It was a poor reward, after zealously maintaining their loyalty to the teachings of Moses and heroically withstanding persecution for something like 2,000 years, to be told by western rabbis, even after the establishment of the State of lsrael, that they could not be recognised as members of the Jewish brotherhood and to be rejected by leading Jewish scholars.

Conflicting opinions as to their origin also caused difficulties.

Whatever records may once have existed have long since disappeared in the upheavals which have beset the country. Neither the Falashas themselves nor foreign scholars have been able to explain with certainty how a Jewish community came to exist in such a remote area and, because of the colour of their skin, they did not conform to the conventional idea that all Jews belonged to the same race, originated from Palestine, and were dispersed over the earth as a result of the Assyrian, Babylonian or Roman conquests.

The notion that the Jews are a race, in the anthropological sense, has frequently been questioned by scholars, notably by Julian Huxley in his book We Europeans, written in reply to the Nazi theories current in the 1930s. More recently, Arthur Koestler in The Thirteenth Tribe has demonstrated how, with the conversion of the Khazars of Russia, a people of Turkish stock, the Jewish people successfully absorbed foreign racial elements on a considerable scale, while the geneticists continue to express grave doubts about a common Jewish ancestral origin.(1) Race, after all, as we have been reminded by a cultural anthropologist, 'is largely in the eye of the beholder; it is more a matter of social ascription than biology'. (2) It is ironical that the Israelis, who themselves have created a melting-pot of different ethnic groups united by a common religious and historical consciousness, should have been among those showing the greatest reluctance to acknowledge the Falasha claim.

The older generation of Falashas, and those who have had little contact with western thought, accept the tradition that their ancestors came to Ethiopia with Menelik, the son of Solomon and Sheba, at Solomon's behest, in the role of a bodyguard of lsraelites to escort the prince on his return to his country after visiting Jerusalem. Others, as Wolf Leslau has written, 'say that they have

(1) See, for example, G. Brown, in Journal of Jewish Studies, vol. 31, no. 1, p. 130.
(2)W. Y. Adams, Nubia, p. 8.