A long the banks of the Gerzeman River, which runs through a valley in northern Ethiopia’s Semien Mountains, sits the village of Semien Menata. Too small and remote to appear on most maps, it is reachable only by walking paths from nearby larger villages. Today Semien Menata is dotted with small wooden homes, flocks of animals, and agricultural fields typical of the region. Scattered about, however, lies evidence of the village’s former inhabitants: Ethiopian Jews known as the Beta Israel who trace their origins to Biblical times, but whose exact roots remain unclear.
Ethiopia’s Jewish community, which settled throughout the rugged north of the country where it was a minority in a mostly Christian kingdom, is first documented in fourteenth-century sources. The Beta Israel consisted of farmers and artisans as well as a religious hierarchy including a class of ascetic high priests, or meloksewoch, and lay priests, or qesoch, in Ge‘ez, a Semitic tongue that became the main liturgical language of the Beta Israel. Meloksewoch lived separately and adhered to strict purity laws that prohibited physical contact with the laity. Both types of priest performed animal sacrifices according to Biblical decree, a practice that lasted into the twentieth century in Ethiopia, long after it had been abandoned in the rest of the Jewish world. The meloksewoch are the only known example of an ascetic Jewish movement after the first century A.D., when sects such as the Essenes, who are generally credited with writing some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, faded away with the rise of the Roman Empire.
Currently, a team led by archaeologist Bar Kribus of Ruhr University Bochum and Sophia Dege-Müller of the University of Hamburg is trying to learn more about the community’s obscure history and unique practices. Team members have drawn on a combination of archaeological survey, texts, and the oral
