The Clergy Are Kessoch, Priests Rather Than Rabbis

Where rabbinic Judaism elsewhere places religious authority chiefly with rabbis trained in Talmudic law, Beta Israel places it with the kessoch, singular kes, a priesthood who lead prayer, teach the Orit, supervise dietary law and ritual purity, and officiate at life-cycle rites including marriage and burial. Steven Kaplan's history describes the office as passing through specific families across generations, its holders trained in a discipline Beta Israel itself understood as closer to monastic formation than to rabbinic ordination, since there was no Talmudic curriculum in Ethiopia for a rabbinate to be trained in in the first place. James Quirin's account of the community situates the kessoch as functioning alongside monks, a separate religious specialist role in Beta Israel practice, so that Ethiopian Jewish religious authority historically rested on a structure with no exact equivalent in rabbinic Judaism, a priesthood and a monastic order operating together rather than a single rabbinic office holding both textual and ritual authority at once. The Encyclopaedia Judaica situates this structure as continuous with, though not identical to, the ancient Israelite priesthood the Hebrew Bible itself describes, a resemblance the community's own tradition has long drawn on to account for its clergy's distinct character within world Judaism.

The kessoch's standing has faced real strain since large-scale Beta Israel emigration to Israel from the 1980s onward, a change the Encyclopaedia Judaica documents in detail. Israel's Chief Rabbinate, having recognised Beta Israel as Jewish in 1973 and 1975, did not extend the kessoch equivalent standing to Israel's own rabbinate for functions such as officiating marriages recognised by the state, so many communal life-cycle roles the kessoch had performed in Ethiopia passed to state-recognised rabbis instead, some of them themselves of Ethiopian Jewish descent trained in Israeli rabbinical institutions. Kaplan's history records that this shift has produced real generational tension within the community, older kessoch and their traditional standing coexisting with a younger generation increasingly formed by mainstream Israeli rabbinic education, a change in where religious authority is trained and formally recognised rather than in what the kessoch have always taught. Quirin's account notes that the kessoch nonetheless remain active religious figures within Ethiopian Israeli community life, respected for a role and a form of training no rabbinical seminary duplicates, so the office has persisted as a living institution even as the range of functions Israeli law formally recognises it for has narrowed since the community's arrival.