The Jews with tattooed crosses
‘Whoever has a tattoo on their body won’t enter Jerusalem.’
Few people outside of Africa knew about Beta Israel until the 1980s. They were hidden to the rest of the world, a tribe of people who observed Jewish customs and lived as Jews, in Ethiopia.
Some called them “falasha,” which means exiles, though it’s a name they have rejected.
They’re Jews in just about every respect, though their culture differs from that of Ashkenazis and Sephardim in a few noticeable ways.
One obvious difference are the tattoos on their hands and necks, and sometimes foreheads.
There are a few theories on the origins of Ethiopia’s Jews. Some point to the Torah, which suggests one of the 12 tribes of Israel, the tribe of Dan, chose to leave the homeland instead of fighting a war, settling in the land of “Cush,” what we now call Ethiopia.
There’s a story about a man named Eldad ha-Dani in the 9th century, who professed to be from what he called an "independent Jewish state" somewhere in East Africa. His stories are questionable -- they involve a daring escape from cannibals, rescue by a tribe of fire-worshippers who held him captive and a ransom to a Jewish merchant for 32 pieces of gold.
But if ha-Dani’s stories were all fiction, how did he know about the Jews in Africa?
Another theory is that groups of Jews migrated to Ethiopia from southern Arabia and converted some of the locals they found there, though it certainly is a tale with less drama.
Whatever their origin, they were largely forgotten until the 1980s, when famine and persecution drove Beta Israel out of their traditional lands seeking resources. Planeload by planeload, they migrated to Israel, where there remains a rather large population of Ethiopian Jews.
Some stayed behind. In 2018, there were still a few thousand Beta Israel in Africa.
Before assimilating into more common religious practice, Ethiopian Jews used a translation of the Torah in Ge’ez, an ancient Semitic language. They refer to the book as the “Orit.” The prohibition against tattoo in Leviticus 19:28, can be found there, too.
But as the Beta Israel deplaned in Tel Aviv in the 1980s and 1990s, tattoos were evident, mostly among the women but sometimes on the men as well.
Educator Noam Sienna wrote about this in 2014, quoting Hagar Salamon, who wrote that she “could not shake off the shock of the first sight of them. The crosses tattooed on their hands and foreheads remained a vivid symbol for me, shattering long-standing perceptions of Jewish identity.”
There was, probably because of the Biblical prohibition against tattoo mixed with some good ol’ fashioned closed-mindedness, some hesitance to consider a group of Black people with face tattoos legitimately “Jews.”
Sienna writes that their existence made Jews reconsider what it means to be Jewish:
“When we say ‘Jews don’t get tattoos,’ the truth of that statement depends on excluding Jews who do get tattoos from the authority to speak as authentic Jewish voices. What would it mean to consider seriously what Beta Israel tattoos might mean as a Jewish practice? At the very least, it would mean foregrounding the diversity of embodied Jewish experiences in our discussion of what ‘Judaism’ is.”
Sienna quotes a 2005 book, “Jewish Exodus from Ethiopia: Children Describe Their Journey from Ethiopia to Jerusalem Through Sudan,” in which a 9-year-old said: “[Officials] told me that ‘whoever has a tattoo on their body won’t enter Jerusalem.’ When they told me I cried all day. I tried to quickly remove my tattoo but a mark remained.”
Finding no literature on the subject, Sienna documented as best he could the tattoos he saw on members of the Beta Israel community. They are done with charcoal, and take the forms of circles, crosses, sun-like shapes and rings around the throat like necklaces.
As Ethiopian Christians also get tattoos, Sienna suggests that the tattoos, particularly the crosses, helped the the Jews of Ethiopia pass, “disguise” themselves “in a hostile Christian environment, or to deflect potential anti-Jewish violence.”