National Library announces digitization project of Beta Israel sacred manuscripts
Dozens of rare texts in Ge’ez, the ancient Semitic liturgical language used in Ethiopia, to be made available online to the public for the first time
Gavriel Fiske is a reporter at The Times of Israel
The National Library of Israel has entered into an agreement with leaders of the Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jewish) community to engage in a comprehensive digitization project of the community’s sacred texts, the NLI announced this week.
After a recent meeting at the library with Beta Israel religious leaders, it was agreed that “high-resolution digital scans of these items will be generated, and made available to the public via the NLI website, while the original items remain with the communities,” the announcement said.
These manuscripts, which are written in Ge’ez, the ancient Semitic liturgical language, include several copies of “The Orit” or Octateuch, the Beta Israel Torah, which comprises the Five Books of Moses plus the books of Joshua, Judges and Ruth.
Other material includes “the Jewish apocryphal texts of Jubilees and Enoch, prayerbooks such as the Book of Psalms, and more,” the NLI said.
Some of these documents are centuries old and were hand-carried to Israel, often after dangerous treks through Ethiopia, during the period of Beta Israel immigration in the 1980s and early ’90s. Most of these texts have been privately held by the community’s Kesim — clergy — or in synagogues but were not available to the public.
Already, 17 documents have been scanned and “will soon be available online,” the notice said. These include four copies of The Orit, a Mesihafe Kufale (Book of Jubilees) from the 18th century, a copy of Mazmura Dawit (the Psalms of David), the Arde’et (Book of Disciples), the Mashafa Mala’ekt (Book of Enoch) as well as several prayer books.
The project is a collaboration between the NLI, the Ethiopian Jewry Heritage Center and Tel Aviv University, whose Orit Guardians MA program “aims to study and safeguard the scriptures and culture of Beta Israel,” the announcement said.
“In recent years, we have been able to document many of the [esoteric] mysteries of the tradition and rich heritage of Ethiopian Jews thanks to cooperation with the Kesim,” said Naftali Avraham, director general of the Ethiopian Jewry Heritage Center.
“I am glad that in this project as well, the Center brought the importance of scanning books before the Kesim, and they joined the project out of recognition of the importance of conservation,” he added.
The NLI website already hosts a digitized copy of The Orit, which was donated to the library in 2016 by the Beta Israel community. According to scholars, The Orit has roots in the Septuagint, a mid-3rd century BCE Greek translation of the Pentateuch (the Five Books of Moses), which is the basis of the Christian Bible.
Undertaken by Jews in Alexandria, the translation was used by the great Jewish philosopher Philo in his biblical exegesis work. The Septuagint is the foundation for several versions of the Old Testament, including the Syriac and Coptic versions, according to scholars. The Ge’ez version was likely translated from the Septuagint in the 5th or 5th centuries CE.
Amanda Borschel-Dan contributed to this report.
