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Reviewed by:
  • One People, One Blood: Ethiopian-Israelis and the Return to Judaism
  • Abraham D. Lavender
One People, One Blood: Ethiopian-Israelis and the Return to Judaism, by Don Seeman. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009. 240 pp. $46.95.

One People, One Blood: Ethiopian-Israelis and the Return to Judaism is an ethnographic study of the "Feres Mura" in Israel and Ethiopia. The so-called "Feres Mura" are the descendants of Ethiopian Jews, some of whose ancestors converted to Christianity in Ethiopia in the 1800s but have now reasserted their Jewish identity and desire to live in Israel. There are now more than 100,000 Ethiopians living as Jews in Israel, with about 20,000 "Feres Mura" who are the central concern of Seeman, although he also gives attention to "Feres Mura" still in Ethiopia. Seeman started research on the Beta Israel community in 1989, conducted research in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in the summers of 1992 and 1993 and in Israel between 1994 and 1996, and concentrated on Jerusalem and Haifa, including immigrant absorption centers, between 1998 and 2003. He clearly is an expert on the topic. One of his main arguments is that the "Feres Mura" must be viewed as "an integral part of the larger Beta Israel or Ethiopian Jewish community whose center is today in Israel" (p. 5).

Seeman notes that the term Beta Israel is the term most commonly used today in both academic and historical contexts, and is frequently used by Beta Israel to describe themselves. He puts the words "Feres Mura" in quotation [End Page 183] marks every time he uses them, and advocates that another term should be used. In fact, as seen, he uses the more encompassing term Ethiopian-Israelis in the subtitle to make his point, this term being used to accurately include those "Feres Mura" who now live in Israel.

Seeman emphasizes three spheres of state policy that impinge heavily upon the "Feres Mura": (1) immigration policy, (2) public health practice, and (3) the power of Israel's religious establishment. He also emphasizes the controversy over the policy of return to Judaism, a policy constantly under pressure to change, and which did change drastically during his years of research. Seeman reminds the reader that it was Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef 's ruling in 1973 accepting the Jewishness of the Beta Israel that set the stage for the eventual immigration to Israel of the Beta Israel, but that, after years of arguments both ways, this drastically changed in 2007 when Minister of the Interior Meir Shitreet "tried to galvanize public opinion to emend the Law of Return to withhold automatic citizenship from immigrant converts in order to remove the temptation of mass conversion by groups like the 'Feres Mura'" (p. 196). The Minister's position was, "No one should go looking for any lost tribes because I won't let them in any more. . . . Let them go to America" (p. 196).

After an Introduction, the book is divided into seven chapters. In Chapter One, "A Death in Addis Ababa," in July 1992, a year after the "Feres Mura" dilemma "burst onto Israeli public consciousness" with the Operation Solomon airlift, Seeman introduces the reader to the "purity, authenticity, suffering, and a sense of belonging to a people and a nation" (p. 40). In Chapter Two, "The Question of Kinship," he gives a good historical overview of life in Ethiopia since the mid-1800s. Special attention is given to Abba Mahari, a leader of the Beta Israel in Ethiopia, who, in 1862, was among the leaders of a disastrous attempted exodus to the "Holy Land" of Israel because he believed that God was ready to gather diaspora Jews back to the land of their fathers. Mahari's various actions were also partly responsible for the failure of Christian missionaries who had tried to start conversions in the 1800s, especially after 1860. It is estimated that only .01 percent of Beta Israels converted in any one year during the century, and these were largely poor youth attracted by the carrot of a free education (p. 51). Despite very few conversions, charges of accepting Christianity have been a major source of accusations against...

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