What makes Beta Israel practice remarkable is not that it differs from Ashkenazi or Sephardi custom, which every Jewish community does, but that it developed without the rabbinic literature that shaped all of them. There is no Talmud in the Beta Israel tradition, no Mishnah, no responsa, and none of the legal apparatus that has organised Jewish life everywhere else since late antiquity.
The scripture is the Orit, the Octateuch, meaning the Five Books of Moses together with Joshua, Judges and Ruth, in Ge'ez, the liturgical language of Ethiopian Christianity, alongside other books of the Ethiopian biblical canon and a body of writing in Ge'ez proper to the community. The religious leaders are the kessoch, singular kes, priests rather than rabbis, whose authority rests on ordination and office rather than on scholarly mastery of a legal corpus.
Practice follows from the sources. The Sabbath is kept with a strictness that impressed and sometimes disconcerted outside Jewish observers. Purity laws that rabbinic Judaism largely suspended with the destruction of the Temple were maintained: menstruating women and women after childbirth withdrew to a separate hut, and the rules governing contact with the dead were observed closely. Sacrifice, abandoned in rabbinic Judaism, persisted at least in the Passover offering into the modern period.
And the community sustained a monastic order. Monks living apart under vows of celibacy have no place in any other Jewish tradition, and Kaplan and Quirin both read the institution as evidence of the community's formation inside an Ethiopian Christian environment rather than in isolation from it. The monasteries had largely ceased to function by the twentieth century.