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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| have prescribed that the Sabbath should be as holy as Sunday without any distinction. He embodied his many injunctions in his so-called holy books, which included The Book of Light, in which Jews are accused of eating children. It is possible that it was in reaction to his father's fanaticism that Abba Saga adopted Judaism and that a number of tribes in the Agau area, including the Falashas and those who had been forcibly converted, rose in revolt. The Chronicle records that the rebels, 'having abandoned the faith of Christians, embraced the Jewish religion, killed a great number of the inhabitants of the province of Amhara and, when the king came to do battle with them, they defeated his troops, drove them away and burned down all the churches in their districts'.(1) The Christians' homes were pillaged and the people deprived of everything, including the Mateb or small blue cord worn around their necks as a sign of their religion. The destruction covered a wide area and extended, we are told, to all the people of Ethiopia. It was during Zar'a Yaqob's reign that Elia ofFerrara (2) had met the young Falasha in Jerusalem who had told him about the continual wars which raged between his people and 'he Amhara kings. Perhaps as a consequence of the newly established contact with Rome a touch of intolerance had been wafted from Europe which fanned the emperor's religious fervour. His crusading enthusiasm was maintained by his son and successor, Ba'eda Mariam (1468-78), who resumed the war against the Falashas and for seven years fought them in the provinces of Begemeder, Semien and Sellemt. Their resistance was stubborn but eventually they were obliged to surrender and the apostates forced to return to Christianity and to rebuild the churches they had destroyed.(3) This campaign, long-drawn-out though it was, marked one of the few military successes ofBa'eda Mariam's reign and was made possible by a truce which the king concluded with the Muslim Sultan of Adal on his eastern frontier.(4) The Falashas now found themselves, mutatis mutandis, in the same plight as the Jews of Khazaria described by Arthur Koestler in The Thirteenth Tribe - squeezed between the conflicting ambitions of the followers of the Cross and the Crescent and resented by both. Many of them succumbed to conversion; others became crypto Jews like the Marranos of Spain. Frequent fighting between Amharas and Muslims broke out (1) ibid. |
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