The Falashas: The Forgotten Jews of Ethiopia, by David Kessler

The Song of Songs

MANY inconclusive theories have been advanced to explain the origin of the Falashas, the black Jews of Ethiopia, and my investigation into their history has led into a number of unexpected paths. From time to time tentative and sometimes conflicting suggestions have been propounded by scholars while the Falashas themselves have relied on picturesque legends and tradition. The story of this unique tribe is both heroic and pathetic. It runs like a continuous thread through the whole length of Ethiopian history and at the same time illuminates the practices of pre-Exilic Judaism and the development of Ethiopian Christianity. The question to be answered is not so much how the Falashas reached Ethiopia as how Judaism got there. Framed in this way the problem appears less intractable. People do not ask how Christians reached England but how Christianity came to these shores. The same may be said of other religious ideas which have spread from country to country, such as Hellenism or Buddhism or Islam.

King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba were bound to play an important part in unravelling the story but I had not anticipated that this would lead to the hypothesis that the Bible story represents an historical 'slippage' of some two centuries, nor that the queen, though an historical personage, was not to be identified, as she usually is, with the land of the Sabaeans in south-west Arabia but more probably with ancient Meroe - a civilisation of which only a few people are aware. This led to a glimpse of ancient Egyptian history and, in particular, of the pharaohs of the twenty-fifth, or so-called Ethiopian, dynasty, the 'broken reed' against which the Assyrians warned King Hezekiah. These were Meroitic kings who came from the country known to the Old Testament writers by the Egyptian name Cush which was called Ethiopia by the Greeks and today forms part of northern Sudan.