Very few of the western scholars who have dealt with the problem of the Falashas are of the opinion that they are ethnically Jews. Most of them think that they are a segment of the indigenous Agau population which was converted to Judaism. How and when they were converted is a problem for which historical evidence is lacking. It has been argued that the Jews of Egypt - we know of the existence of a Jewish community in Elephantine in the fifth century BC - or the Jews of Yemen may have sent forth missionaries who converted these African tribes to Judaism. There seems to be more historical evidence for contact between Yemen and Ethiopia than between Egypt and Ethiopia, and I would therefore be inclined to think, with some others, that the conversion came from the Jews of Yemen. It must be conceded, however, that nearly all the proofs in favour of this view are indirect rather than direct. The problem still awaits final solution.(1)

It will be among the aims of this book to meet this challenge.

The view that the Jewish religion reached the Axumite kingdom of Ethiopia by way of the Yemen has had many advocates. A Jewish settlement was established in south-west Arabia - the Arabia Felix of Roman geographers - following the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70 and the renewed dispersion of the Jewish population of Palestine. It is reasonable to suppose, therefore, that some Jews made the short sea-crossing to the African coast where the port of Adulis was already an important trading centre. Moreover, many links of religion, language and commerce connected the two coasts of the Red Sea.

Alternatively, it is at least equally likely that Jewish influences reached Axum by way of the Nile Valley. There had been Jewish settlements in Egypt and Upper Egypt for centuries before there were similar outposts in southern Arabia. Between Egypt and Axum lay the kingdom of Meroe in what we now know as northern Sudan. There is evidence, in both the Old and New Testaments, to show that Jews could have settled there. From Meroe, following the valley of the Nile or one of its tributaries, it is no great distance, and not an unduly hazardous journey, to Axum.

The fact that the Bible was translated into Ethiopic (or Ge'ez) from the Greek Septuagint and not from the Hebrew text, which

(1)Falasha Anthology, p. xliii.