"It Is Futile to Trust in Man": Methodological Difficulties in Studying Non-Mainstream Populations with Reference to Ethiopian Jews in Israel

There is an extensive literature on Ethiopian Jews, but it contains remarkably few references to methodological problems in studying this population. This article explores the nature of the encounter between the researcher and Ethiopian Jews in their new setting in Israel, where the Ethiopian and the Israeli personalities are characterized by different and sometimes opposing qualities. The intentional use of ambiguities in Ethiopian communication may produce an extreme situation in which the collection of data westerners consider