Beta Israel Erotic

The Beta Israel are the Jews of the Ethiopian highlands, a people who kept a Torah-based faith for centuries in near-total isolation from the rest of the Jewish world and who now live almost entirely in Israel. Their villages sat in the rough country north of Lake Tana, around Gondar and up into the Semien Mountains and western Tigray, where they farmed rented land and worked as blacksmiths, potters and weavers, trades their Christian neighbors often disdained and sometimes feared. The name itself means House of Israel. The outsiders' name, Falasha, means roughly landless wanderer and is avoided now.

Their religion, Haymanot, rests on the Orit, the first eight books of the Bible in Ge'ez, not on the Talmud, which never reached them. Priests called kessim rather than rabbis led prayer, and monks once held real authority. Sabbath was kept with unusual rigor, purity laws were followed to the letter, including separate huts for menstruating women, and their own holiday, Sigd, falls fifty days after Yom Kippur: the community fasts, climbs a hill, hears the Orit read and renews the covenant. Israel made it a national holiday in 2008. The old home languages were Kayla and Qwara, Agaw tongues of the Cushitic branch, but over the last few centuries most families shifted to Amharic or Tigrinya, both Semitic. Hebrew is now the language of the young, Amharic of their grandparents.

Origins are disputed. Community tradition points to the tribe of Dan or to Menelik, son of Solomon and Sheba. Most historians see a group that crystallized in the medieval highlands among Agaw speakers holding to biblical practice as the Christian empire closed around them. Wars with the Solomonic emperors between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries stripped them of land and autonomy, and that defeat made them tenant craftsmen. European Jews made contact in the 1860s, and Jacques Faitlovitch's schools in the early 1900s tied them to world Jewry. Israel's Sephardi chief rabbi ruled them Jewish in 1973, the Law of Return applied from 1975, and the airlifts of Operation Moses in 1984 and Operation Solomon in 1991 carried tens of thousands out, the latter moving over fourteen thousand people in about a day and a half. In Israel the story since has been army service, Knesset seats and a first cabinet minister, alongside blunt public fights over policing and discrimination. More than 150,000 Ethiopian Israelis live today, concentrated in Netanya, Rehovot, Beersheba and Ashdod, while only small remnant communities remain in Gondar and Addis Ababa, many of them Falash Mura, descendants of converts to Christianity, waiting to join relatives.