The Falashas: The Forgotten Jews of Ethiopia, by David Kessler
Today's date is: 5/12/2025
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The Falashas: The Forgotten Jews of Ethiopia, by David Kessler
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| Prester John are there Jews'(1) and it was left to later Jesuit and other writers to correct his error. Stray references to Ethiopian Jews of this period were diligently assembled by the bibliophile Sidney Mendelssohn, whose little-known book, The Jews of Africa, was edited by Hyams on in 1920. (2) He mentioned that Jacques Basnage, the French Protestant preacher who wrote a history of the Jews in 1706, related that the Jesuit Bishop de Oviedo wrote in 1557 'that the Jews possessed great inaccessible mountains; and they had dispossessed the Christians of many lands which they were masters of, and that the kings of Ethiopia could not subdue them, because they have but small forces, and it is very difficult to penetrate into the fastnesses of their rocks'. (3) John Pory, the English translator of Leo Africanus's History and Description of Africa, early in the seventeenth century, reported that: at this day also the Abassins affirm that upon Nilus towards the west there inhabiteth a most populous nation of the Jewish stock under a mighte king .... And likewise on the north part of the kingdom of Goiame (Gojjam) and the southerly quarter of the kingdom of Gorhan there are certain mountains, peopled with Jews, who there maintain themselves free and absolute, through the inaccessible situations of the same. (4) Balthazar Tellez, the Portuguese Jesuit missionary, in his Travels of the Jesuits in Ethiopia, reported that in the seventeenth century many' Jews lived 'free from any subjection to the Empire ... between the Emperor's dominions and the Cafres dwelling near the river Nile',(5) which would correctly place them in the Agau territory of Agawmeder. Both Tellez and Basnage stated that Hebrew was being used by the Falashas in their synagogues, though confirmation for these statements is lacking and it is more likely that they mistook the Falasha dialect of Agau for Hebrew. Among the seventeenth-century writers on Ethiopia was Job Ludolf, the German scholar who has been called 'the founder of Ethiopian studies in Europe'.(6) He knew about the existence of Jews in the country and was critical of his predecessors, the Jesuit priests, whom he chided because they 'never took care to enquire when, or upon what occasion, the Jews came first into Ethiopia. (1) Beckingham and Huntingford (eds), The Prester John of the Indies, vol. 2, p. 512. |
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