The Falashas: The Forgotten Jews of Ethiopia, by David Kessler
Today's date is: 5/12/2025
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| 61 Jewish faith, the religion caught on among that section of the Axumite population which belonged to the Agau tribes. These people represented the Ethiopian 'substrate population par excellence', (1) who had settled in the northern part of the highlands before the arrival of the Semitised Amharas and Tigreans. The Agau, today living principally in the area around Lake Tana and the Semien mountains with an offshoot in the neighbourhood of Keren in Eritrea, speak a Cushitic language which differs from the Semitic languages derived from Ge'ez. Until relatively recently the Falashas still spoke a form of the Agau language known as Kwarinyia, so-called from the area west of Lake Tana where some of them lived. When Bruce returned to England from Gondar he brought with him somewhat defective extracts from the Song of Songs and a vocabulary written in what he called 'Falashan', which he published in his Travels. The Falasha dialect is now almost extinct and the traveller will be hard put to find more than a few words spoken by the oldest members of the community. The dominance of Amharic, the official Ethiopian language, has driven many minor languages out of existence as formerly Anglo-Saxon imposed itself on the Celtic tongues in the British Isles. According to Leslau, writing in 1951, 'Agau is still used in many prayers and benedictions, though in general the priests utter these words with out understanding them'. (2) There are two alternative traditional theories to account for the origin of the Agau themselves. On the one hand, Ethiopian tradition maintains that 'the Agau tribe came into the country together with the army of Menelik I',(3) in other words that they are the descendants of the legendary Hebrew bodyguard provided by King Solomon as an escort for his son, which would not explain their speaking a Cushitic language. On the other hand, Halevy reported that the Agau considered that their ancestors had come from Sennar, on the Blue Nile,(4) at approximately the southern boundary of the old Meroitic kingdom, and not above 250 miles from Lake Tana as the crow flies, which is no great distance in terms of the movement of people and ideas. It is open to speculation whether the Sembritae, whom Strabo described as descendants of Egyptian exiles from Psammetichus, could have implanted a form of Judaism on the Agau tribesmen. But the Agau area of settlement certainly lay on the route from the Blue Nile to Lake Tana and not in the north of the country on the Red Sea (1) Ullendorff, The Ethiopians, p. 39. |