During the height of King Solomon’s reign of glory, o Best Beloved!, the dark-skinned Queen of Sheba, hearing of Solomon’s wisdom, traveled to Jerusalem to learn from him. The story is differently told in the Bible, the Qur’an, and in the Kebra Nagast, the Ethiopian holy book, but in the Ethiopian version, the virtuous Queen is tricked into sleeping with the wily Solomon and returns to Ethiopia pregnant with his child. The son, Menelik, became the first emperor of Ethiopia, thus establishing the Solomonic dynasty claimed by the ruling family of Ethiopia until the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1975. Ethiopia famously became a bastion of Christianity from the 4th century onwards (the Land of Prester John), but somewhere in the nebulous mists of myth, history, and continuous opposition to a centralized empire emerged an Ethiopian populace who considered themselves the descendants of Solomon and Sheba, and who called themselves Jews.
Formerly called “Falashas” by outsiders, a label now considered derogatory, the Beta Israel held the Five Books of Moses as their central religious text, upholding many of the laws and commandments set forth in the Torah, including dietary restrictions, the observance of the Sabbath, and major biblical festivals. For fifteen centuries, the Beta Israel clung to their Jewish identity and religious practice in complete isolation and in ignorance of the rabbinical traditions developed by world Jewry elsewhere. They knew nothing of later Jewish texts like the Talmud or the Mishnah, central to Rabbinic Judaism.
By the nineteenth century, when, in its devouring embrace, European imperialism attempted to conquer the independent kingdom of Ethiopia, knowledge of the Beta Israel began seeping into the West. The Beta Israel had, by this time, been forced into remote poverty by the Ethiopian ruling powers, but the scrum of Christian missionaries overrunning the territories was an even greater threat to the community’s survival.
Lone Western Jewish defenders, such as Joseph Halévy and Jacques Faitlovich, made it their mission to stanch the flow of conversion by connecting the Beta Israel to the rest of world Jewry. Faitlovitch secured two letters from rabbis abroad acknowledging Beta Israel as fellow Jews. The second letter from 1921, written by the revered Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi of Palestine, called on the Jewish people worldwide to save the Beta Israel — “50,000 holy souls of the house of Israel” — from “extinction and contamination.”
The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 set the stage for a protracted discussion about the legitimacy of Beta Israel as authentic Jews and their right to immigrate to Israel. Finally, in 1975, the government of Yitzhak Rabin officially accepted the Beta Israel as Jews for the purpose of the Law of Return. In that same year, Emperor Haile Selassie was strangled and a military junta known as the Derg ruled Ethiopia as a Marxist-Leninist state. During the 1980s, a protracted civil war, drought, famine, economic decline, and a repressive dictatorship made life unbearable not only for Ethiopian Jews but for Ethiopians in general. Tens of thousands, including the Beta Israel, undertook a dangerous overland trek to refugee camps in neighboring Sudan to escape. Thousands perished along the way.
The refugee camps were themselves swamps of corruption, disease, and for the Beta Israel, the site of continued stigmatization by fellow refugees who considered them sorcerers and Christ-killers. The death toll among the Beta Israel continued unabated and was even greater than amongst other refugees. After receiving accounts of the persecution of Ethiopian Jews in the refugee camps, Associate U.S. Coordinator for Refugee Affair Richard Krieger came up with the idea of wholesale airlift of the population to Israel and met with Mossad, the Israeli equivalent of the CIA, and Sudanese representatives to put into place what was called Operation Moses.
After a secret Israeli cabinet meeting in November 1984, the decision was made to go forward. Between November 21, 1984, and January 5, 1985, 8,000 Ethiopian Jews were secretly flown from Sudan to Israel. Operation Moses was the first of these mass evacuations. Six years later, Operation Solomon, a covert Israeli military operation in 1991, airlifted over 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 36 hours.
Although Ethiopian Jews suffer anti-black discrimination and higher rates of poverty than the general Israeli population, there’s no question that they would have faced extinction as a community had they remained in Ethiopia. In this one case, at least, a communal religious identity trumped race. Israel proactively brought thousands of Africans – strange, impoverished, ignorant of Western ways and modern lifestyles – and declared them to be citizens because they were Jews.
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