The Beta Israel: Falasha in Ethiopia: From Earliest Times to the Twentieth Century Paperback by Steven B. Kaplan (NYU Press)

The study of this book proved to be a distinct pleasure. It was exciting to see Kaplan clear away the accretions of ignorance and superstition about Ethiopian Jews, one piece after another, relentlessly. That is the polemical aspect of the book, important now, but not necessarily as important in time to come, as the main outline of the history of Ethiopian Jews becomes better understood.

Briefly put, Kaplan shows that Ethiopian Jews are unlikely to have come to Ethiopia from some other place. They are not likely to be some lost tribe of the original children of Israel, for example. He shows the deep Ethiopian roots of these "Beta Israel," which they share with Ethiopian Christians. The latter are more Jewish, and the former more Christian, than the Jews and Christians of Europe. Furthermore, it seems most likely that these Ethiopian Jews, though in some sense continuing earlier Ethiopian Judaism, arose as a group, more or less gradually, only between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The sources that Kaplan describes are early reports by travelers on the one hand, and the Ethiopian writings in the Ge'ez (and later Amharic) languages on the other. He also utilizes the oral traditions of today's Beta Israel. In the main, other scholars have confirmed Kaplan's main conclusions, particularly James Quirin and Kay Kaufman Shelemay.

Kaplan's last three chapters, including the concluding one, are particularly fascinating. They tell the story of the Beta Israel's growing Jewish self-identification and indeed Zionism during the last two hundred years of their history, much of it in response to both European Christian and European Jewish contacts. The earlier five chapters, covering a period of about a millennium, is more hurried and, to this reader, sometimes confusing in its plethora of names and dates.

Kaplan is not interested in a history of ideas, not even religious ideas. Certain groups are introduced as "Judaized" or even Jews, but it is not always clear how their religious ideas differed from those whom he calls Christian. We can suspect, but often it is only a suspicion, that the Jews did not accept Jesus as god while the Christians did. Rarely does this become explicit in the book. Moreover, we are told that the Beta Israel's Torah is called orit, and that, like other Beta Israel literature, it seems to have come from Ethiopian Christian sources after some changes were made. We are not told quite what these changes were. It would have helped to define Jewish-Christian differences, in the realm of religious ideas, more sharply.

Notwithstanding these reservations, I see this book as of very fundamental importance. It is one of those works that have changed the thinking of a generation. We owe the author a very profound gratitude.