The Falashas: The Forgotten Jews of Ethiopia, by David Kessler
Today's date is: 5/12/2025
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| 102 very survival of his people, sued for peace. The King agreed to pardon him in return for the surrender of Amdo. Gideon accepted and Amdo was convicted of rebellion and murder and crucified with great cruelty. The peace was short-lived. Treacherously and without warning the King ordered a general pogrom of all Falashas living between Lake Tana and the Semien mountains. Gideon was killed and, with his death, Falasha independence virtually came to an end. Bruce wrote that the official reason for the massacre was revenge for the Falashas' support of Amdo's rebellion but he saw the real cause in the hand of the new religion and the King's Jesuit advisers. He placed the date at 1616, though some writers, including Ben Zvi, favour 1624. Gideon, according to Bruce, was 'a man of great reputation, not only among his subjects but throughout all Abyssinia'.(1) He was reputed to have been immensely rich and his treasures to have been hidden in the mountains where, in Bruce's day and no doubt long after, they were sought in vain. A few escaped the massacre in the company of Phineas, who succeeded Gideon as leader. Bruce wrote: ... the children of those that were slain were sold for slaves by the king; and all the Falasha in Dembea, in the low countries immediately in the king's power, were ordered upon pain of death to renounce their religion, and be baptised. To this they consented, seeing there was no remedy; and the king unwisely imagined that he had extinguished by one blow the religion which was that of his country long before Christianity, by the unwarrantable butchery of a number of people whom he had surprised living in security under the assurance of peace. Many of them were baptised accordingly, and they were all ordered to plow and harrow upon the Sabbath day. (2) Ever since the Portuguese first came to Abyssinia at the end of the fifteenth century the Roman Catholic Church had attempted to gain ascendancy in the country. The missionary spirit was strong among the Europeans and they were irked by the peculiar form of Christianity which they encountered, with its markedly Judaic characteristics. By the middle of the sixteenth century the Jesuit order had become interested in Ethiopia and decided to undertake the conversion of its people.(3) The Pope gave the project his blessing and in 1557 Bishop Andre de Oviedo's (1) ibid., p. 292. |