The Question of Judaism in Ancient Ethiopia (Prof. Hatke)

Article

1. Ethiopian Christians are well known for their adherence to Old Testament traditions, including male circumcision, the prohibition of pork, and the observance of the Saturday Sabbath alongside the Sunday Sabbath. To many, these traditions have suggested some Jewish substratum in Ethiopian society that predates the introduction of Christianity in the fourth century. That the Bēta ʾƎsrāʾēl, the indigenous Jews of Ethiopia, have historically lacked any knowledge of rabbinic tradition has similarly been taken by some as evidence that Judaism was introduced to Ethiopia, probably from South Arabia, in prerabbinic times. Although various versions of the theory of an ancient Jewish substratum in Ethiopian culture have come and gone over the years, the basic idea still enjoys support among a number of scholars. This article makes the case, however, that this theory is without basis.
2. The very existence in Ethiopia of a group calling itself Bēta ʾƎsrāʾēl, literally “The House of Israel,” has long seemed to validate the notion that the Judaizing characteristics of Ethiopian Christianity could be attributed to a Jewish substratum. Known to their Christian neighbors by the derogatory term Falāšā “exiles, wanderers,” the Bēta ʾƎsrāʾēl have historically practiced a religion based on the Old Testament that, owing to its lack of accretions from Rabbinic Judaism, has been seen as a direct offshoot of Israelite religion, and thus of great antiquity. Although the Bēta ʾƎsrāʾēl were known to the outside world since the late fifteenth century (Kaplan 1992: 82), it was not until the 1770s that the Scottish traveler James Bruce made contact with members of the community in their Ethiopian homeland (Bruce 1790: I: 485–487). A detailed, accurate portrait of this group was introduced only a century later by Adrianople-born Orientalist Joseph Halévy (Halévy 1868a; idem 1868b; idem 1869). For Halévy, the origins of the Bēta ʾƎsrāʾēl were to be sought in South Arabia (Halévy 1907: 157 [75]). Edward Ullendorff similarly accepts the thesis of a South Arabian origin of the Bēta ʾƎsrāʾēl though, in his Ethiopia and the Bible, he is rather less sanguine than Halévy when it comes to the Jewish identity of this group (Ullendorff 1968: 117).

Although much of the earlier literature took for granted a pre-Christian Jewish presence in Ethiopia, as well as a pre-Christian origin of the Bēta ʾƎsrāʾēl, these assumptions have been called into serious question since at least the 1960s by such scholars as Maxime Rodinson (Rodinson 1963; idem 1964), Steven Kaplan (Kaplan 1988; idem 1992), Jon G. Abbink (Abbink 1990), and James A. Quirin (Quirin 1992). Some of the textual evidence for Ethiopian contact with Jews and Judaism during Late Antiquity. That such contact indeed occurred is proven by the abundant evidence from that period for: 1) Ethiopian contact with, and at times occupation of, neighboring South Arabia; and 2) a vibrant Jewish community in South Arabia. During the period in question, northern Ethiopia was dominated by the kingdom of Aksum, whose ruler ʿĒzānā (r. ca. 330–370) embraced Christianity and established it as the state religion. Across the Red Sea, South Arabia was dominated by Ḥimyar, a kingdom in which Judaism gained a foothold around the beginning of the Common Era, but which was also home to a Christian community starting in the fourth century. It will be argued in this article that the claims for a Jewish presence in Aksumite Ethiopia, and for a Jewish substratum in Ethiopian Christianity, do not stand up to scrutiny.

Judaism and Ethiopian Christianity

The most popular arguments for direct Jewish influence on Ethiopian Christianity generally center on practices and beliefs among Ethiopian Christians that either derive from the Old Testament or contain Old Testament themes. Particularly noteworthy is the claim by Ethiopian royalty of descent from King Solomon. This finds its ultimate expression in the famous Kәbra Nagaśt “The Glory of the Kings,” the best known sub-narrative within which is the story of the visit of the Queen of Sheba – an Ethiopian woman named Mākәddā, according to the account – to King Solomon, in the course of which the queen is impregnated by the Israelite king (Bezold 1905: 17–28). When Mәnīlәk, the child born of this union, comes of age and visits his father, he is made king and given the name David, before returning to Ethiopia to beget a line of rulers of Israelite lineage. The Jerusalemite entourage that escorts Mәnīlәk home is alleged in the account to have stolen the Ark of the Covenant and brought it with them to Ethiopia, where it thenceforth remains. Of course, it should be stated at the outset that identification with Israel is a well-known trope, attested cross-culturally from antiquity to the modern period (Rodinson 1963: 401–402; Beeston 2005: 67). That similar ideas circulated in Ethiopia is thus not grounds for assuming that these originated during antiquity. Even if one allows for the possibility that traditions of Israelite lineage among Ethiopian royalty predate the midfourteenth century, Aksumite kings never claim Israelite ancestry in their royal titles. Far from invoking putative Israelite ancestors, these titles speak instead of rule over peoples and territories in and around the Horn of Africa, with kinship terms referencing not Solomon but rather the Aksumite king’s father and clan affiliations.

Turning to Ethiopian Christian customs, male circumcision is too widespread in Africa, particularly in East Africa and the Horn (Kaplan 2003b), to be indicative of Jewish influence As a caveat, it should be noted that male circumcision among Christian Ethiopians is performed on the eighth day after birth, following Jewish tradition, as informed by the Old Testament (Genesis 17:12) (Schattner-Rieser 2012: 10). In this respect, Ethiopian Christians differ not only from other African groups but also from Coptic Christians, with whom their church has historically been closely tied, and who do not perform circumcision until the male child has reached six years of age (ibid.). That said, it is not clear when Ethiopian Christians adopted the tradition of circumcision on the eighth day after birth, and it is entirely possible that the habit reflects an attempt to rationalize a pre-existing local tradition by adapting it to Old Testament tradition. Since the custom of male circumcision on the eighth day after birth is specified in Genesis, a book available to Christians and Jews alike, it cannot be posited that Ethiopian Christians can only have adopted this custom as a result of direct contact with Jews. Pre-existing customs associated with the ritual isolation and purification of women who have given birth (ibid.: 13) may have been similarly reinterpreted in light of Old Testament law.

Less common cross-culturally, however, is the prohibition of pork. According to Christopher Haas, “[t]he unusual absence of pig bones in Aksumite sites seems to indicate a dietary choice not made on the basis of food supply, but from an ideological imperative” (Haas 2008: 110). The lack of pig bones may reflect a transregional phenomenon in antiquity, for Pliny the Elder (d. 79) states that no species of swine of any kind is found in Arabia (Cain 2000: 76). This absence likely reflects a culinary phenomenon – whether due to an outright taboo or to a mere lack of pigs – that extended from Nubia to the Horn of Africa. Prohibition of pork consumption is also attested among the Cushitic-speaking Sidama people of southern Ethiopia (Seyoum Hameso 2006: 62).

1. Biblical Footprints, Ancient Migrations
2. In her 2012 article, “Empreintes bibliques et emprunts juifs dans la culture éthiopienne,” Ursula Schattner-Rieser argues that, while most Judaizing elements in Ethiopian Christianity are based on the Old Testament, rather than on post-Biblical texts like the Targum and Mishnah, some such elements can explained by positing a Jewish presence in Ethiopia (Schattner-Rieser 2012). To demonstrate such contact, one would have to establish a direct link between Ethiopian Christianity and post-Biblical Jewish tradition. Schattner-Rieser is aware of this challenge and, to her credit, points out that the Mishnaic – and thus post-Biblical– prohibition of the mixing of dairy and meat products is unknown among Ethiopian Christians, as well as among the Bēta ʾƎsrāʾēl (Anteby-Yemini 2008: 161). However already lots of responses.

Schattner-Rieser is not alone, however, in positing Jewish settlement in Ethiopia as far back as the Iron Age. Such a scenario was already posited by Jacqueline Pirenne in her “Des Grecs à l’aurore de la culture monumentale sabéenne,” a paper given at a conference on pre-Islamic Arabia held in Strasbourg in 1987 and published in the proceedings of that conference two years later (Pirenne 1989). In her paper, Pirenne argues that the Sabaeans migrated to South Arabia from the north in two waves, one from Northwest Arabia ca. 690 BCE or a century later and a second via the Nile Valley towards the beginning of the sixth century BCE (262–269). According to Pirenne, migrants in this second wave arrived along with a group of Greek mercenaries who, during the reign of Pharaoh Psammetichus II (595–588 BCE), deserted from the Egyptian army and fled to the Upper Nile, before settling in the Tәgrāy region of northern Ethiopia and eventually crossing the Red Sea to South Arabia (Ibid.: 266–267, 268–269). On the basis of Sabaic inscriptions found in Tәgrāy that associate resident Sabaeans (s¹bʔ) with a group called ʕbr, 51 Pirenne argues that these itinerant Sabaeans were joined in the course of their migration by Hebrews fleeing the first Neo-Babylonian siege of Jerusalem that began in 598 BCE (Pirenne 1989: 264–265). Her basis for this claim seems to be the resemblance of the term ʕbr to the Hebrew ethnonym ʕiḇrî “Hebrew.” She then uses this supposed presence of Hebrews in Ethiopia to explain such phenomena as the claim of Solomonid descent by Ethiopian emperors, the supposed Jewish influences on Ethiopian Christianity, and the ethnogenesis of the Bēta ʾƎsrāʾēl (Ibid.: 265).

This is all fantasy though and there’s no evidence. Nor is it clear how three migratory groups – Greeks, Hebrews, and Sabaeans – managed to converge and then move on as a unit, in the manner suggested by Pirenne. Quite apart from these objections, there is no evidence for Judaean refugees fleeing as far as the southern Red Sea region during the early sixth century BCE, or indeed any other period. The term ʕbr appears, in fact, to refer to denote the indigenous people of northern Ethiopia56 and, far from being related to the ethnonym ʕiḇrî, is instead cognate with ġbr, 57 a term for various types of vassal groups belonging to larger bodies that, while not encountered in Standard Sabaic, is attested in Qatabānic and Minaic.58 That the Sabaeans established a presence in the Horn of Africa was due to the commercial outreach of the South Arabian kingdom of Sabaʾ during the first half of the first millennium BCE, not to far-flung migrations in which Hebrew refugees were involved.

1. Jews in Aksumite Ethiopia?
2. Although few scholars have gone as far as Pirenne in stretching the evidence to fit an a priori thesis, the idea of Jewish migration to, or influence on, Ethiopia during antiquity has continued into the present century. Thus, in his 2008 article “Mountain Constantines: The Christianization of Aksum and Iberia,” Christopher Haas claims that “[a]lthough there is considerable debate about the precise origins of the Falashas [i.e. Bēta ʾƎsrāʾēl], Ethiopia’s ancient Jewish community, there is a consensus that strong Semitic influences from South Arabia, if not outright Jewish migration, helped to create this community prior to the introduction of Christianity.ˮ 59 Curiously, neither of the two sources that Haas cites in the accompanying footnote,60 ostensibly to back up this claim, address the question of South Arabian influence on the ethnogenesis of Ethiopian Jewry. Nor is there anything like a “consensus” that the Bēta ʾƎsrāʾēl were either influenced by or descended from South Arabian Jews (Tubach 2015: 363 [n. 125]).

1. Even if one assumes the occasional immigration of other South Arabian Jews to Ethiopia, there is no evidence that the Bēta ʾƎsrāʾēl owe their origin to such immigrants who, if they were anything like the Yoseph from Aden, would have come as individuals rather than a large groups. Nor is there any evidence that the Bēta ʾƎsrāʾēl are descended from whatever Ḥimyarite Jews might have numbered among those prisoners of war whom Kālēb brought with him back to Ethiopia. In fact, Bēta ʾƎsrāʾēl ethnogenesis can be traced only as far back as the fourteenth century at the very earliest,67 while the earliest references to the group, preserved in Christian Ethiopian chronicles, describe them as recent apostates from Christianity.68 The Christian origins of the Bēta ʾƎsrāʾēl are evident from the influence of the Ethiopian Christian liturgy on their own liturgical traditions, their tradition of monasticism, and the widespread retention of Christian material in their literature.
2. One notes by stark contrast their lack – at least before their migration en masse to Israel starting in the 1980s – of any knowledge of the Talmud, the Targum, or even the Hebrew language,70 all of which were well known among other Jewish communities, including that of South Arabia.71 For the Bēta ʾƎsrāʾēl, by contrast, Gәʿәz has historically served as the liturgical language, much as it has for Ethiopian Christians, while their spoken language was originally a dialect of Agaw, largely replaced during the modern period by Amharic.72 By contrast, no trace of South Arabian influence, whether through contact or migration, has ever been identified in the languages spoken by the Bēta ʾƎsrāʾēl. It is significant, then, that, while the Classical Gәʿәz term for synagogue, mәk w rāb, is derived from Sabaic mkrb – a topic that shall be treated in greater detail below – no such term is used among the Bēta ʾƎsrāʾēl. Instead, the standard term for synagogue among the Bēta ʾƎsrāʾēl is masgīd, a word that, according to Christian Robin, might be derived from Arabic masǧid (i.e. “mosque”)!73 If anything, the group that came to self-identify as Bēta ʾƎsrāʾēl is best understood as a schismatic party that expressed its resistance to the orthodoxy of the Ethiopian Church by adhering to the Old Testament to the exclusion of the New and removing all Christian references from what religious literature they inherited from the Ethiopian Church.

As alternative evidence for a Jewish presence in Aksumite Ethiopia, one might instead turn to a short, two-line inscription in consonantal Gǝʿǝz from Aksum known by the siglum RIÉth 205:

This inscription reads ʔn yhd gbrk, a phrase that can be vocalized as ʔana yǝhūdā gabarkū “I, Yehuda, have made (this).” However, even if this individual was Jewish, as seems likely given his name, it need not follow that he was an Aksumite simply because he employed Gǝʿǝz in his inscription. . In that case, the Yehuda of RIÉth 205 could easily have been a Ḥimyarite Jew who visited Aksumite Ethiopia. The very fact that he employed a purely consonantal form of the fīdal script may be indicative of his foreign origin, as this was the form of that script that most closely resembled the South Arabian musnad to which a Ḥimyarite would have been accustomed, even if it was not written in the right-to-left direction in which musnad is written. But however one chooses to interpret RIÉth 205, this single inscription – and a very short one at that – can in no way be used as evidence of a permanent Jewish community of any size in Ethiopia before the medieval ethnogensis of the Bēta ʾƎsrāʾēl.

Another case for a Jewish community in Aksumite Ethiopia is presented by Jürgen Tubach in his “Aramaic Loanwords in Gәʿәz,” a study published in the 2015 volume Semitic Languages in Contact (Tubach 2015). Although Tubach’s focus is, as the title indicates, on Aramaic loanwords, he treats loanwords of Hebrew origin as well. Of such loanwords he identifies three categories: 1) so-called cultural borrowings deriving ultimately from Sumerian or Akkadian that were inherited by Hebrew and/or Aramaic; 2) words which belong to a typically Jewish sphere that are “useless in a Christian context;” and 3) words that could have a Jewish or Christian origin. The single example of a cultural borrowing treated by Tubach is haykal (Ibid.: 352–353), which in Gәʿәz means “temple, sanctuary, altar, Noah’s ark” (Leslau 1991: 221) and which derives ultimately from Sumerian É.GAL, literally “big house,” i.e. palace.

1. Of the Gәʿәz vocabulary that, according to Tubach, can only have a Jewish origin, be it via Hebrew or Aramaic, he draws attention to the following terms: sanbat “Sabbath, Sunday, week”; mǝṣwāt “alms, almsgiving, charity”; ṣalōt “prayer”; ṭāʕōt “idol, false god”; haymānōt “belief”; ʔōrīt “Torah, law”; sīʔōl “netherworld, Sheol”; gahannam “hell”; fәsḥ “Passach, Easter”; ʕarb “Friday”; nabīy “prophet”; masīḥ “anointed, Christ”; talmīd “disciple”; ʔaṭhara “to clean, purify, lustrate”; tābōt “ark (i.e. Noah’s ark, Ark of the Covenant)”; kāhǝn “priest”; and malak “angel”.81 In some cases, Tubach posits a Jewish origin on morphological and/or semantic grounds. Thus, for example, Gәʿәz ṭāʕōt, though cognate with Syriac ṭāʕyūṯā “error, ignorance, forgetting,” differs from the latter in both morphology and meaning, but directly parallels Hebrew ṭāʕūt and JudaeoAramaic ṭāʕūṯā “error, idol.”82 In other cases, Tubach assumes a Jewish origin for a word due to the lack of such a word in a Christian language like Syriac, mәṣwāt being a case in point.83 In still other cases, Tubach bases his argument for Jewish origins on phonology. Thus, while the Gәʿәz terms nabīy, ṣalōt, and masīḥ all have Syriac cognates (nḇīyā, ṣlōṯā, and mšīḥā respectively), the fact that these Gәʿәz terms retain /a/ in the first syllable would discount their derivation from Syriac.
2. Rather, Tubach argues, “[t]he borrowing of these words must have taken place before the first half of the 3rd century AD, when the unstressed short vowels in open syllables were dropped in Aramaic.”84 Since this predates the introduction of Christianity to either Ethiopia or South Arabia by at least a century, Tubach concludes that “[t]he Hebrew and Aramaic words with a special Jewish connotation – except other Jewish elements – require Jewish communities in the Axumite empire. If this were not the case, the number of these words is not explainable. It should not exceed the number of such loan words in Greek, English, or another European language.”85 He further uses this argument to resurrect the theory that the Bēta ʾƎsrāʾēl are the descendants of Jewish immigrants from South Arabia,86 despite all evidence to the contrary, as outlined above.

By contrast, the presence of Jews in neighboring South Arabia is well documented during Late Antiquity:

Not only do we find Sabaic inscriptions referring to the Jewish community by name (s Israel (ys³rʔl), see CIH 543/1, Gar Bayt al-Ashwal 1/3, Gar framm. 7/2, Ibrahim al-Hudayd 1/8, and SR-Naʿḍ 9/3–4. For references to this community as Jews (yhd, hd, hwd, or ʔyhdn ), see CIH 543/2, Ja 1028/12, MAFRAYḤaṣī 1/4.5.13, and Ry 515/5. For the nisba yhwdyn , see Eskoubi 2000: C 1), as well as to synagogues (kns¹t (YM 1200/7), ms¹gd (MS Tanʿim al-Qarya 9), and mkrb (Bayt al-Ashwal 4 g/1, CIH 151+CIH 152/2, DhM 215/8, Gar Bayt al-Ashwal 1/5, Gl 1194/4, Ja 475/2, Ja 856/3, MAFRAY-Ḥaṣī 1/6.8.13.14, Ry 520/4.9, Ry 534+MAFY/Rayda 1/1.5, YM 1200/6), there are inscriptions in Aramaic or Hebrew left by Ḥimyarite Jews (DJE 23 (Robin 2004: 846 [Fig. 8], 888–890), Naveh-Ṣuʿar 24 (ibid.: 839 [Fig. 4], 890), and the seal-ring from Ẓafār (ibid.: 849 [Fig. 10], 890), and, at other times, bilingual Sabaic-Hebrew or Sabaic-Aramaic inscriptions (Gar Bayt al-Ashwal 1 (Robin 2004: 850 [Fig. 12], 883–884), Naveh-Bilingue (ibid.: 841 [Fig. 5], 891).

How, then, might one account for the Gәʿәz vocabulary of Jewish origin for which there is no apparent transmission through Christian intermediaries? Pierluigi Piovanelli proposes one solution, suggesting that “Syro-Palestinian travelers and merchants, whose first language was Aramaic, made regular journeys between Aila, on the gulf of Aqaba, and Adulis, in the bay of Zula, on their way to India” (Piovanelli 2018: 187):

In closing, let us turn our attention to a short article published by Pieter W. van der Horst the same year as Tubach’s piece, which has a direct bearing on the question of a Jewish presence in Aksumite Ethiopia. In his article, van der Horst draws attention to a rather mysterious figure whom the Babylonian Talmud calls Rabbi Yehuda “the Indian” (raḇ yәhūḏāh hindūʔāh) (Van der Horst 2015). This man is reported in Kiddushin §22b–§23a to have been a convert to Judaism who traveled by sea from his homeland, but who had died while abroad, leaving no heirs. That the Babylonian rabbi Mar Zutra (d. 417) is stated to have spent time with him during his last days indicates that Yehuda died in Mesopotamia. Some years ago, Michael Morony alluded in passing to Rabbi Yehuda in his Iraq after the Muslim Conquest and asserted that he was “a former Hindu convert” (Morony 2005: 308), even though the Talmud says nothing of Yehuda’s former religion. In fact, it is not until the ninth century (Gamliel 2018: 43–44), that we find the earliest concrete evidence of a Jewish presence in South Asia, namely a grant given to the merchant guilds maṇigrāmam and añcuvaṇṇam by the local ruler, Ayyaṉ Aṭikaḷ, a subordinate, in turn, of the Cēra king Sthāṇu Ravi Varma (r. 844-885). Dating from 849 and inscribed on copper plates in Old Malayalam, the grant includes signatures in Arabic, Pahlavi, and Hebrew scripts, attesting to the presence in South India of Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Jews, most likely merchants hailing from regions further west (Gamliel 2018: 43–44). While one cannot exclude the possibility that an individual Indian might have embraced Judaism during earlier times, both South Arabia and Ethiopia were regularly referred to as “India” by Late Antique authors (Mayerson 1993, Schneider 2004).

But as argued above, hard evidence for a Jewish community in Aksumite Ethiopia is lacking. Thus, while one cannot exclude out of hand the possibility that Yehuda was an Ethiopian who, conceivably through contact with Jews in Ḥimyar, converted to Judaism, the simpler solution is that he was a Ḥimyarite himself, hailing from a region where contact with Jews would have been a far more common occurrence than in Ethiopia. If so, this is significant for the history of South Arabian Judaism, as it should cause us to reconsider the widely held view that Ḥimyarite Jews are not mentioned in external Jewish sources like the Talmud

1. Conclusion
2. The adherence to many aspects of Old Testament tradition is a striking feature of Ethiopian Christianity. Upon closer examination, however, this phenomenon can be explained as a rationalization of local customs (such as the pork taboo and male circumcision) in light of the Old Testament, or else takes the form of customs (such as observance of the Saturday Sabbath) for which pre-medieval evidence is lacking. The Ethiopian Church is by no means unique in its reverence for the Old Testament, though the extent to which it adheres to some aspects of Old Testament tradition in ways that other Christian denominations do not is evidence of its uniqueness, not of a Jewish substratum. To the extent that such a Jewish substratum existed among Christians in the southern Red Sea region, one would expect to find it instead in South Arabia, where a Jewish community is well documented during Late Antiquity. Aksumite contact with South Arabian Christians, whose religious vocabulary was likely influenced by such a substratum, could account for many of the Aramaic and Hebrew loanwords in Gәʿәz for whose transmission no other Christian agents appear responsible. That individual Jews, whether hailing from South Arabia or from regions further afield, took up residence in the kingdom of Aksum is of course entirely possible. Indeed, the Yehuda who left the inscription RIÉth 205 may well have been one such individual. However, there is no evidence that a Jewish community on the scale of South Arabia’s existed in Aksum, in which case one would not expect those Jews who may have resided in Aksum to have exerted any influence on Ethiopian Christianity.
3. As for the Bēta ʾƎsrāʾēl, this group is best understood as descended from Agaw-speaking Christians deemed heretical by the Ethiopian Church, whose ethnogenesis occurred through a de-Christianization of their religious tradition, rather than descent from Jewish immigrants from South Arabia. As a caveat, it must be stressed that the conclusions reached in this article reflect the current state of our knowledge. Future excavations in the Horn of Africa might indeed bring to light evidence that will compel a reconsideration of the arguments made here. In the meantime, however, the hypothesis of an ancient Ethiopian Judaism is best rejected.