The Falashas: The Forgotten Jews of Ethiopia, by David Kessler
Today's date is: 5/12/2025
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| 93 It has always been difficult to ascertain the size of the Falasha population. The best estimate today gives a figure between 28,000 and 30,000. Faitlovitch, at the beginning of this century, thought it was about 50,000. In the middle of the last century Halevy estimated the number at between 150,000 and 200,000 or one tenth of the total population of Abyssinia. Bruce, however, was told that at the time of the defeat of King Gideon early in the seventeenth century the Falashas 'were supposed to amount to 100,000 effective men'.(1) If this figure is anything like correct and assuming one effective man per family of five people the Falasha population at that time would have amounted to about half a million souls. Bearing in mind the difficulties with which Amhara rulers had to contend in suppressing the Falasha·kingdom, this figure does not seem exaggerated. The Jews were a force to be reckoned with. The continual decline in the Falashas' numbers after they lost their independence is a reflection of the hardships they have had to bear, the impact of wars and lawlessness, the poverty caused by their loss oflands, the tyranny of greedy feudal-type landlords and the pressure, reinforced by foreign missionaries, to be converted to Christianity and to assimilate into the dominant, Amhara community. The royal chronicles, and the Kebra Nagast, on which we have to rely for most of our information and which were Bruce's principal sources, are the product of Amhara civilisation. They were written in large measure to justify the claim of the Solomonic dynasty to the imperial throne and to ensure the supremacy of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. The bias of the court historians is apparent in their references to Jews, Muslims and Roman Catholics or Franks and their prejudices inevitably colour their writing. Bruce himself was once accused by a high cleric, Abba Salama, of being a Frank who 'was accursed, and should be stoned as an enemy to the Virgin Mary'. (2) On another occasion, just before leaving the country, he was obliged to declare that he was not a Roman Catholic and he explained that a priest of his Protestant religion, 'preaching in any country subject to those Franks, would as certainly be brought to the gallows as ifhe had committed murder, and just as speedily as you would stone a Catholic priest preaching here in the midst of Gondar'. (3) It is as well to remember that parts of eighteenth-century Europe, especially the Iberian peninsula, were little more religiously tolerant than 'savage' Abyssinia and that heretics were still being burnt at the stake in Bruce's day. (1)Travels, vol. 1, p. 486. |