ABSTRACT
When, in the 1970s, the Ethiopian Jews – the Beta Israel – first began to arrive in Israel, their very presence posed a dramatic challenge to conventional ideas of who is a Jew.1 What does an Ethiopian, who observes religious laws based mainly on the Bible but not on the Talmud, have in common with a Russian Jew who follows neither? Absent a common religion, is there an ethnic or biological marker that links them? In what sense, if any, can one speak of a community of Jewish blood? Such questions, seemingly laid to rest by the Holocaust, have recurred with new intensity in the wake of the creation of Israel and the ingathering of the “exiles” from far-flung lands. While the Beta Israel saw themselves as lighter-skinned than their Christian neighbors in Ethiopia, a racialized phenotype was not central to their identity. When they arrived in Israel, they were suddenly subjected to racial typing according to skin color: they “became,” as it were, black. Moreover, this new black identity was one that distinguished them not from non-Jews, but from other Jews. Although the explicit language of blood was rarely invoked in Israel – no surprise less than half a century after the Holocaust – the black physiognomy of the Beta Israel nevertheless aroused powerful prejudices about the Jews as a putative race. The identity of the Beta Israel in Ethiopia itself was not based on racial characteristics, but, as the Israeli folklorist Hagar Salamon has shown, it was most definitely based on blood: not the blood inside their veins, but rather their blood manipulations and rituals.2 Indeed, blood in this sense played a central role in differentiating this minority group from the majority Christians in Ethiopia. The Jews believed that their Christian neighbors were polluted for three reasons: because they did not observe the laws of menstrual purity, because they failed to slaughter meat with a sharp knife, and because they ate blood with their meat. Pollution with menstrual blood was considered so severe that the Jews made it a practice not to have any physical contact with their Christian neighbors, even in celebrations to which the latter might be invited. The use of what seemed to the Jews dull knives bespoke Christian cruelty toward animals, symbolic of their cruelty generally. Finally, the Christian custom of eating meat with the blood still in it merged in Jewish eyes with what they knew of the Christian belief in the consumption of the blood of Christ.
