The Jews of Ethiopia

The Birth of an Elite

Tudor Parfitt, Emanuela Trevisan Semi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134367672
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

This book offers the results of the most recent research carried out in European and Israeli universities on Ethiopian Jews. With a special focus on Europe and the role played by German, English and Italian Jewish communities in creating a new Jewish Ethiopian identity, it investigates such issues as the formation of a new Ethiopian Jewish elite and the transformation of the identity from Ethiopian Falashas to the Jews of Ethiopia during the twentieth century.

1

THE CONSTRUCTION OF JEWISH IDENTITIES IN AFRICA

Tudor Parfitt

The confrontation of isolated societies with the modern world gave rise to certain tensions and confusions and this was nowhere more true than in Africa. The way Europeans saw Africans and their way of life, their religions and social mores was to have a profound impact upon the development of the African continent. Further confusion was to be generated by the amalgamation of traditional African and European or modern elements. These processes may be seen to have started right at the outset of colonial intervention. One of the key areas of confusion was religion.

From mediaeval times until at least the seventeenth century the general assumption in Europe had been that there were four main world religions: Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Paganism.¹ In time the great text-based, priestly religions of India, Japan and China could be approximately accommodated as an extension of this scheme of things as the parallels between them and the religions of the Judeo–Christian–Islamic tradition were so evident. Such religions may have been explained via Judaic models (and often were) but they were perceived as actual religions. The problem arose with the unknown religious systems of Africa, parts of the Americas or Australia where such evident parallels did not seem to exist. What happened in the case of Africa in the realm of religion was reflected elsewhere in the ‘savage’ world.

The ‘savage’ religious and philosophical systems of Africa were simply incomprehensible to the colonists, missionaries and others who observed them. They were beyond the limits of the known world and far beyond the limits of their own experience and imagination. As they were incomprehensible they were sometimes hardly perceived to exist at all. In the context of the Cape, which from the seventeenth century on was a part of Africa which was relatively well known, the culture of the indigenous peoples was regularly described in negative terms: they had no laws, language, reason or religion. In 1634 one traveller noted that they are ‘without any Religion, Lawe, Arte or Civility that we could see’.² This view remained more or less standard, at least for many western travellers, and in white racist enclaves in Southern Africa and elsewhere is no doubt still cherished.

The acute sense of difference traditionally felt by Europeans with respect to Africans may in part be explained by the fact that until the second half of the nineteenth century little was known of the great majority of the African interior or indeed of much of the coastal area. A critical feature of Africans was, of course, that they were black, supposedly quite the opposite of white. Similar suppositions were made of black people as were made at much the same time of American Indians. Were they really human? In 1520 the Swiss medical writer Paracelsus had argued that the black race was of a quite different origin. By the second half of the eighteenth century a full-scale debate emerged between monogenists, who claimed a common origin for the whole of humanity, and polygenists who argued that Negroes were quite simply members of a radically different species. Eventually the idea emerged that the Negroes were a separate species more or less intermediate between Europeans and the ‘oran-outangs’.³

For centuries Europeans had lived in ignorance of Africa. In early mediaeval times the entire eastern world beyond Islam was more or less unknown, and from the time of the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 641 Africa and the Indian Ocean were effectively removed from the European sphere. Even in classical times Africa had been insulated from Greek, Roman and Egyptian influence by natural barriers. In time Muslims and particularly Arabs acquired a good deal of information about the African coasts, and no doubt more than we suspect of the interior, but Europeans had almost none. Even by the time of the Renaissance the Dark Continent was little more than a concept: parts of the littoral were known but the interior was a void of knowledge which cartographers could decorate according to their fancy. Thus Swift’s famous lines:

So Geographers, in Afric maps,

With savage-pictures fill their gaps;

And o’er unhabitable downs

Place elephants for want of towns.

Well into the Renaissance the main sources of information on Africa remained classical texts. Manuscripts and early printed versions of Ptolemy’s Geography, whether in the original Greek or in Latin translation, normally reproduced four maps of (north) Africa, which illustrates how pre-Renaissance European knowledge about Africa was limited to the Mediterranean coast and the lower Nile. For mediaeval Europe the Bible and the classical texts – chiefly Homer, Herodotus, Pliny and Ptolemy – were the principal sources of information on Africa. In the Odyssey (e.g. 1:22) Homer had distinguished between two Ethiopias, one in the east and one in the west, at opposite ends of the earth. Aeschylus considered that the eastern Ethiopia stretched as far as India – and this confusion was to continue until the mediaeval period. This polarised Africa was in time taken to represent the ‘admirable Ethiopia’ of the Nubian Meroitic civilisation on the one hand, and the savage regions of sub-Sahara on the other. For Herodotus the men of Meroe were ‘the tallest and most handsome in the world’ whereas the sub-Saharan Negro population were ‘dog-faced creatures and beasts without heads’.⁴

This division fed into a mediaeval discourse which was as alive in Islam as it was in Christendom, in which all sorts of expectations were centred on the bon éthiopien. Africa continued to be seen as both a terrestrial hell and, beyond the Mountains of the Moon described by Diogenes, a terrestrial paradise. There was some biblical support for these essentially classical ideas. The Nile was often taken to be the Gihon, one of the four rivers of Paradise, described in Genesis as the river ‘which flows around the whole land of Cush, where there is gold, and the gold of that land is good’ (the other three were the Pison, the Hiddekel and the Euphrates). Many fifteenth-century maps include the river Gihon ‘qui descendit de montibus paradisi’, and paradise is often presented, as it is on the Munich portolan of 1502, as a walled mountain-top town in Africa. As against the African paradise there was the other Ethiopia – the successor to the terrestrial hell: the Africa of cannibalism and the slave trade, of unbearable heat and decimating disease, of foetid swamp and jungle – the white man’s grave, the heart of darkness, what D. H. Lawrence called ‘the continent of dark negation’.

This ambiguous view of Africa achieved striking iconographic form in the famous Hereford Mappa Mundi, probably drawn by Richard de Bello in 1289. The map represents a symbolic world with Jerusalem at the centre, paradise at the top, and damned souls being dismissed from the seat of judgement to join the bestial figures which are trooping towards a crescent-shaped Africa that borders the edge of a flat, round world. Africa is divided roughly by an elongated Atlas range: on the one side of it there are illustrations of biblical and classical stories and pious depictions of the lives of the saints; on the other side are deformed savages, some with ocular irregularities like the four-eyed Maritime Ethiopians, the Blemyes with eyes in their breasts or the one-eyed panther-eating king of Ethiopia; then we see hermaphrodites, snake-eating troglodytes, humanoid creatures with mouths so small they are condemned to suck their food through straws. In short, the known side of Africa was more or less an extension of Christendom, the epitome of savagery, of barbarism. The literature produced by the colonisation and exploration of Africa to a remarkable degree maintained this polarity of perception. J. C. Prichard, the eminent English ethnologist of the first half of the nineteenth century maintained that the African ‘races’ with the most pronounced ‘Negroid’ traits ‘deformed countenances, projecting jaws, flat foreheads’ were the most ‘savage and morally degraded’ of the African peoples. On the other hand those tribes with a ‘nearly European countenance and a corresponding configuration of the head’ were the most civilised and the closest therefore to Europeans.⁵ In the course of the nineteenth century a myth known as the Hamitic hypothesis developed into the conventional wisdom of the time. This myth maintained that light-skinned peoples of Egyptian or Indo–European origin had in times past spread across Africa where they still formed an elite in many societies. As they gradually interbred with subject peoples they themselves degenerated. This was the explanation put forward for the apparent decline of a number of African societies from Yorubaland to Benin or Great Zimbabwe. This view persisted well into the twentieth century. Its most forceful proponent was the British anthropologist Charles Seligman whose widely admired and hugely influential Races of Africa (London, 1930) stated categorically that ‘the civilisations of Africa are the civilisations of the Hamites’.⁶ Such views were echoed by a number of Germans, notably Leo Frobenius, who was convinced that the Yoruba, for instance, came from Atlantis.

In mediaeval times there was the notion that somewhere in Africa Jewish kingdoms were to be found. Eldad’s famous book Sepher Eldad fed into this as did countless other sources including Sir John Mandeville, who explored the parallel idea that a Christian kingdom existed – connected with the Lost Tribes as well as with the Pygmies and the Amazonians and stretching from East Africa to the Indus and across Africa as far as the Atlantic Ocean – which was ruled over by the Priest King, Prester John. During the fifteenth century, under the influence of Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460), Portuguese seamen had been venturing down the west African coast and in 1487 Bartholomew Diaz was blown round the southern tip of Africa, holding out hopes of a sea-route to India which was eventually discovered by Vasco da Gama in 1497–9. Until the Portuguese voyages of exploration brought the African coast within the European sphere, Arab travellers, as we have seen, had much greater contact with Africa than did Europeans, and Arabs produced works of geography and history which revealed some of the continent’s mysteries. In the tenth century Abu’l Hassan al-Masudi noted that the mid-point of what is today Mozambique was the limit of Arab navigation at the time. And in about 1030 the polymath Abu Rayhan al-Biruni confirmed this. Further information was given by Al-Idrisi in the twelfth century, followed by Abd al-Munim al-Himyari in the fifteenth.⁷ Nonetheless, for the Arabs the distinction between the civilised races (such as the Arabs) and peoples such as those to be found in the interior of Africa – the despised Zanj – was clear as day. Ibn Khaldun observed of such folk that they were ‘closer to dumb animals than to rational beings’.⁸

For Renaissance Europe the best known of the Arab historians and geographers of Africa was Leo Africanus (c.1492–c.1550). He was born of Arab Muslim parents in Granada and was originally called Hassan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzān al-Zayyātī. After the Spanish conquest of Granada in 1492 his wealthy family moved to Morocco, and the young Hassan travelled widely in Africa visiting Timbuktu and the sub-Saharan empires of Mali and Bornu. Captured by Italian pirates off the north African coast on a return trip from Mecca, in 1518 Hassan was compelled to convert to Christianity and was baptised at St Peter’s in Rome on 6 January 1520 as Giovanni Leo Africanus. His most important work was the remarkable Description of Africa,⁹ which was written around 1528–9 and was for many years the only source on sub-Saharan Africa.¹⁰ (He also wrote an Arabic grammar and a manual of Arabic rhetoric.) Description of Africa at once became an essential part of the rapidly expanding body of sixteenth-century European geographical knowledge. Translated in 1556 into both Latin and French, it went through a number of editions in several European languages. An English translation by John Pory, which appeared in 1600, was read by Ben Jonson and probably by Shakespeare and John Webster.¹¹ In Description there are frequent mentions of Jews in Africa: he notes that once Jewish law was widely observed, that there were warrior tribes in the Atlas claiming descent from King David, that the Canaanites travelled to Africa, followed later by the Sabeans, and that the ruler of Timbuktu could not stand the sight of Jews.¹² As the major modern source on Africa, Description carried great authority. In a postscript to the English edition entitled A summaried discourse of the manifold religions professed in Africa, John Pory noted:

At this day also the Abassins affirm that upon the Nilus towards the west there inhabiteth a most populous nation of the Jewish stock under a mightie king. And some of our m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The construction of Jewish identities in Africa
• 2 Giovanni Ellero’s manuscript notes on the Falasha of Walqayt
• 3 S.Schachnowitz’s novel Salomo der Falascha (1923)
• 4 The Falashas in the German Jewish press in Germany during the first half of the twentieth century
• 5 Ethiopian Jews in Europe: Taamrat Emmanuel in Italy and Makonnen Levi in England
• 6 Abraham Adgeh: the perfect English gentleman
• 7 Gete Yirmiahu and Beta Israel’s regeneration: a difficult path
• 8 The Ethiopian Jewish exodus: a myth in creation
• 9 The sacred and secular: the immigration of the black Jews of Ethiopia to Israel
• 10 Birth and death in an Absorption Centre: the process of change among Ethiopian Jews in Israel
• 11 The function of musical instruments in the liturgy of the Ethiopian Jews
• 12 About the Jewish identity of the Beta Israel
• 13 The relationship between the Beta Israel tradition and the Book of Jubilees
• Index