jewishhenna:I’m really excited to be delivering a paper tomorrow at Harvard Divinity School about ta
jewishhenna:I’m really excited to be delivering a paper tomorrow at Harvard Divinity School about tattoo traditions among the Jewish communities of Ethiopia — yes, Jews with tattoos! It’s based on a blogpost I wrote a while ago here. Here’s a snippet from my paper:“I am not advocating for Jews to get tattoos; but I am advocating for a more generous assessment of what is a ‘Jewish’ practice. What makes Beta Israel tattoos un-Jewish? It seems unfair to charge them with transgressing the rabbinic tradition which developed in another area of the Jewish world. It is not clear whether their tattooing is a transgression even of Biblical law; and even if it is, practices differing from Biblical law are not disqualified as Jewish, since this is the case in much of contemporary Judaism. Nor is the contemporary rabbinic establishment concerned with closeness to Biblical law, since Ethiopian Jewish practices around niddah [menstrual purity], for example, which adhere closely to Biblical law, have been similarly constrained. And neither are practices shared with or adapted from non-Jews disqualified as Jewish, since this is a basic characteristic of most Jewish culture. And, as I noted earlier, the voices of Ethiopian Jews themselves are missing from this conversation: how did they think about tattoos? What was the relationship between tattoos and their understanding of the Orit? 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 could represent 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.”Photo: a Beta Israel man at prayer, by Ilan Ossendryvver. -- source link
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