Isolation, Contact and a Canon Reconsidered

Scholars have long debated how early Beta Israel's separation from the wider currents of rabbinic Judaism actually occurred, since the community left no continuous written record of its own history before outside observers began describing it. Kay Kaufman Shelemay's study of the community's music and ritual situates its documented emergence as a distinct religious group in the fourteenth century, consolidated through conflict with the Christian Solomonic monarchy into the sixteenth, though oral tradition and some scholarship have argued for much older origins tied to ancient contact between Judaism and the kingdom of Aksum, a question the documentary record cannot settle either way. The Orit's standing as sufficient scripture on its own was not seriously tested from within the community until sustained contact with world Jewry began in earnest in the twentieth century, first through Western Jewish relief and educational organisations and later through emigration to Israel, where the Sephardi and Ashkenazi Chief Rabbinates formally recognised Beta Israel as Jewish in 1973 and 1975 respectively. That recognition did not require the community's own scriptural tradition to be rewritten, but it did open a two-way encounter in which younger generations, especially after large-scale immigration to Israel, have increasingly studied the Talmudic literature the community's long isolation had kept from it, a change in access to rabbinic learning rather than a correction to what the Orit itself is held to be.