The Beta Israel: Falasha in Ethiopia: From Earliest Times to the Twentieth Century

Introduction

Introduction Despite the existence of a vast and ever-expanding literature on the Beta Israel (Falasha) of Ethiopia, no book-length scholarly study of their history has yet been published. Major works on their literature and religion have generally offered only brief surveys of their history, and most of the standard books in Ethiopian and Jewish history have dealt at best only briefly with their particular story. Thus, while recent events have focused attention on the Beta Israel to an unprecedented degree, much of their history remains only dimly understood. This book seeks to offer a partial remedy to this problem by tracing the history of Jews and Jewish influences in Ethiopia from earliest times until the twentieth century. The starting point of this book probably needs no explanation. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the Beta Israel will have noticed the extent to which interest in their origins has dominated discussions of their historical, cultural, and even national identity. While most of these discussions have been singularly uninformed, and the dearth of sources places the topic itself more in the realm of prehistory than history, no study of the Beta Israel would be complete without a detailed examination of the evidence for and the impact of early Jewish influences upon Ethiopian culture. Although there is little reason to assume that a direct link exists between the Beta Israel and these early elements, the milieu I 2 INTRODUCTION they helped create is an essential ingredient for any understanding of later events. This early history is, therefore, discussed in some detail in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 is concerned with events from the fourth to thirteenth century, a vast period during which we have no reliable sources on Jews in Ethiopia. Although much of what is presented in this chapter is of necessity very tentative, in this case at least an overcautious approach appears to be a necessary corrective to the bulk of previous speculation. In the next chapter, we begin recounting the history of the Beta Israel in earnest and examine the circumstances that led to the transformation of loosely affiliated groups in northwest Ethiopia into a clearly defined ethnic-religious entity known as the Falasha. Chapter 5 considers the causes and consequences of the wars between the Falasha and the Christian rulers of Ethiopia. In Chapter 6, we describe the events and forces that changed the Beta Israel from a highly valued group of artisans and builders to a despised semi-caste group. The final tVIO chapters examine the impact of Protestant missionary activity and the great famine of 1888-1892. In the conclusions, we consider the significance of this book for the study of both Judaism and Christianity in Ethiopia. The decision to limit this study to the period prior to the twentieth century may require more explanation than its starting point. Interest in the more recent history of the Beta Israel is clearly considerable and probably exceeds that which exists for most of the periods examined in this book. Unquestionably, events that took place after 1900 including the activities of the Jewish counter-missionary Ya'acov (Jacques) Faitlovitch , the Emperor Haile Sellassie's policies of modernization, Christianization , and Amharization, the Italian Fascist conquest of Ethiopia, and the growing relationship of the Beta Israel with World Jewry that culminated in the massive aliyah (immigration) movement of the 1980s and 1990s, are all richly deserving of detailed study. Nevertheless, it was decided to exclude them from this work. Despite the abundance of written and oral documentation of these events, in almost every case even the most preliminary research has yet to be undertaken. Thus any attempt to extend this volume to include events up to and including the last decades of the twentieth century would have involved a vast amount of preliminary spadework and identification of sources for each of these modern topics. The completion of this volume with its analysis of earlier periods would have been delayed by at least several years. INTRODUCTION 3 Even more important, the history of the Beta Israel in the twentieth century differs substantially from that of any earlier period. As we shall discuss in greater detail below, prior to the twentieth century, the history of the Jews of Ethiopia is the story of their life in Ethiopia. Events outside that country and, in particular, developments among other Jewish communities had virtually no impact on their condition. From the twentieth century...