The Sign and the Seal. A quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant

Ironically, several of these accounts were written by foreigners who came to Ethiopia with the express intention of engineering cultural change, notably nineteenth-century Christian missionaries who had heard rumours of the existence of a sizeable population of Abyssinian Jews and who had rushed to convert them. One such evangelist was Martin Flad, a young German who arrived in Ethiopia in 1855 to proselytize on behalf of the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews.(33) His book, The Falashas of Abyssinia, was published in 1869. I found a worn and much-handled copy of it in the British Library and soon became intrigued by several passages in which the author insisted that there must have been Jews in Ethiopia at least since the time of the prophet Jeremiah (around 627 BC)(34), and possibly since the reign of Solomon. Flad based this assertion in part on the fact that:

The Falashas know nothing of either the Babylonian or the Jerusalem Talmud, which were composed during and after the time of the captivity. They also do not observe the Feasts of Purim and of the Dedication of the Temple, which . . . are still solemnly kept by the Jews of our time.(35)

On further investigation, I discovered that the Feast of the Dedication of the Temple was properly known as Hanukkah (meaning, literally, 'Dedication'). From my point of view the most significant fact about it was that it was instituted in 164 BC(36) and therefore would certainly have been observed by the Jewish community that established itself in the Yemen after AD 70. The academic orthodoxy which had previously persuaded me to see the Falashas as the descendants of Ethiopians converted by these Yemeni Jews thus suddenly began to look very suspect. To put matters as plainly as possible, non-observance of Hanukkah suggested only one rational conclusion: the Falashas must have acquired their Judaism before 164 BC and thus not from the Yemen but from some other source. I next researched the Feast of Purim of which Flad had also found Ethiopia's Jews to be ignorant. This festival, too, I learned, had been observed since at least the second century BC. Indeed it was quite possibly of even earlier provenance than that: the events that it commemorated took place in the mid-fifth century BC and several of the authorities whom I consulted suggested that its observance had become widely popular by 425 BC.(37) This raised the interesting possibility of which Flad himself had obviously been convinced that the Falashas had become isolated from the evolving body of world Judaism well before that date, perhaps during the sixth century BC. I now had a growing sense that the gap between Abyssinian legend and historical fact was closing fast: five hundred years before Christ, after all, was only four hundred years after Solomon. It was beginning to look more and more probable that the Judaism of the Falashas had arrived in Ethiopia in early Old Testament times just as the Kebra Nagast and the Falashas themselves had always claimed. If this were so, then the implications were clear: at the very least the story of the abduction of the Ark to Ethiopia by Menelik deserved to be taken much more seriously than the academics had hitherto allowed. I found further evidence for this point of view in the account of another nineteenth-century missionary, Henry Aaron Stern, who was himself a German Jewish convert to Christianity. He had worked and travelled with Flad in Ethiopia and had published his own Wanderings among the Falashas in Abyssinia in 1862. As I read this 300-page volume I developed an intense dislike for its author, who came across as an arrogant, brutal and unscrupulous proselytizer with no respect whatsoever for the culture or traditions of the people amongst whom he was working. In general, too, I felt that his descriptions of Falasha religion and lifestyle were thin and poorly observed. As a result, by the time I was halfway through the book I had become thoroughly impatient with it. Then, on page 188, I came across something interesting. Here, after a lengthy treatise on the absolute interdiction amongst the Falashas of 'intermarriages with those of another tribe or creed', Stern described the Ethiopian Jews as being faithful to the law of Moses 'which . . . is the formula after which they have moulded their worship.' He then added:

It sounds strange to hear in central Africa of a Jewish altar and atoning sacrifices . . . [Yet], in the rear of every place of worship is a small enclosure with a huge stone in the centre; and on this crude altar the victim is slaughtered, and all other sacrificial rites performed.(38)

Though at this stage my general knowledge about Judaism was limited to say the least, I was well aware that animal sacrifice was no longer practised anywhere in the world by modern Jews. I had no idea whether this ancient institution still existed amongst the Falashas in the late twentieth century; Stern's account, however, made it quite clear that it had flourished a hundred and thirty years earlier. Continuing his description of the sacrificial enclosure, the German missionary next remarked:

This sanctum is sacredly guarded from unlawful intrusion . . . and woe betide the stranger who, ignorant of Falasha customs, ventures too close to the forbidden precincts . . . I was one day on the very verge of committing this unpardonable offence. It was a very sultry and close noon when, after several hours' fatiguing march, we reached a Falasha village. Eager to obtain a short rest, I went in quest of a cool and quiet shelter, when accidentally I espied in the midst of a secluded grassy spot a smooth block that looked as if it had been charitably placed there to invite the weary to solitude and repose. The thorny stockade easily yielded to the iron of my lance, and I was just about to ensconce myself behind the flattened stone when a chorus of angry voices . . . reminded me of my mistake, and urged me to beat a hasty retreat.(39)

I found myself wishing that Stern had received the punishment he deserved for vandalizing a holy place.(40) At the same time, however, I could not help but be grateful to him for drawing my attention to the practice of sacrifice amongst the Falashas. This was a lead well worth following up since it might provide another clue to the date at which Ethiopia's Jews became separated from the main body of their co-religionists. I devoted considerable effort to researching the obscure subject of Judaic sacrifice in Old Testament times. The picture that eventually emerged from the fog of scholarly references was of a constantly evolving institution that started out as a simple offering to God which anyone, priest or layman, could make and in virtually any place where a local shrine had been established. This state of relative unregulation, however, began to change after the Exodus from Egypt around 1250 BC.(41) During the Hebrews' wanderings in the wilderness of Sinai the Ark of the Covenant was built and housed in a portable tent or 'tabernacle'. Thenceforward all sacrifices were to be made at the door of this tabernacle and anyone disobeying the new law was to be punished by banishment:

Whatsoever man there be of the House of Israel . . . that offereth a burnt offering or sacrifice and bringeth it not to the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, to offer it unto the Lord; even that man shall be cut off from among his people.(42)

I learned, however, that this prohibition was rather less absolute than it sounded. The main point of the code was not to abolish sacrifice at local shrines in all circumstances but rather to ensure that sacrifices were carried out exclusively at a centralized national place of worship when and if such a place existed. In the wilderness the tabernacle housing the Ark was such a central point. Later, from roughly 1200 to 1000 BC, a national sanctuary was established in Israel at Shiloh, which thus became the new sacrificial centre. Significantly, however, there were periods of political upheaval when Shiloh was abandoned and during these periods the Hebrews were permitted to sacrifice once again at local shrines.(43) By the 950s BC Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem had superseded Shiloh as the national religious centre. There is evidence, however, that local sacrifices did take place elsewhere from time to time, particularly amongst those Jews living far from the capital. Indeed it was not until the reign of King Josiah (640-609 BC) that a blanket ban on all forms of sacrifice other than at the Temple began to be strictly enforced.'(44) So seriously was this prohibition taken that the Jews appear not to have attempted sacrifice of any kind in the decades immediately following the Temple's destruction by Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BC. The early tradition of reverting to local shrines in the absence of a centralized national place of worship seems to have been irrevocably abandoned. Quite simply, while there was no Temple there could be no sacrifice.(45) After the return from the Babylonian Exile, the Second Temple was built in Jerusalem and the institution of sacrifice was rerestablished exclusively within its precincts; meanwhile the absolute prohibition on local offerings was reinforced and appears to have been strictly obeyed. This system of centralized sacrifice remained firmly in place from 520 BC, when the Second Temple was dedicated, until 70 AD when it was razed to the ground by the Roman Emperor Titus.(46) No Third Temple had ever been contemplated, other than by millennial groups who linked the fulfilment of that dream with the coming of the still-awaited Messiah.(47) In consequence, since AD 70, sacrifice had everywhere been abandoned by the Jews. The Falashas were the sole exception to this ruk.(48) Moreover Stem's account suggested that they had offered sacrifices at all their places of worship when he had worked amongst them in the nineteenth century. With a little further research I was able to confirm that this tradition was so strong that sacrifices continued to be made by the majority of Falasha communities today despite their increased exposure to modern Jewish practices.(49) As I considered this fact, I realized that there might be a number of possible explanations for it. The most obvious and attractive of these explanations, however, was also the simplest and therefore the most likely to be correct. I wrote in my notebook:

The ancestors of today's Falashas must have been converted to Judaism at a time when it was still acceptable for those far away from the centralized national sanctuary to practise local sacrifice. That would suggest that the conversion took place before King Josiah's ban i.e. no later than the seventh century BC and possibly even earlier than that. HYPOTHESIS: At some stage after the building of Solomon's Temple (mid-900s BC) but before Josiah (mid600s BC a group of Jews migrated from Israel and settled in Ethiopia. They established local shrines at which they conducted sacrifices to their God and they began to convert the natives of the country to their faith. Perhaps they initially maintained contact with their homeland. The distance was great, however, and it is reasonable to suppose that they would eventually have became completely isolated. They would thus have been untouched by the great revolutions in theological thought that took place in the Judaic world in subsequent centuries. This explains why the Falashas are the only Jews still practising sacrifice. Frozen like flies in amber, trapped in a time-warp, they are the last surviving practitioners of genuine First Temple Judaism. So far so good. But QUESTION: why would a group of Jews have migrated from Israel to somewhere as far away as Ethiopia? We are talking the tenth to seventh centuries BC here, not exactly the jet age. The gr must therefore have had a very strong motive. What could that have been? ANSWER: The Kebra Nagast is in no doubt about what the motive was. It says that the migrants were the first-born sons of the elders of Israel, and that they came to Ethiopia in the entourage of Menelik to attend the Holy Ark of the Covenant which they had abducted from the Temple.

DECLINE AND FALL

If the Kelm Nagast's account of the arrival of Judaism in Ethiopia were true, I reasoned, then I might expect to find evidence somewhere in the historical annals to prove that the Jewish faith had formerly enjoyed a much greater prominence in that country than it did today. That certainly would make sense if it had originally been associated with so exalted a figure as Menelik I. I remembered, moreover, that my old friend Richard Pankhurst had mentioned something to me that was relevant to this line of Inquiry. When we had worked together in 1983 he had told me that the Falashas had once been a prosperous and powerful people with kings of their own. I therefore placed another telephone call to Richard in Addis Ababa to see if he could recommend any sources that might shed light on the decline and fall of the Falashas. He directed me to a book with which I was already slightly familiar. Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile in the Years 1768-1773 written by the Scottish adventurer James Bruce of Kinnaird. Pankhurst also suggested that I should look into the 'Royal Chronicles' compiled during the reigns of a number of Ethiopian emperors since medieval times. These, he said, documented a series of wars that had been fought between the Christians and the Jews and could be of interest. 'Other than that,' he added, 'I'm not sure where you can get the kind of information you want. The problem is that almost nothing in depth was ever written about the Falashas before Bruce.' James Bruce of Kinnaird, as I was to discover, was something of an enigma. Hailing from a staunchly Presbyterian Stirlingshire family, he had belonged to the minor aristocracy and had inherited sufficient wealth to indulge a lifelong passion for overseas travel. Initially it seemed to me that it was only this wanderlust that had lured him into the heart of the Ethiopian highlands. When I began to look at his work on the Falashas, however, it gradually dawned on me that his interest in these people had been too intense and too sustained to be explained away merely as the normal curiosity of an intelligent traveller. Over a period of several years he had carried out meticulous research into the faith, customs and historical origins of Abyssinia's black Jews. In the process, interviewing elders and religious figures, he had recorded many ancient traditions that would otherwise most certainly have been lost to history. Amongst these traditions was one which stated that King Ezana of Axum had been reading the Psalms of David when he was first introduced to Frumentius, the young Syrian who later converted him to Christianity.(50) Bruce, furthermore, made it quite clear that the monarch's acquaintance with this book of Old Testament verse resulted from the widespread prevalence of Judaism in Ethiopia at that time(51) i.e. the early part of the fourth century AD. Resolving Doubts 141 In the context of what I now knew about Falasha customs, I was happy to give credence to this assertion. Indeed I took it as additional support for my own rapidly evolving hypothesis namely that a form of the Jewish faith incorporating archaic traditions of blood sacrifice had been in Ethiopia for at least a thousand years before Frumentius turned up to preach the gospel of Christ. I was soon to find further confirmation of this in an old and rare Ethiopic manuscript that had once rested in the Tigrayan fortress of Magdala (stormed and looted by British forces under General Napier in the nineteenth century). Entitled A History and Genealogy of the Ancient Kings it contained the following passage:

Christianity was introduced into Abyssinia 331 years after the birth of Christ by Abuna Salama, whose former name was Frumentos or Frumentius. At that time the Ethiopian kings reigned over Axum. Before the Christian religion was known in Ethiopia half the inhabitants were Jews, who observed the Law; the other half were worshippers of Sando, the dragon.(52)

The reference to worshippers of 'the dragon' presumably a rubric for all sorts of primitive animistic gods was interesting. It suggested that Judaism had at no point become the exclusive state religion of Ethiopia and that, in the pre-Christian era, the Falashas like Jews everywhere had accepted the coexistence of many pagan creeds. I reasoned, however, that they would undoubtedly have been put on their guard, and been tempted to abandon their traditional tolerance, by the arrival of a militantly evangelistic monotheistic sect like the Christians, whom they would have had good reason to see as a real threat to their preeminence and to their beliefs. The conversion of the Axumite king would have looked particularly ominous in such a context and thereafter Jews and Christians might well have found themselves locked in bitter struggle. There was considerable support for this analysis amongst the traditions recorded by Bruce. The Scottish adventurer asserted, for example, that the Falashas were very powerful at the time of the conversion to Christianity or, as they term it, 'the Apostasy'. At this time they declared a prince of the tribe of Judah, and of the race of Solomon and Menelik, to be their sovereign. . . This prince . . . refused to abandon the religion of his forefathers.(53) Such a state of affairs, Bruce added, was bound to lead to conflict since the Christians, too, claimed to be ruled by a king descended from the line of Solomon. The conflict, when it came, was thus precipitated by concerns that were entirely secular:

Although there was no bloodshed upon difference of religion, yet, each having a distinct king with the same pretensions, many battles were fought from motives of ambition and rivaiship of sovereign power.(54)

Bruce provided no details of these 'many battles' and the history books, too, were silent concerning them other than noting that in the sixth century AD Kaleb, a Christian king of Axum, assembled a vast army and took it across the Red Sea to do battle with a Jewish monarch in the Yemen.(55) Was it not quite probable, I now speculated, that this Arabian campaign had been an escalation of fighting between Jews and Christians in Ethiopia itself? Evidence that this might indeed have been the case was contained in the Kebra Nagast. Towards the end of the great epic I found specific mention of King Kaleb in a chapter that seethed with anti-Judaic sentiments: here, for no apparent reason, the Ethiopian Jews were suddenly described as the 'enemies of God'; furthermore, the text advocated that they should be 'cut to pieces' and that their lands should be laid waste.(56) All this was said in a context that ascribed two sons to Kaleb. One of these sons was named 'Israel' while the other was referred to as 'Gebra Maskal' (an Ethiopic term meaning 'Slave of the Cross'). The symbolism of a Jewish Christian rift was hard to miss (with the Christian faction, of course, being represented by Gebra Maskal and the Jewish faction by Israel). And this analysis began to look even more credible when I remembered that the Falashas never referred to themselves as 'Falashas' but always as 'Beta Israel', i.e. 'House of Israel'.(57) The basic message, therefore, seemed clear enough; nevertheless, the whole passage was complicated by dense and obscure imagery. Several times, for example, the words 'Chariot' and 'Zion' cropped up. I could make little or no sense of the former. I already knew very well, however, that the latter 'Zion' was one of a number of different epithets for the Ark of the Covenant used frequently in the Kebra Nagast.(58) Everything became clear when I read that Israel and Gebra Maskal were destined to fight each other. After this battle, the text continued:

God will say to Gebra Maskal, 'Choose thou between the Chariot and Zion', and He will cause him to take Zion, and he shall reign openly upon the throne of his father. And God will make Israel to choose the chariot, and he shall reign secretly and he shall not be visible.(59)

In this fashion, the Kebra Nagast concluded:

The kingdom of the Jews shall be made an end of and the Kingdom of Christ shall be constituted . . . Thus hath God made for the King of Ethiopia more glory and grace and majesty than for all the other kings of the earth because of the greatness of Zion, the Ark of the Law of God.(60)

It seemed to me beyond any reasonable doubt that what was being described here, albeit in arcane and symbolic language, was a conflict between the Jews and Christians of Ethiopia a battle for supremacy in which the followers of the new religion triumphed while the followers of the older faith were vanquished, thereafter to live invisibly in secret places. It was also clear that the Ark of the Covenant 'Zion' had stood at the heart of this struggle for power and that the Christians had in some way managed to wrest it from the Jews who thenceforward had had to content themselves with the 'Chariot', in other words with second best. As my researches continued, however, it became obvious that the Falashas had not tamely accepted the invisibility and second-class status that the Christians had sought to impose on them. On the contrary, I found a considerable body of evidence to suggest that they had fought back and, furthermore, that they had done so with great determination and over a rather lengthy period. The first tantalizing hint of sustained warfare between Abyssinia's Jews and Christians came in an account written by a ninth-century traveller named Eldad Hadani better known as Eldad 'the Danite' because he claimed descent from the lost Israeli tribe of Dan. Exactly who he was, or where he came from, was by no means clear. In a widely circulated letter written in AD 833, however, he had claimed that the Danites and three other 'lost' Jewish clans lived in Ethiopia where they were locked in permanent antagonism with the Christian rulers of that country: 'And they slew the men of Ethiopia and unto this very day they fight with the children of the kingdoms of Ethiopia.'(61) On investigating further I discovered that several authorities regarded Eldad as a charlatan and his letter as an improbable piece of fiction. Others, however, felt that much of what he said was firmly grounded in fact.(62) I had no hesitation in aligning myself with the latter camp simply because Eldad's references to the Abyssinian Jews were too close to the truth about the Falashas to have been pure fabrications. He insisted, for example, that they had emigrated from the Holy Land to Ethiopia in First Temple times, shortly after the separation of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel (i.e. around 931 BC)(63). In consequence, he said, they did not celebrate festivals instituted after that date such as Purim and Hanukkah. Neither did they have rabbis 'for these were of the Second Temple and they did not reach them.'(64) I was already well aware of the non-observance of the later festivals by the Falashas, and of the implications of this. On checking I now discovered that they did not have rabbis either: indeed their religious officials were called kahen, a word derived from the Hebrew kohen (more familiar as the common name Cohen) meaning 'priest' and dating back to the era of the First Temple.(65) All in all, therefore, it did sound very much as though Eldad had been in Ethiopia as he had claimed, and had given a faithful enough description of the state of Judaism there in the mid-ninth century AD. His report of sustained fighting between the Abyssinian Jews and their neighbours during this period thus also looked quite plausible:

And their banner is white and written thereon in black is 'Hear 0 Israel, the Lord our God is one God' . . . They are numerous as the sands of the sea, and have no employment but war and, whensoever they fight, they say it is not good for mighty men to flee, let them die young, but let them not flee, let them strengthen their heart unto God, and several times they say and cry all of them together, 'Hear 0 Israel, our God is one God', and then they all take heed.(66)

Eldad concluded that the Jewish tribes in Ethiopia had been successful in their warlike endeavours and had 'placed their hands on the necks of their enemies'.(67) This, it seemed to me, was nothing more nor less than a fairly accurate description of the true balance of power between Christians and Jews in the ninth and early tenth centuries AD. It was, after all, at precisely this time that the Christian Solomonic dynasty of Axum had been overthrown. And I already knew from my previous research that this coup d' t had been the work of a Jewish monarch a great queen named Gudit (or Judit, or possibly Yehudit). As outlined in Chapter 5, Gudit's brief and bloody reign was followed, perhaps half a century later, by the establishment of the Zagwe dynasty, to which King Lalibela had belonged. Although they were almost certainly Jews at the outset, the Zagwes themselves later converted to Christianity and subsequently (about fifty years after Lalibela's death) abdicated the throne in favour of a monarch claiming Solomonic descent. Whatever else it achieved, however, it quickly became apparent to me that the Zagwe interregnum had not halted the chronic state of conflict between the Abyssinian Jews and Christians. As my researches continued I learned that Benjamin of Tudela, a widely travelled Spanish merchant who lived in the twelfth century, had reported the existence of Jews in Ethiopia who were 'not under the yoke of the Gentiles', and who had 'cities and castles on the summits of mountains'. He spoke of wars with the Christians in which the Falashas were normally successful, taking 'spoil and booty' at will because no man could 'prevail against them'.(68) Then, in the fifteenth century, the Jewish traveller Elijah of Ferrara related that he had met a young Falasha in Jerusalem and was told how his co-religionists 'preserved their independence in a mountainous region from which they launched continual wars against the Christian emperors of Ethiopia.'(69) A hundred years later the Jesuit Bishop of Oviedo asserted that the Falashas hid away in 'great inaccessible mountains; and they had dispossessed the Christians of many lands which they were masters of, and the kings of Ethiopia could not subdue them, because they have but small forces, and it is very difficult to penetrate into the fastnesses of their rocks.'(70) The bishop was wrong, however. His statement was made in 1557 by which date, far from 'dispossessing' anyone, the Falashas were actually under sustained attack from Christian forces bent, apparently, on genocide. Sarsa Dengel, the Solomonic emperor who ruled from 1563 to 1594, waged a seventeen year campaign against them a campaign described by one respected scholar as 'a veritable crusade, inspired by religious fanaticism.'(71) During the fighting, which saw brutal onslaughts against Falasha strongholds in the Simien mountains west and south of the Takazze river, the defenders acquitted themselves with great dignity. Even Sarsa Dengel's sycophantic chronicler could not avoid expressing admiration for the courage of one group of Jewish women who, rather than be captured and used by the emperor's men, hurled themselves off a cliff with the cry 'Adonai [God] help me'.(72) Later the Falasha king, Radai, was taken prisoner. Offered his life if only he would beg the Virgin Mary for mercy and death if he would not he is reported to have said: 'Is not the mention of the name of Mary forbidden? Make haste! It is better for me that I should depart from a world of lies to a world of justice, from the darkness to the light; kill me, swiftly.' The emperor's general, Yonael, answered: 'If you prefer death, die bravely and bow your head.' Radai then bowed and Yonael struck him with a great sword: the single blow instantly decapitated the Falasha monarch and passed through his knees also, the blade finally burying itself in the ground. Those who witnessed this horrible scene were said to have admired 'the courage of the Jew in death who declared the things of the earth are bad and the things of heaven are good.'(73) Towards the end of the same campaign the last two Falasha fortresses in the high Simiens were attacked and overwhelmed despite the bravery of the defenders. In both cases the leaders and their picked men chose suicide rather than captivity. This did not bring an end to the persecutions, however. On the contrary, even worse atrocities were committed after 1607 when Emperor Susneyos ascended the throne. He launched a pogrom against all Falashas still living in the vast highland expanses between Lake Tana and the Simien mountains. During the next twenty years of 'unwarrantable butchery' thousands were killed in fierce fighting and their children were sold as slaves. The few survivors, according to the detailed account given by the Scottish traveller James Bruce:

were ordered upon pain of death to renounce their religion, and be baptised. To this they consented, seeing there was no remedy . . . Many of them were baptised accordingly, and they were all ordered to plough and harrow on the Sabbath day.(74)