeneration of its different groups'.⁶ Nahoum appears to have harboured no great doubts about the Jewishness of the Falashas; the only question was whether they were of Israelite stock or converts. While still in Cairo, on the way to Ethiopia, he observed in a letter that the aim of his study was in part to discover whether the Falashas were indeed 'true Jews according to the generally accepted view ... or proselytes'. But this matter he felt was unlikely to be resolved and would probably remain obscure: in any event as he put it: 'What difference does it make whether they are Jews or 'Judaisants'? If they have, as Halévy has stated, Jewish sentiment, faith and experience, they deserve all the sympathy and benevolence of the Alliance Israélite'.⁷ And a short while later on board boat in the Red Sea he observed in a letter to the Alliance that as the Radbaz had pronounced the Falashas shevuyim 'it is our duty, according to our religious traditions to transgress the law and even to sell our synagogues and the scrolls of the law in order to raise the funds necessary to come to their aid'.⁸'

None the less, part of his project included the task of deciding what exactly the Falashas were and to that end he had immersed himself in the racial and anthropological theories of the time: 'we must weigh all the considerations' he wrote 'and by a methodical analysis of the material . . . determine the origin of the Falashas from an ethnographic point of view without upsetting too much the overly impressionable Pro-Falasha people and the 'Falashistes'.' The methodology which he felt most suitable for the task was 'crâniometrie': this system however required 'a special preparation and mathematical precision'. Having neither he proposed to limit himself to 'the most simple and practical method advisable in the circumstances by anthropologists which is to say a study of the exterior configuration of the body which consists in an examination of the descriptive characteristics (colour of skin, nature of hair, organs, senses etc.) and of the anthropometric character (that is methodical measurements of the proportions of the body ) . . . which I know will be sufficient for us'.⁹

Originally hoping to cross into Ethiopia via Massawa¹⁰ Nahoum was obliged by the Ethiopian authorities while he was still in Cairo to enter the country via Djibouti and Addis Ababa, the new capital.¹¹ Before leaving Egypt the rabbi went to some lengths to ensure that the Alliance bought an appropriate gift for the Emperor: in a telegram from Cairo he indicated that the Emperor Menelik liked modern weapons, beautiful carpets, silks, new inventions, good saddles and the like.¹² He also suggested that the Alliance send formal greetings – 'something flattering for the King of Kings of Ethiopia'.¹³ After a spending a month in Cairo the two-man mission departed Egypt on the 4th January 1908 and arrived in Addis Ababa in February, 1908 – forty one years after the intrepid Halévy had entered the country from the Sudan in 1867.¹⁴ Nahoum discovered while he was in Djibouti that the Emperor of Ethiopia had telephoned the Governor of Djibouti to tell him that a scholar was expected, a relative of Rothschild, and that everything should be done to assist him. The Bulletin Mensuel of the Alliance noted that they had had 'a rather tiring journey'. In fact what had happened, although this is not mentioned in the printed account, is that on 28th February Nahoum who, as we have seen, had little equestrian experience, fell off his mount but, as he put it 'with a semi-circular movement to the left and to the right I managed to slip under the belly of the animal and during my fall got kicked in the chest and hurt my right hand and the index finger of my left hand'. In addition his coat and trousers were ripped and his watch and two pairs of spare glasses were broken. He spent the next ten days in bed in his hotel tended by his companion the young Russian doctor Eberlin. Eberlin wrote in haste to the Alliance to assure them that the great pain in which Nahoum found himself would not keep them from 'the great task the very last detail of which Mr. Nahoum keeps you so jealously informed' and that Nahoum had not for a second lost his courage, zeal or good humour, and was disinclined to take any notice of the said accident and its consequences. He assured the AIU that they would 'double and triple their precautions in order to finish their mission successfully'.¹⁵

Nahoum was granted an audience by the Emperor on 6th March, 1908. He presented his gift and read out a suitably obsequious address which commented on the fact that the Emperor 'permitted the Falashas to freely practise their religion and had given them precious tokens of His Imperial favour' and thanked him on behalf of the Alliance for the magnificent demonstrations of his spirit of tolerance and his great and humane goodness.'¹⁶ While noting that the Falashas practised the same religion as European Jews the address none the less observed that in addition to finding out more about the distribution, numbers, history and religious literature of the Falashas the mission hoped to 'resolve a problem which for many years has been placed before the scholarly bodies of Europe but which has remained until today without a satisfactory solution'.

In addition to his prepared text Nahoum made a speech of his own. The head of the French delegation, Mr. Brice, wrote a description of the speech to Stephen Pichon, the French Foreign Minister, in which he noted: 'Mr. Nahoum presented very ably the aim of his philological and ethnographic research which he has come to this country to carry out. Comparing Ethiopia to a flower long deprived of sun and which awaits just a ray of light to open, he made Menelik this ray of light, thanks to which the flower has opened and the country, until his accession plunged in darkness, has now left the isolation in order to enter into relations with the rest of the world'.¹⁷

In his letter to the Alliance of 12 March, 1908 Nahoum observed that the Emperor had apparently not stopped talking about his speech ever since and had even sent an emissary to ask for a copy of the text.¹⁸ With transparently false modesty Nahoum added in his letter 'Au fond je ne sais pas ce qu'il avait d'extraordinaire'.¹⁹ In his letter to the Alliance – although this does not appear in the printed version in the Bulletin Mensuel – he continued 'Obviously I put myself at the level of my audience by using figures of speech and poetic metaphors in the oriental way – just what was required to catch the attention of primitive peoples'.²⁰

On the 15th March Nahoum went to the Palace and was received by Alto Haile Mariam Pasha 'in a special pavilion reserved for foreigners of note'. They were then taken to the throne room where they were placed 'on gilded chairs before a table royally prepared. The very last detail of etiquette had been observed: tablecloth and napkins embroidered with the Imperial arms and silver vases . . . During dessert the Emperor had Ato Hailésk me if I wanted to make a toast which I accepted eagerly. They brought champagne and as if by magic all 5000 pairs of jaws stoppeds working. I got up, glass in hand, absolute silence everywhere, and made a short speech in the name of my superiors, mentioning the great tolerance of their Majesties, their love of progress and finished by wishing them a long and prosperous reign.' As the Emperor bade him farewell he held Nahoum's hand and asked him to stay on in the capital for another three weeks to observe the feast of the Ark of the Covenant.'

Nahoum stayed on. In a letter to his wife in Constantinople, flushed by his success with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Original Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Note on Editors
• 1 Rabbi Nahoum's Anthropological Mission to Ethiopia
• 2 From Wolleqa to Florence: The Tragic Story of Faitlovitch's Pupil Hizkiahu Finkas
• 3 The Life and Death of Solomon Isaac
• 4 The Impact of the Italian Occupation of Ethiopia on the Beta Israel
• 5 Some Unpublished Documents Relating to the Twentieth Century History of the Beta Israel in Ethiopia
• 6 The Case of the Falas Mura
• 7 Ethiopian Dynastic Marriage and the Beta Israel
• 8 All in the Family: 'Kinship' as a Paradigm for the Ethnography of Beta Israel
• 9 Everyday Resistance and the Study of Ethiopian Jews
• 10 Israeli Women of Ethiopian Descent: The Strengths, Conflicts and Successes
• 11 Fertility Decline and Changes in the Life Course among Ethiopian Jewish Women
• 12 Women in History and Historiography: Research on Women of the Beta Israel
• 13 Identity Reformulation among Ethiopian Immigrant Soldiers: Processes of Interpretation and Struggle
• 14 The Beta Israel Band of Porachat Ha Tikva: War in Songs and Songs in War
• 15 Dance at the Ethiopian Disco: Tradition or Change
• 16 Of Names, Amulets and Movies: Some Patterns of Oral, Written and Non-Verbal Negotiation among the Ethiopian Jews in Israel
• 17 Beta Israel prayers: Oral and Written Traditions — Analysis of a service for the New Moon
• 18 The Formal Organisation of the Beta Israel Liturgy — Substance and Performance: Literary Structure
• 19 The Formal Organisation of the Beta Israel Liturgy — Substance and Performance: Musical Structure
• 20 Differences Between the Amharic Dialects of Gondar and Addis Ababa
• 21 Divination as Prevention of Illness and other Life Problems
• 22 Sickness and Medicine: Perceptions of Ethiopian Immigrants and their Doctors in Israel
• 23 Idioms and Narratives of Mental Health Problems among Ethiopian Jewish Patients in Israel
• 24 The Long Journey of the Young Beta Israel from Lasta
• 25 The Epistle of Elias