Israelite identity and anti-Judaism in Late Antique and medieval Ethiopia

Scholars have long acknowledged the cultural and political significance attached to the fashioning of Israelite identity in Ethiopia. Insufficiently appreciated, however, is the extent to which the claim of descent from Jacob's seed turned on its head the supersessionist paradigm that had come to prevail everywhere else in the Christian ecumene. Ethiopia invented for itself a biological Israelite genealogy, assuming the mantle of chosen peoplehood literally to become carnal Israel. How to reconcile the prestige of Israelite ancestry according to the flesh with the Christian doctrine of spiritual inheritance according to the promise? How to channel Old Testament ritual into a national religious consciousness while at the same time repelling even the intimation of tainted kinship with the Jews? Visual evidence from late thirteenth-century wall paintings and fifteenth-century manuscripts demonstrates that the greater the investment in Solomonic succession, the translocation of Zion, and the embrace of Old Testament practices, the sharper the antithesis between becoming "Israel" and becoming "Jewish".