The Falashas: The Forgotten Jews of Ethiopia, by David Kessler
Today's date is: 5/12/2025
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| 63 Elephantine or the conjecture that Jewish influences in Abyssinia had penetrated by way of Egypt are devoid of any reliable historical basis', (1) it is nevertheless difficult to accept his opinion that it is 'probable that some Jewish elements at least were included in the South Arabian waves of migration across the Red Sea into· Abyssinia'. (2) Though an interchange of peoples across the Red Sea no doubt occurred in both directions, any possible 'waves of migration' must have taken place far earlier, between the fifth and second centuries BC, before Jewish elements had become established in the Yemen. Commercial contacts also existed between the ports of Arabia and of Axum as we can see from the description of trade and navigation in the anonymous Periplus of the Erithraean Sea of the second century AD. North of Himyar, in the Hejaz, the Jewish religion spread rapidly and 'whole tribes seem to have gone over to Judaism and accepted monotheism before the rise of Muhammad' and, by the seventh century, they had acquired a wide range of 'knowledge of the Old Testament and of midrashic or homiletic narratives'. (3) What has been said of the Hejaz was no doubt equally true of neighbouring Yemen, where 'Judaism struck deep roots throughout the length and breadth of the Himyar kingdom'(4) and converted several of the rulers to its faith from about the end of the third century AD onwards. It would thus appear that while Judaism spread at roughly the same period in Abyssinia and Arabia it arrived and developed independently in each area. The rise of Christianity in Axum in the fourth century faced an already existing Judaism with an active opposition 200 years before the advent of Islam created a similar but more serious threat for the Jews in Arabia. In the Hejaz the Jewish community came to an ignominious end but in the Yemen, though suffering persecution, the community continued vigorously until the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, when it migrated virtually en bloc. In Arabia, the Jews were well versed in both biblical and post-biblical literature and they knew Hebrew. The Jews of the Axumite kingdom, on the other hand, seem to have had no knowledge of Hebrew beyond a few words and no experience of Judaism outside of the Bible. The Jews of Arabia remained in contact with Palestine, as witness the journey of Rabbi Akiva, one of the leaders of the Jewish revolt against Rome, to the south of the peninsula about the year (1) Ullendorff, Ethiopia and the Bible, p. 16. |