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Ujm,
You are very quick to judge people that went through persecutions you never went through. If the Christians in Ashkenaz burnt all of the Sifrei Torah and chumashim and said that no one is allowed to use any holy books accept those approved by the Church, would the Ashkenazi Jews have just stopped studying Torah or would they have used the Christian approved ones?
I also note that you haven’t responded to many of my other points. Do you concede that the Beta Israel do have a strong claim of being Jewish and they are at least a safek (such that we have a chiyuv to save them, love them, etc.)
Always,
I don’t know why I wrote shevat instead of Sivan in my post yesterday. I apologize for the confusion. They celebrated Shavuos on the 12 of Sivan. I looked up a couple more of their practices. They do not lain haftorah. They are tovel for keri. But it is not clear if this is because of takanos Ezra or because the Torah requires it for eating taharos.
Another interesting thing I found was that their married women covered their hair. Which is not something Karaites do or did.
To ujm: If you have 10 men ready to start davening, and two are dark-skinned, and you think they do not count for a minyan because they are Ethiopian, what is the polite way to say to the dark-skinned men that they are not Jewish and therefore do not count for a minyan?
And if the other 8 men, white and known to your satisfaction to be Jewish, want to count the dark-skinned men for the minyan, what do you say to the 8 white Jews?
And will ujm, and everyone else, remember that Hashem knows who is Jewish, and if you miss a day of davening, that alone will not send you to gehinom. But repeatedly insulting or being unkind to anyone will increase your chances of going to gehinom.
Ujm,
That’s just wrong. The Old Testament is a translation of Tanach. It isn’t heretical the way the New Testament is. The Alexandrian Jewish community used the Greek translation for generations.
Why is your standard “clearly documented” over oral testimony? In halacha we accept oral testimony over documents. The Torah sh’bal peh was oral for over a thousand years.
There is plenty of documentation, however, of the group’s history and identification from Christian and Muslim groups that interacted with them (including descriptions of their persecution, forced convervions, burning of seforim, etc.). Additionally, there is the writings of Eldad HaDani, Benjamin of Tudela, the Radbaz, and some secular Jews that visited them in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There are also letters that the Beta Israel community sent to Jewish communities in Europe and Jerusalem in the mid-19th century describing their communities and their plight.
I’ve seen the Radbaz and one of the 19th century letters. For the rest, I am relying on other people’s articles citing these sources.
> some secular Jews that visited them in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
I recall reading that when someone who visited them did not keep shabbat, they questioned his Jewishness.
Ujm,
You are just ignoring the evidence you don’t like. They are not “heretofore uknown” (unlike the Lamba), they were known to the broader Jewish community from the Radbaz, Benjamin of Tudela, and Eldad HaDani. (And it was known that there was an a Jewish community in Kush from Tanach). Additionally, there are numerous references to them in Muslim and, especially Christian sources. They had wars, over hundreds of years, with their Christian neighbors. This is isn’t just some oral tradition that doesn’t match up with other evidence. It is an oral tradition that fits in with the rest of the documentation we have.
We have a letter that was sent by a leader of the Beta Israel in 1850 (or so), in Hebrew, to Jerusalem asking for help to emigrate to E”Y. That’s 170 years ago.
At this point, it’s not worth it to argue anything with ujm. Like I said earlier in this thread, he is nothing more than an extremely bigoted, racist, disrespectful person. His opinions should be completely ignored, just like those of the various Neturei Karta trolls who show up every so often to yell “Gevalt” about the existence of the State of Israel.
> are the same people today calling themselves Beta Israel?
seems like grasping for straw instrad of admitting someone has a better argument. Are you saying several Jewish communities existed in Ethiopia and one disappeared? Get yourself an Occam razor.
Ujm,
1) They are in the same location in Ethiopia, they match the description of those sources, and we can track their basic history from that time. There are also no other candidates. There’s no other group in that part of Africa even claiming to be Jewish. If you say the Beta Israel are some new group, then you need to explain what happened to the Jews of Ethiopia and where their replacements came from.
2) The Islamic sources that I have seen cited are from the 16th and 17th centuries. The Ethiopian Jews are called Falashas (which the Beta Israel are still called by the Ethiopian gentiles) in these sources. There are Christian sources going back to the 4th Century. Around the 12 century or so, after the rise of the Ethiopinum empire, the Christian sources also begin to refer to the Beta Israel as Falasha.
3) I found it online here at http://www.ybz.org.il/_Uploads/dbsAttachedFiles/Article_110.8.pdf It was published in an Israeli academic journal called Te’uda. The letter is from 1862. But references earlier communications. As for how I know it is the same people, there’s no other candidates. How do you know that current Chasidim are descendants of the Talmidei Baal Shem Tov and their followers? Maybe all the chasidim got wiped out in 1870 and new people arose (out of nowhere) and started pretending that they were always chasidim.
> Maybe all the chasidim got wiped out in 1870 and new people arose (out of nowhere) and started pretending that they were always chasidim.
sidetracking: you have a point here. Gemorah talks about real chasidim. then there were Ashkenazi medieval chasidim. modern chasidim took over a name.
The “Afrikaners” moved there only a couple hundred years ago, the Ethiopian Jews (or non Jews, not saying one way or another but just pointing something out) claim to have been in central Africa close to the equator for thousands of years. It would make sense that the Ashkenazim started off relatively darker but after a long time in dark Northern Europe took on paler complexions.
“that their Tanach is the same as the Old Testament ”
Our Tanakh is the same as the Old Testament used by Protestant Christians. The only difference is that the books are in a different order, and that very few Protestant Christians can read Hebrew so they only use translations. But their scholars for centuries have used the Hebrew Tanakh as the basis for their translations. (The first such English translation was published in 1560.)
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