The Tribe of Dan and the Jews of Ethiopia

The Jewish people preserved their sacred texts.

Their sacred texts preserved the Jewish people.

The survival and return of the Jews of Ethiopia provide an astonishing example of this dialectic,

Let us begin with today’s Torah reading, in which Jacob – now named Israel – pronounces his parting blessings over his twelve sons, the leaders of the twelve tribes.

Jacob rebukes the character flaws in some of his sons. But he speaks warmly of the Dan. Late Jacob says that Dan is a future leader, a judge. He is also a shrewd and effective fighter. “He is a serpent on the path of the horse’s heel.”  The reference is likely to Dan’s ability to resist powerful mounted riders –  like the soldiers  Israelites would face against the Egyptians. Moses would also speak warmly of Dan; he was a “lion’s cub.”

Dan often located itself at the exposed edges of the Israelites, at one point, next to the Philistines. The mighty Samson emerged from its ranks, a man of extraordinary physical prowess and sharp intellect – when not stupefied by Delilah –  and in the end,  a man willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for his dignity and the survival of his people and his God.

The tribe of Dan appears briefly in other parts of the Bible. The book of Judges tells us to relate to Galilee, where it seizes the city of Lachish. The tribe became part of the United Kingdom of David and—recalls the book of Chronicles—provided many skilled fighters. Later, with the other “lost ten tribes,” Dan fell to the Assyrian conquest. Where did its people go?

There are many other theories about the origins of the Jewish community in Ethiopia, and historians have not reached a consensus. There may be a variety of origins. But one strand of historical memory traces all the way back to the Dan tribe of the bible. Perhaps, through generations, they traveled through Egypt and Sudan along the way. The Danite origin was adopted by the mysterious figure Eldad Ha-Dani in the ninth century and by additional witnesses in later centuries.

Other Ethiopian Jews believed another bible-based story: that they descended from a union of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

Whatever the precise history of their origins, a pivotal point for the Jews of Ethiopia was in 1976 when the Chief Sephardic Rabbi ruled that the community in Ethiopia was fully Jewish and, indeed, descendants of the tribe of Dan. This opened the way to their mass immigration to Israel.

There is much more to the biblical origins of the Ethiopian Jews. However, when they may have arrived in Egypt, they brought with them sacred texts that included the five books of Moses. They did not have access to later sacred writings, like the Talmud. But based on the texts they did retain, they revered the Torah and honored the dietary codes, the purity codes,  the requirements for circumcision, and the sanctity of the Sabbath.

After the “Dan” ruling of the Chief Sephardic Rabbi, the Israeli government then conducted a series of rescue operations to airlift the Ethiopian community. The name, Israel, is in recognition of the same Israel who blesses the tribes in this week’s Torah reading. The Ethiopian community is known as Beta Israel, the house of Israel. The operations to rescue them had names like Moses, Joshua, and Solomon. The majority of the people of Israel are Jews, whose name arises from the son Jacob and tribal leader Judah – who is also warmly blessed by Jacob in his parting benedictions.

Many Ethiopian Jews perished on their trek to the rescue waystations in Sudan; the memorial day in Israel for them is Jerusalem Day. The Jews of Ethiopia, like the Jews of the rest of the Diaspora, never lost hope of returning to their holiest city.

The generative and sustaining power of the Jewish bible arises from its literary power. Much of it is written with a distinctive but superb literary craft. The text is replete with elegant nuances of language and stunning interconnections. The literary power is so strong that it can be detected even in translations like the King James bible. Perhaps it carried through in the translations used by the Ethiopian Jews in the ancient language Ge’ez.

But there is much more to the radiant power of the Jewish bible. Within it, enormous energy is compacted into small packages. A simple story like the Akeda,  the binding of Isaac, a few words – say about how the Lord is one – can convey a world of meanings. The words, moreover, are suffused by a sense of transcendent importance. The Bible is not merely a stirring epic, a collection of “ripping yarns.”  it engages with the most deeply felt and perplexing issues of the human condition. It problems whether there is meaning in our lives and whether it comes in part from an eternal power outside of our ordinary material world.

We live in a time when we are surrounded by many who would deny or erase the arc of history. There are denialists that there is such a thing as the Jewish people.

Are we all connected by common genetic ancestry? It appears that most of us are, but perhaps in some Jewish communities, the genetic like is more like a trace. But that does not matter. We are united as a people, even today, by reasons that include an interest in our past and a commitment to survive in the future. The holy books- the bible, the Talmud, all the commentaries on them – have been, and will remain, the foundation that helps to give us, as a people,  a shared heritage, the feeling of belonging to the same extended family, an ongoing sense of mission, and, we hope, an abiding destiny.