Two hundred years ago, Gibbon epitomised the isolation of the country when he wrote how, 'encompassed by the enemies of their religion, the Ethiopians slept for near a thousand years, forgetful of the world by whom they were forgotten', and added that 'they were awakened by the Portuguese, who, turning the southern promontory of Africa, appeared in India and the Red Sea, as if they had descended through the air from a distant planet'. If that lapidary phrase represented a somewhat exaggerated view when applied to the nation as a whole, it was, nevertheless, broadly applicable to the Jewish section of the population. When the Falashas were first visited by European Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they were surprised to find that they were not the only Jews left in the world.

Gibbon's comment appeared in 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' at about the time that a pioneering work was being written by another very remarkable author. James Bruce's Travels to Discover the Source ef the Nile, first published in 1790, described his adventures in Abyssinia during the years from 1769 to 1771. The Scottish explorer had brought back with him to Europe not only a thrilling tale but also a vast collection of documents and pictures dealing with the history, customs, languages, religions and natural history of Ethiopia. Never before had so much information about this distant land been made available for study by the scholarly world. Gibbon and Bruce may not have met but they moved in similar social circles and the historian would almost certainly have heard of the explorer's travels.

Bruce's five volumes also contained the first eyewitness account of the Falashas since a few stray references to them had appeared in the reports of Portuguese and Spanish soldiers and missionaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His description of their history, language and religion was fuller and more objective than anything which had previously appeared and he had no doubt that he had observed and talked to members of a once-powerful Jewish

(1) Vol. 2, ch. 47.