The Hyena People: Ethiopian Jews in Christian Ethiopia Volume 13 Paperback - 1999 - 1st Edition

First line

Small rounds huts of wood, straw, and mud, which can be erected in a few short days, fill the tiny villages scattered along the steep mountains and broad plains of northwestern Ethiopia.

From the rear cover

The Jews (Falasha) of northwestern Ethiopia are a unique example of a Jewish group living within an ancient, non-Western, predominantly Christian society. Hagar Salamon presents the first in-depth study of this group, called the "Hyena people" by their non-Jewish neighbors. Drawing on more than a hundred interviews with Ethiopian immigrants now living in Israel, Salamon explores the Ethiopia within as seen through the lens of individual memories and expressed through ongoing dialogues. What results is an ethnography of the fantasies and fears that divide groups and, in particular, Jews from non-Jews.

Recurring patterns can be seen in Salamon's interviews, which thematically touch on religious disputations, purity and impurity, the concept of blood, slavery and conversion, supernatural powers, and the metaphors of clay vessels, water, and fire. The Hyena People helps unravel the complex nature of religious coexistence in Ethiopia and also provides important new tools for analyzing and evaluating interreligious, interethnic, and especially Jewish -- Christian relations in a variety of cultural and historical contexts.