The Falashas: The Forgotten Jews of Ethiopia, by David Kessler
Today's date is: 5/12/2025
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| 70 also prepared for women in confinement. The uncleanness lasts for forty days if a male child is born and eighty days if it is a female child (cf Leviticus 12). Upon the conclusion of her time of uncleanness, the woman shaves her head, immerses herself, and washes her clothes before returning to her home, while the custom is to burn the confinement hut. A man undergoes purification after touching somebody or something impure by isolating himself from the community for one or more days and then washes his body and his clothes with ashes and water and sometimes shaves his head.(1) The Falashas do not eat raw meat like other Ethiopians and they observe the Pentateuchal laws concerning the ritually clean and unclean animals and the purging of the sinew of the femoral vein. Shechitah (ritual slaughter) is carried out by a priest and the Falashas do not eat meat slaughtered by Christians. They wash their hands before partaking of food and recite blessings before and after. Circumcision of boys, in accordance with the biblical prescription, takes place on the eighth day after birth. There is no fixed date for the excision of girls, which is a custom widely practised in Africa but is not prescribed by Jewish law and has presumably been adopted from the pagan past of the Agaus. There is little doubt that the practice will die out as Western influences gain ground. When an Israeli authoress not long ago asked a Falasha elder in a remote village whether he approved of the custom she was told: 'The clitoris is removed so as to paralyse the centre of feeling. Any woman who is not circumcised will run after men like a mare after a stallion and will become a prostitute. (2) The Falasha dietary laws do not include the prescription forbidding mixing meat and milk as this is a Talmudic interpretation of the biblical prohibition against seething a kid in its mother's milk (3) which had not reached the Falashas before the period of their isolation. The practice of purification by sprinkling the ashes of a red heifer, 'the water of separation', as ordained in Numbers 19, is still maintained. The ashes are kept in an earthenware jar, sometimes to be seen hanging on the inner wall of the synagogue. Among the relatively few Christian characteristics which have been adopted by the Falashas perhaps the most significant is the institution of a monastic system for monks and nuns which, according to Falasha tradition, was introduced in the fifteenth (1) ibid., p. 72. |