Blackness in Transition: Decoding Racial Constructs through Stories of Ethiopian Jews

The present article examines racial dynamics as portrayed in stories told, exchanged, and developed in an ever-changing dialogic process. The unique transition of Ethiopian Jews, from being Jews in black Ethiopia to blacks in Jewish Israel, highlights changing constructs of "blackness" in both the Ethiopian immigrant community and the Israeli host society. This research has uncovered a system of racial hierarchies among the Beta Israel, including a secret system of masters and slaves (chewa and barya), and this system challenges conventions of control and racist ideology. Drawing on the discourse concerning the colonial paradigm, the present work analyzes these complex racial dynamics, an important aspect of which is the de-essentialization of Jewishness.