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

Today's date is: 5/12/2025
HOME | Cover Page | Contents | Introduction 1| Strangers in the Midst 9 | Legend and History 24| Judaism, Christianity and Islam 58 | The Middle Ages 74 | Resistance and Defeat 94 | Missions and Missionaries 106 | Jacques Faitlovitch 130 | The Struggle for Recognition 147| Postscript 170 | Select Bibliography | Images | Index |


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sect. His writings aroused much interest and no little controversy; three editions were published in Great Britain and translations appeared in French and German. When the revelation that indigenous Jews living in east-central Africa was eventually comprehended by English churchmen and by Protestants in Germany and Switzerland, they realised that there were prospects for proselytisation which were not to be missed. By 1838 the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews began to think of establishing a mission in Ethiopia, though it took another eighteen years before the intention was translated into reality.

A different picture was presented by the Jewish world, at that time comprising many individual communities with no coordinating international institutions, which evinced remarkably little interest in their long-lost brethren. Despite the circulation of the early reports it was not until the 1840s that Jewish organisations began to express any concern and then on a most modest scale, being motivated principally by a desire to counteract the threat from the missionaries.

While the Christian evangelists were convinced that they had discovered a· long-lost branch of the Jewish faith and that it was their duty to bring the Falashas into their fold, the Jewish world remained sceptical and it took many years before they fully recognised the validity of the Falashas' demand to be joined to the wider community. Their claim was based on their strict adherence to the teachings of the Torah, the five books of Moses, as well as their acceptance of all the other books of the Old Testament. Falashas reject the New Testament and the Koran. Their Bible, which, excluding the New Testament, they share with the Christians, is written in Ge'ez, the ancient Ethiopic language which is now 'dead' and used only for liturgical purposes both in synagogues and churches. A few Hebrew and Aramaic words have found their way into the Ge'ez Bible, which is a translation from the Greek Septuagint, itself a translation from Hebrew, made, it is said, by seventy-two Jewish scholars in Egypt at the instance of King Ptolemy II, Philadelphus, in the third century BC. A knowledge of the Hebrew language appears to have completely bypassed the Ethiopian Jews. Orthodox rabbis have questioned the authenticity of their attachment to the Jewish religion because they do not follow the precepts of the Halachah, or Oral Law, as distinct from the Torah or Written Law which they scrupulously follow. However, as the codification of the Oral Law, known as the Talmud, was not completed until about AD 500, at a time when the Jews of Ethiopia were already cut off from their co-religionists


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