Questions about Jewishness, Judaism, and the Jewish people have been topics of millennia-long debates. In this paper, I focus on the formation of social hierarchies in Israel based on skin-color to argue that there is unresolved yet consequential tension between definitions of Jewishness as a religious tradition, a national identity, and a state apparatus. I embrace the perspective of Ethiopian Jews, whose identities were reframed in Israel as Blacks, to illustrate how this tension placed dark-skinned immigrants beyond the scope of both Jewish religious tradition as well as national identity, to become the marginalized inhabitants of the Jewish State. Thereby I describe and examine two state-imposed processes in which Israel’s Rabbinate plays a central role: 1) Israel’s demand that Ethiopian Jews convert to Judaism in order to be accorded citizenship. 2) Israel’s demand that Ethiopian Jewish children attend a segregated Jewish Orthodox public-school system, to acquire and cultivate a particular national identity. State-sponsored schools have become the basis for both religious and national identity education and re-education.