One other work of this period should be mentioned although it does not refer to the existence of a Jewish community. Father Jerome Lobe's Voyage to Abyssinia was published in Portugal about 1659 and a translation into English from the French version was made by Samuel Johnson as his first literary work. The book had so deeply impressed him that when he came to write his romantic story Rasselas, as a pot-boiler to pay for his mother's funeral expenses, he located the action in the mountains of Abyssinia. Because he had built up a quite unrealistic picture of Ethiopia he was offended by Bruce's description of Lobo as a liar. Johnson had met Bruce but had not formed a high opinion of him and inclined to think that the Scottish explorer was an imposter who, in any case, scarcely served to promote the popular eighteenth century picture of the noble savage.

By degrees Bruce's reputation has been rehabilitated and today it is recognised that, significant as was the journey, 'perhaps the most important result of his travels was the collection of Ethiopic manuscripts which he brought with him from Ethiopia. They opened up entirely new vistas for the study of Ethiopian languages and history and placed this branch of Oriental scholarship on a much more secure basis. '(2) Among those documents were many which contained valuable information about the history of the Falashas while Bruce's own observations cast a valuable light on the condition of the community at the time of his two-year stay in and around Gondar in 1769 and 1770.

Fifty years after the short account of Elia of Ferrara in the first half of the fifteenth century, another Italian, Rabbi Obadiah of Bertinora, a scholar and traveller, reported that he had seen two Falashas in captivity in Egypt. In the following century the Spanish-born Rabbi David ben Abi Zimrah of Cairo, known as the Radbaz (1479-1573), in reply to an inquiry as to the legitimacy of a Falasha slave woman's son by her Egyptian master, said that the Falashas were Karaites who could be accepted into the Jewish community (as distinct from Karaites living among Rabbinite Jews) if they were to learn Jewish laws and customs. He quoted from other sources to show that they belonged to the tribe of Dan but, according to Professor Chaim Rabin, 'he evidently did not believe it, though he conceded that they were at least potentially

(1)Mendelssohn, op. cit., p. 24.
(2)Ullendorff, The Ethiopians, p. 13.