National Identities Versus Cultural Identities: Beta Israel Community
Creators: name: Gebremichael, Abrham Yohannes
Publisher: name: Universität Bielefeld
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: 300

description: This study focuses on the structure of the national and cultural identities of the Beta Israel community. It primarily focuses on people over thirty-five who were born and lived in Ethiopia at least until the age of twelve and then left for Israel, which is the first generation. Beta Israel, the Falasha, Ethiopian Jews, or Ethiopian Israelies are a community of people involved in a type of Judaism exclusive of ancient rabbinical writings. They were alienated from the rest of the Jewish world and lived in Ethiopia for centuries. The community and scholars believed they had lived in Ethiopia earlier than the Ethiopian Axum dynasty accepted Christianity in the fourth century. Most Beta Israel communities are to be found in the mountainous highlands of the Gondar region, north of Lake Tana in Begemdir, in the Wollo and Tigre provinces. This relatively small community lived surrounded by traditional, dominant, Ethio- Semitic language speakers and orthodox Christian society in Ethiopia. Then since the 1980s, within modern, white, dominant, Semitic language speakers and Jewish society in Israel. Shortly, it can be stated that they have a distinction from Ethiopian Christians and a union with Ethiopian Christians. Simultaneously distinctions from western Judaism and unity with western Judaism. The thesis endeavors to describe these intermingled belongings of individuals and groups in different contexts; consequently, see the following three pieces. First, it describes how the community understands, interprets, and deciphers nationalities, ethnicities, and other groups forms. It investigates these concepts within the frame of social identity and self-categorization theories. Second, it works within the theory of segmented assimilation. Therefore it investigates how the situation of the host society, the new immigrant, and the individual sociodemographic factors or personal quality of an individual upon arrival to the new environment affect the integration process negatively or positively. Third, how science as means of knowledge production influenced or impacted the construction of the identity of the community or minority group. Particularly in this research, the community came from Ethiopia. The Israel public, therefore, sees Africa as uncivilized or unfitted to the modern world. This understanding of the public originated and persisted within the society, primarily utilizing political and scholarly discourse. This thesis shows how these discourses depict the community to the public. At the same time, it answers the following three questions: first, what are the most significant limitations of dominant nationalism theories when applied to minority groups? Second, migration as an instant change in space, to what extent does it affects the community's cultural and national identities? Moreover, this change in space causes changes in the internal structure of a community or group by restructuring the group's internal "glue," such as norms, values, and cultural features. Therefore, it also answers how these "glue" contradict, interrelate, and explain each other as individuals and a group? Third, what external factors contribute to being economically the least privileged community in Israeli society? This qualitative research utilizes both primary and secondary data. That is the secondary data from governmental and non-governmental organizations and scientific scholars who work in the field of Medicine, Genetics, and Social science. The primary data contain a series of semi-structured interviews with about twenty Beta Israelis, an immersion observation method for about three months in Ethiopia as well as Israel. That helps to measure the original scale of the individual and collectivistic attitudes of national and cultural identities of the community. The study utilized the primary variable, age, to select the focus group, targeting people over thirty-five. The data collection is executed in Amharic and Tigrigna languages since the target group, and the researcher speaks their native languages. Then it is translated and analyzed into English.