The Falashas: The Forgotten Jews of Ethiopia, by David Kessler
Today's date is: 5/12/2025
|
1 Records Found.
Displaying page 1
of 1:
| 75 founded an independent Jewish Kingdom in what was appropriately known in the Bible as the gold land of Havilah beyond Abyssinia. This country, according to Genesis (2:11), was surrounded by the river Pishon while another river, Gihon, 'compasseth the whole land of Cush', and later came to be associated with the Nile. Eldad had a lively imagination for he recounts that the 'sons of Moses' who lived in Havilah were cut off from the world by 'Sambatyon, an impassable river of rolling stones and sand which stops only on the Sabbath when it is surrounded by fire and covered by a cloud. It is possible to see and speak with these sons of Moses but not to cross the river. (1) Eldad received support for his views from a famous contemporary rabbi, Zemah ben Hayyim, who was one of the Gaonim, or leaders, of the Sura academy in Babylonia, where the Talmud had been compiled over 300 years earlier. (2) There is nothing to show that Eldad had ever visited Ethiopia but his various tales evidently contained a modicum of truth and it has been suggested that his aim in telling them was to raise the morale of contemporary Jews by giving them news of tribes of lsrael who lived in freedom, such as the Himyarites, the Falashas and the Khazars.(3) Three hundred years after Eldad ha-Dani, Benjamin of Tudela, the Spanish Jewish merchant and traveller, reported that in the country on the opposite side of the Red Sea from Yemen 'there are Jews who are not subject to the rule of others, and they have towns and fortresses on the tops of the mountains'.(4) Benjamin, too, was recounting from hearsay but he did travel as far as Yemen and beyond and no doubt he was truthfully repeating what he had heard. Another 300 years elapsed before the next known report. This came from Elia of Ferrara, a scholar who emigrated to Palestine in 1434 and related that in 1438 he had 'met a young Falasha in Jerusalem and was told how his co-religionists preserved their independence in a mountainous region from which they launched continual wars against the Christian emperors of Ethiopia'. (5) These reports are very meagre but they are evidence of a continuous thread of legend and history which stretches back a very long way. Whatever may have been the basic cause of the hostility between (1) Enc.Jud., vol. 6, col. 576. |