Jews with Tattoos? Tattooing Traditions of the Beta Israel

In looking through some statistics for my blog, I discovered that seven people have found my blog by searching “beautiful Ethiopian women.” At the risk of increasing that number, I thought I would devote some time to traditions of body art among the Jewish communities of Ethiopia. While henna is used among Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Ethiopians, in this post I’m going to go (a little) out of my field and talk about tattooing.

The origins of the Ethiopian Jews are murky and, to my mind, irrelevant to this discussion (but see Kaplan 1992, Parfitt 1999, or Weil 2011 for some approaches). Suffice it to say that by the 19th century there was a large community of Jewish Ethiopians, living mostly in the areas of Gondar, Wegera, Semien, Wolqayt and Shire in Tigray (yes, there is both a Gondar and a Shire in Ethiopia; no, it is not Middle Earth). A related community is known as Feresmura or Falashmura, Jews who had converted (or been converted) to Christianity in the nineteenth century, but maintained a separate communal identity. Ethiopian Jews are also known as Beta Israel, ‘the House of Israel’ (an older term, Falasha, literally ‘exiles,’ has been largely rejected by the community).

Ethiopian Jews in Israel celebrating Sigd, Jerusalem, 2010.
Photo by Noam Sienna

In Ethiopia, the Beta Israel practiced a Torah-based form of Judaism — that is, without the additional customs, explanations, festivals, and practices of rabbinic Judaism as codified in the Talmud and later scholars. Since coming to Israel, they have largely been assimilated to the structure of normative Judaism; the Feresmura have also reverted to Jewish practice in Israel. Some excellent introductions are here, here, and here.

One of the most striking features of the Ethiopian Jewish community is their tattooing. Historically, the vast majority of Jewish communities generally refrained from tattooing, even when living in environments with established tattoo traditions, due to the prohibition on tattoos in Leviticus 19:28. Technically, in the Biblical context this was a prohibition on imitating Canaanite mourning practices of cuttings and tattooed inscriptions for the dead. The rabbis, however, eventually identify this with any form of putting ink permanently under the skin, whether writing or drawing, for any purpose. While I’m on the subject, let me remind everyone that tattooing, while thus prohibited, does not disqualify one from burial in a Jewish cemetery or access to any other Jewish service (so hopefully that myth can finally be busted).

Beta Israel woman, Jerusalem, 2010.
Photo by Noam Sienna.

Ethiopian Jews, however, did develop traditions of tattooing (note: even though the sacred text of the Ethiopian Jewish community was not the Hebrew text of the Bible but its Ge‘ez translation, known as the Orit, this prohibition still appears there as well). This is often one of the first things people notice; anthropologist Hagar Salamon writes 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” (1999, pg. 3).

That last point is important for me. 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.

The Ethiopian Jewish experience in Israel, however, has been otherwise. These tattoos, as one might imagine, are frequently invoked in describing the Beta Israel as Other. For example, Abbink describes their “‘strange and exotic’ African appearance: black, living in primitive conditions, women with tattoo signs on their arms and heads” (1984, pg. 242). They also reinforce the Israeli suspicion — both on a state level and in public discourse — of the validity of their Jewish identities. 

Hadas Nogah, an Ethiopian-Israeli who immigrated at the age of 9, remembers: “[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” (Arnon-Ohana 2005, pg. 163). It is no wonder that many Ethiopians attempt to have their tattoos removed, if they can afford it.

Ethiopian Christian woman
(Parkyns, 1853, pg. 28)

Of course, tattoos have a deep history in North and East Africa in Muslim and Christian communities (see Johnston 1844 or Parkyns 1853 for some descriptions of the tattooing process in 19th-century Ethiopia). But the rarity of tattooing in a Jewish community makes this case especially worthy of attention. It is (in my opinion) essential that these customs are recorded now while we still have access to elders and carriers of this tradition. 

If we don’t, we will end up with the situation we have now with henna practices: the generation growing up in Israel abandons it, and then in fifty years from now people like me are going to wonder about the traditions, try to reconstruct them from childhood memories, and regret that no-one recorded them while they were still vibrant.

So guess how many published sources there are on Beta Israel tattoos? If you guessed zero, you win, um… the same sad feeling I have (sorry). There has not been a single academic study or even description of Beta Israel tattooing practices. The most treatment the subject has received is half a paragraph in the ‘Ethiopia’ volume of the (usually excellent) Ben-Zvi series on Jewish culture (Salamon 2008, pg. 157), and one medical article (Lapidoth and Aharonowitz 2004) describing the use of laser technology to “improv[e] the quality of life of Ethiopian immigrants in Israel and eas[e] their social integration in their adopted country” (pg. 908) by removing their tattoos.

'Before and after' pictures of Beta Israel tattoo removal,
from Lapidoth and Aharanowitz, 2004, pg. 907. 

Beta Israel woman, Jerusalem, 2010.
Photo by Noam Sienna.

From the little published material, and my own observations, I can make a few basic comments. Beta Israel tattoos, known as tukurat, are done primarily for women, on the face (forehead, temples, and chin), neck, and hands. Men are occasionally tattooed as well, mainly on their hands. 

The tattooing is done with charcoal, although the exact process is unclear. The lack of serious study also means the symbolism and purpose of tattooing among the Beta Israel is not fully known, but most reports suggest tattoos were seen as both a sign of beauty and as protection against negative forces, and some tattoos had medicinal or healing properties as well. 

The motifs range from simple circles and crosses to more elaborate sun-like shapes and necklace-like rings around the throat. In my own work in Israel, I observed a variety of different motifs and placements, and attempted to record them, but unfortunately I was not able to do any fieldwork directly addressing them. 

The suggestion has also been made that the tattoos, the crosses in particular, were intended to disguise Jews in a hostile Christian environment, or to deflect potential anti-Jewish violence, but it remains unclear. It is a topic to which I hope to devote further study.

Some Beta Israel facial and hand tattoos.
From my field notes, Israel, 2010.

My goal in highlighting these traditions is to not only to protest the ongoing marginalization of Ethiopian Judaism, but to suggest that it is part of a larger trend, so prevalent in Israel, that has understood Jewish Diaspora culture — especially culture that originates outside of Europe — as unimportant, irrelevant to Jewish life, or even un-Jewish. In focusing on this particular bodily Jewish experience, I am attempting to push back against a conceptual definition of Judaism which privileges the authority of the (male) rabbinic textual tradition and which centres Jewish authenticity in European Jewish culture. 

After all, the rabbinic tradition from which 'our' Judaism emerged is in many ways farther from Biblical Judaism than that of the Beta Israel (in areas such as kashrut and niddah, for example, not to mention things like Hillel's prozbul). It seems unfair to hold Beta Israel responsible to a standard developed in the rabbinic tradition, unless we're willing to say explicitly that the only acceptable vision of Jewish life is that of contemporary Ashkenazi rabbinic Judaism (and in Israel, that means specifically that of the Orthodox rabbinate). What I'm proposing here is the possibility of widening our vision of Judaism to include multiple possible conceptions of Jewish flourishing.

Have I gone too far? Have I not gone far enough? I welcome your thoughts and questions in the comments below!

Bibliography

Abbink, Gerrit Jan. The Falashas in Ethiopia and Israel: the Problem of Ethnic Assimilation. Nijmegen: Institute for Cultural and Social Anthropology, 1984.

Arnon-Ohanna, Yuval. Jewish Exodus from Ethiopia: Children Describe Their Journey from Ethiopia to Jerusalem Through Sudan, Jerusalem: Misrad haBitahon, 2005.

Johnston, Charles. Travels in Southern Abyssinia, Through the Country of Adal to the Kingdom of Shoa. London: J. Madden and Co., 1844.

Kaplan, Steven. The Beta Israel (Falasha) in Ethiopia: from Earliest Times to the Twentieth Century. New York University Press, 1992.

Lapidoth, Moshe and Gali Aharonowitz. Tattoo Removal among Ethiopian Jews in Israel: Tradition faces Technology. Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, Vol. 51, no. 6, 2004, pp. 906-909.

Parfitt, Tudor and Emanuela Trevisan Semi. The Beta Israel in Ethiopia and Israel: Studies on the Ethiopian Jews. London: Curzon, 1999.

Parkyns, Mansfield. Life in Abyssinia: Being Notes Collected during Three Years’ Residence and Travels in That Country. London: John Murray, 1853.

Salamon, Hagar. The Hyena People: Ethiopian Jews in Christian Ethiopia. University of California Press, 1999.

Salamon, Hagar. Ethiopia (Jewish Communities in the East in the 19th and 20th Centuries Series). Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 2008.

Weil, Shalva and Emanuela Trevisan Semi. Beta Israel: The Jews of Ethiopia and Beyond: History, Identity and Borders. Venice: Cafoscarina, 2011.