It seems, then, that some Christian Ethiopian monks along with Muslim
merchants coming from Africa supported the stories told by the Yemeni Jews.
Evidently, the Yemenis had been telling these stories in Jerusalem over a long
period; no one refuted them. Yemeni Jews feature as the main informants in
similar letters sent to Italy by other rabbis.
It seems that Jerusalem and, consequently, Italy had been inundated with
news relayed by Yemeni Jews on this particular issue for about a century prior
to David’s arrival in Italy.^33 Yemeni Jews served as an important source of
information about the goings-on in Ethiopia. They were not only the commu-
nity closest to the African kingdom, but the only one in the vicinity. They
enjoyed a great deal of authority because no one else could corroborate or
refute the stories they told. As for the content of the news, one senses that the
developments in Ethiopia were quite new to the Yemenis themselves, as they
began relating the stories only around the mid-fifteenth century, when the “old
Ashkenazi Rabbi” was young. Finally, they themselves—not only their listen-
ers—seemed to be fascinated with what they had to narrate. Was there a
Yemeni conspiracy to spread lies about Ethiopia, and why did it all start in
the mid-fifteenth century?
The recent historiography of the Falasha Jews and of Ethiopia in general
suggests that these Yemeni informants were telling a version of real events.
Steven Kaplan, a historian of Ethiopian Jewry, has convincingly shown that,
around the beginning of the fifteenth century, amid efforts of the Solomonic
Christian dynasty (which began c. 1270 ) to strengthen the Christian grip on
Ethiopia, certain peripheral groups resisted state policies and assumed a
“Jewish” identity. These groups, recognized in various Ethiopian chronicles
asayhud(Jews), became over time a more cohesive group mostly because of the
economic sanctions that a resistance to Christianization entailed: the “previous
inchoate group identity began to take on new social and economic overtones.”
The religious articulation of this new identity as “Jewish” took place under the
leadership of monks (falasyan), who introduced “biblical-Hebraic elements
found in Ethiopian Christianity,” which “were adopted and adapted to develop
a distinctive Jewish identity.” This became eventually the “far more centralized
and distinctive group known as theFalasha[Beta Israel].”^34
The group’s appearance was noticed to some extent by Jewish commu-
nities in the Middle East when “Jews from the land of Prester John” began
appearing in slave markets at the beginning of the sixteenth century.^35 Its rise
did not please the state’s ruling fanatical Christian dynasty; there was a series of
violent conflicts between the new Judaized group and the emperors. Of partic-
ular importance was the period of Zra’a Ya’ecop ( 1434 – 1468 ), a zealot whose
reign was characterized by “religious nationalism” and punctuated by repeated
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