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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Coming from the Agau tribe, of Hamito-Cushitic stock, the Falashas can lay no more claim to being semites or ethnic Jews than the converted Jews of Khazaria. They illustrate Professor H. W. F. Saggs's observation that in ancient times there was an absence of ethnic exclusiveness among Jews which persisted until after the Exile, for 'the Israelites did not think of themselves as ethnically distant in origin from their neighbours'.(1) Despite their almost total isolation, which denied the Jews of Ethiopia the opportunity to bring their religion into line with the ideas developed in the rest of the Jewish world, and which has laid them open to the reproach of fossilisation, they displayed a remarkable loyalty to their faith. Faced with the alternatives of death or conversion they followed the example of the defenders of Masada and chose mass suicide or execution.

It might be supposed that with a record as heroic and as remarkable as that of the Falashas, western Jewry would have wished to make contact with their African brethren as soon as their existence became generally known. That did not occur and it is one of the ironies of Jewish history that the isolation of the Falashas has continued almost until the present day. Ever since they lost their independence in the seventeenth century - they were the last segment of the Jewish people to surrender their autonomy - their numbers have been eroded by assimilation into the surrounding society and this remains today the greatest threat to their survival.

Oblique references to Jews in Cush occur in several places in the Old Testament and the fact that St. Philip in the New Testament story apparently evinced no surprise at meeting an Ethiopian who had come to Jerusalem to worship suggests that the existence of a Jewish community in the Horn of Africa was known at that time. Subsequently, Jewish travellers from at least the ninth century AD reported that there was a Jewish kingdom in Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia) and the Portuguese adventurers were well aware of a Jewish population in the country in the sixteenth century. First-hand and far more detailed information was made available by James Bruce when he published his five-volume Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile in 1790; this was studied by Jewish writers like M. L. Marcus in France and Filosseno Luzzatto in Italy in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The Jewish press had called attention to the existence of Falashas by 1847 in England and four years later in France, while gentile publications and Christian missionaries had taken cognisance of them many

(1) ibid., p. 40.


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