The Kessoch as a Priesthood Rather Than a Rabbinate

Where rabbinic Judaism elsewhere places religious authority chiefly with rabbis trained in Talmudic law, Beta Israel places it with the kessoch, singular kes, a priesthood who lead prayer, teach the Orit, supervise dietary law and ritual purity, and officiate at life-cycle rites including marriage and burial. Steven Kaplan's history describes the office as passing through specific families across generations, its holders trained in a discipline Beta Israel itself understood as closer to monastic formation than to rabbinic ordination, since there was no Talmudic curriculum in Ethiopia for a rabbinate to be trained in in the first place. James Quirin's account of the community situates the kessoch as functioning alongside monks, a separate religious specialist role in Beta Israel practice, so that Ethiopian Jewish religious authority historically rested on a structure with no exact equivalent in rabbinic Judaism, a priesthood and a monastic order operating together rather than a single rabbinic office holding both textual and ritual authority at once. The Encyclopaedia Judaica situates this structure as continuous with, though not identical to, the ancient Israelite priesthood the Hebrew Bible itself describes, a resemblance the community's own tradition has long drawn on to account for its clergy's distinct character within world Judaism.