I then asked the Wambar if he knew whether the Falashas also venerated sacred groves.
‘No,’ he replied, ‘they do not.’
‘Would you say that their religion is in any way similar to yours?’
A sage nod: ‘Yes. In many ways. We have much in common.’ Unprompted he then added: ‘The founder of the Qemant religion was called Anayer. He came here to Ethiopia so long ago. He came, after seven years of famine, from his own country, which was far away. As he travelled on the journey with his wife and children he met the founder of the Falasha religion, also travelling on the same journey with his wife and children. A marriage alliance was discussed between the two groups, but it did not succeed.’
‘Did Anayer and the founder of the Falasha religion come originally from the same country?’
‘Yes. But they were separate. They made no marriage alliance.’
‘Nevertheless, the country of their birth was the same?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know where it was?’
‘It was far … It was in the Middle East.’
‘Do you know the name of this country?’
‘It was the land of Canaan. Anayer was the grandson of Canaan who was the son of Ham, who was the son of Noah.’
I was intrigued by this genealogy and by the faded memory of an ancestral migration from the Middle East – a memory that also suggested a common locus for the origin of the Falasha and the Qemant religions. I could not get the Wambar to confirm whether the ‘Canaan’ that he had referred to was the Promised Land of the Bible. Indeed, despite his familiarity with names like Ham and Noah, he claimed never to have read the Bible. I believed him on this point but, at the same time, was in no doubt that there was a scriptural background to what he had just told me. Contained in his account, for example, were echoes of the great trek made by the patriarch Abraham and his wife Sarah who had fled Canaan and ‘journeyed, going on still toward the south’ because ‘there was famine in the land’.11 At the same time, like Egypt in the book of Genesis, the country that Anayer had come from had been afflicted by seven years of famine.12
‘Tell me more about your religion,’ I now asked the Wambar. ‘You mentioned spirits earlier – spirits living in trees. But what about God? Do you believe in one God, or many gods?’
‘We believe in one God. Only one God. But he is supported by angels.’
The Wambar then went on to list these angels: Jakaranti, Kiberwa, Aderaiki, Kiddisti, Mezgani, Shemani, Anzatatera. Each, apparently, had his own distinctive place in the countryside. ‘When our religion was strong, all the Qement used to go to these places to pray to the angels to mediate with God on their behalf. Jakaranti was the most respected, then Mezgani and Anzatatera.’
‘And God?’ I asked. ‘The God of the Qemant. Does he have a name?’
‘Of course. His name is Yeadara.’
‘Where does he reside?’
‘He is everywhere.’
A single God then, and an omnipresent one. I was beginning, already, to see why Gamst had characterized these people as Hebraeo-Pagans. This impression, furthermore, was strengthened by almost everything else that the Wambar told me during our long discussion in the village of Aykel. I kept detailed notes of that discussion and, after my return to Addis Ababa, made a careful study of his answers – comparing them point by point with the Scriptures. Only when I had completed this exercise was I able to appreciate just how strong and how old the Judaic dimension of Qemant religion really was.
The Wambar had told me, for example, that the Qemant were forbidden to eat any animal that was not cloven-hoofed and that did not chew the cud. In addition, he had said, camels and pigs were regarded as unclean and were strictly forbidden. These restrictions accorded perfectly with those placed upon the Jews in the eleventh chapter of the Old Testament book of Leviticus.13
The Wambar had also said that amongst the Qemant even ‘clean’ animals could not be eaten if they had not been slaughtered properly. ‘Their throats must be cut until all the blood is gone,’ he had explained – adding that, for the same reason, it was forbidden to eat any animal that had died of natural causes. Both proscriptions, I discovered, were perfectly in line with Judaic law.14
Still on the subject of food, the Wambar had told me that the consumption of meat and dairy products at the same table was permitted by Qemant religion. He had added, however, that it was regarded as an abomination to eat the flesh of an animal that had been cooked in milk. I knew that orthodox Jews were forbidden to mix meat and dairy foods in the same meal. When I researched the background to this particular Kosher restriction, however, I learnt that it derived its authority from the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, both of which stated: ‘Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk.’15 This, more or less exactly, was the rule obeyed by the Qemant.
Another area of convergence concerned the Sabbath – which, like the Jews, the Qemant observed on Saturday. ‘It is forbidden to work on that day,’ the Wambar had told me. ‘It is forbidden to light fires on Saturday. And if a field should catch fire accidentally on the Sabbath then that is a field that we must no longer use.’16
These restrictions and others like them – all very much in accord with biblical law – made me more and more confident that a deep and truly ancient Judaic substratum did indeed underlie the religion of the Qemant. What finally convinced me that this was so, however, was the one practice that the Wambar had described to me which had not sounded Judaic at all – namely the veneration of ‘sacred groves’.
He had told me during our interview that there was a qole site on the outskirts of Aykel where I might see a tree believed to be the residence of a powerful spirit. I did go to look at this tree, which turned out to be a huge, spreading acacia. It stood to the west of the village on a spur of high ground, beyond which, across a hundred descending miles, the land sloped steeply away towards the Sudanese border. A soft afternoon breeze, laden with the fragrance of distant deserts, blew through the tawny canyons beneath me, circulated amongst the ravines and foothills, and soared on eagles’ wings across the first battlements of the escarpment.
Gnarled and massive, the acacia was so ancient that it would have been easy to believe that it had stood here for hundreds and perhaps even for thousands of years. Inside the walled enclosure that surrounded it, laid out upon the ground, were various offerings – a jar of oil, a heap of millet, small piles of roasted coffee beans, and a trussed chicken awaiting sacrifice. In their own way all these oblations contributed to the peculiar character of the place: numinous and eerie, by no means menacing but none the less distinctly strange.
What multiplied this other-worldly effect, however – and what made this Qemant qole site so different from any other place of worship I had ever come across in my travels – was the fact that every branch of the tree to a height of about six feet off the ground had been festooned with woven strips of vari-coloured cloth. Rustling in the wind, these waving pennants and ribbons seemed to whisper and murmur – almost as though they were seeking to impart a message. And I remember thinking that if I could only understand that message then many hidden things might be revealed. Superstitiously I touched the living wood, sensed its age, and returned to my companions who were awaiting me at the bottom of the hill.
Later, back in Addis – after I had looked into the other comparisons between Qemant religion and Old Testament Judaism – I ran a routine check in the Scriptures and in works of biblical archaeology to see if I could find any references to sacred trees. I did not expect that I would. Much to my surprise, however, I discovered that certain specially planted forest groves had been accorded a sacred character in the very earliest phases of the evolution of the Jewish faith. I was also able to confirm that these groves had been used as places of active worship. In the twenty-first chapter of the book of Genesis, for example, it was stated that: ‘Abraham planted a grove in Beersheba, and called there on the name of the Lord, the everlasting God.’17
&nbs
p; Reading more widely around the subject I established the following points with certainty: first, that the Hebrews had ‘borrowed’ the use of sacred groves from the Canaanites (who were the indigenous inhabitants of the Promised Land); second, that the groves were normally situated in high places (known as bamoth); and third, that they often contained sacrificial stone pillars of the kind that I had seen on Tana Kirkos and that – as I already knew – were called masseboth.18
Very little was understood about how the groves had been used, what they had looked like, what sort of ceremonies had gone on within them, or what kind of offerings had been made there. The reason for this ignorance was that the priestly elite of later biblical times had turned savagely against all such practices, cutting down and burning the sacred trees and overthrowing the masseboth.19
Since it was these same priests who had also been responsible for the compilation and editing of the Scriptures, it was hardly surprising that they had left us with no clear picture of the function and appearance of the groves. Moreover the single reference that did evoke some kind of image was regarded as a mystery by biblical scholars. This reference, in the second book of Kings, spoke of a place ‘where the women wove hangings for the grove.’20 As I read these words, the memory was still fresh in my mind of the strips of woven cloth that hung from every branch of the fetish tree on the outskirts of the village of Aykel. And it seemed to me then (as it seems to me now) that there was no mystery at all about the words in the book of Kings – but much that still cried out for explanation about the Qemant who, in the heart of Africa, had managed to acquire a Judaeo-Canaanite tradition as hoary with age as this one.
The whole issue, I felt sure, was intimately connected to the larger problem of the Falashas, the Qemant’s better-known neighbours.
Aswan and Meroe
Despite the strong Judaic flavour of their religion, no one has ever claimed that the Qemant are in fact Jews: there is too much that is pagan and animist about them to have allowed that to happen. The position, however, is quite different for the Falashas. They have been widely regarded as true Jews since the early nineteenth century – though they were not formally recognized as such by the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem until 1973. Two years later the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi followed suit, opening the way for the Israeli Ministry of the Interior to declare that the Falashas were entitled to automatic citizenship of Israel under the terms of the Law of Return.21
Ironically the main reason that rabbinical recognition was so long delayed was the pronouncedly Old Testament character of Falasha religion which did not in any way incorporate or refer to the Talmud (the authoritative body of Jewish law and lore accumulated between 200 BC and AD 50022). This made the Falashas seem quite alien to many Israeli and other Jews; it was later accepted, however, that ignorance of Talmudic precepts was simply a function of the fact that the Ethiopian arm of the faith must have been cut off from the evolving body of world Judaism at some extremely early date. This same isolation also explained the Falashas’ continuing adherence to practices that had long been forbidden by the rabbis, notably animal sacrifice (see Chapter 6).
The important point – which weighed heavily when official recognition was finally granted in the 1970s – was that the social and religious behaviour of the Falashas did clearly and unambiguously conform to the teachings of the Torah (Old Testament). Moreover, within the Torah, as one would expect of pre-Talmudic Jews whose religious beliefs were genuinely ancient, they showed the greatest respect for the Pentateuch (i.e. the five books believed by the orthodox to have been written by Moses himself, namely Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy).23
This ‘fundamentalism’ within Falasha religion was typified by their strict observance of the food restrictions enumerated in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy and by their refusal to eat any animal – ‘clean’ or not – that had been slaughtered by a Gentile. It was also recognized that they paid meticulous attention to the Mosaic laws of cleanliness and purity. Special huts, for example, were set aside for those members of the community considered to be temporarily in states of ritual impurity – such as menstruating women, who were segregated for seven days in line with a Levitical edict.24
Falasha circumcision ceremonies (gezrat) were equally traditional, taking place on the eighth day after the birth of a male child, exactly as stipulated in the Pentateuch.25 Likewise their Sabbath procedures were rigorously orthodox with all fires being extinguished before sunset on Friday, and on the Sabbath itself no work of any kind being done, no water being drawn, no fire being lit, no coffee being boiled, and only the consumption of cold food and drink being permissible.
I was aware of all this when, during my stay in Gondar in January 1990, I visited several Falasha settlements. My objective was to make contact with religious leaders, to whom I wanted to put certain specific questions. Because of the mass migration of Ethiopia’s Jews to Israel this was no easy task: many homesteads were completely deserted, stripped of their goods and chattels, their doors left unbarred, and their inhabitants gone. Nevertheless, in the countryside some twenty miles from Gondar I did find one village that still seemed to be functioning. Called Anbober, it straggled across a steep slope in rolling mountainous terrain and was populated almost entirely by women and children, the majority of the menfolk having already left for Israel.
Falashas have neither synagogues nor rabbis; instead their places of worship are called mesgid and their religious officials kahenat (singular kahen, meaning ‘priest’). With my interpreter Legesse Desta, I now walked up through the village followed by a rapidly growing crowd of mischievous children. We were making for the mesgid – identifiable by the Star of David on its roof – where I hoped very much that I might find the kahen in residence.
On this occasion I was not disappointed: inside the humble building, at a roughly made wooden table, a lean, elderly man sat studying a copy of the Torah (which was beautifully written in Ge’ez on cured sheepskin leaves). Legesse began by explaining why we had come and then asked the priest if he would mind answering some questions from me. After a lengthy debate he gave his assent to this and introduced himself as Solomon Alemu. He was, he said, seventy-eight years old. He had been the kahen of Anbober for almost thirty years.
We spent the next couple of hours going through numerous aspects of Falasha belief and ritual. All Solomon’s answers confirmed the pure Old Testament character of the religion and were very much in line with what I had already learned from my research. In this context I pressed him particularly hard on the issue of blood sacrifice, trying to establish why his people continued with this practice when Jews everywhere else had abandoned it two thousand years previously. ‘We believe’, he replied with great conviction, ‘that God in his throne observes these ceremonies and is pleased.’
Perhaps Solomon knew, perhaps he did not, how close this simple statement was to a verse in the book of Leviticus which described offerings made by fire as being ‘of a sweet savour to the Lord’.26 Certainly, he seemed a wise and well read man. When I complimented him on his scholarship, however, his response – with no trace of false modesty – was to insist that he understood far less about the Judaic traditions of the Falashas than his father had done. And he added that his father, in his turn, had understood less than his grandfather – who had also been kahen of Anbober. ‘We are forgetting our own past,’ he said sadly. ‘Day by day we forget our history.’
Taking my cue from this I asked Solomon if he knew for how many centuries there had been Jewish people in Ethiopia.
‘We came here’, he replied, ‘long ago … long before the Christians. The Christians are recent compared with us.’
He then proceeded to tell me the familiar story of the Queen of Sheba, Menelik and the bringing of the Ark. In this way, he said, the Jewish faith had arrived in Ethiopia.
I asked casually: ‘Do you have any idea what route Menelik and his companions used when they made their journey?’
Though it mi
ght have surprised me once I now accepted his answer to this last question with perfect complacency: ‘According to our traditions they travelled from Jerusalem through Egypt and Sudan.’
Almost bored, I prompted: ‘Presumably they would have followed the river Nile for much of the journey?’
The kahen nodded: ‘Yes. That is what our traditions say.’ He then added two details that were completely new to me: ‘On the way,’ he said, ‘they rested at Aswan and Meroe.’
Aswan, I knew, was in Upper Egypt (near the site of the modern high dam of the same name), and in Pharaonic times had been important as a source of the granite used in the construction of the Pyramids. Meroe, the ancient capital of Nubia, had been located much further to the south, in what is now the Republic of the Sudan.
Intrigued, I pushed Solomon for more details of the Falasha traditions concerning these places. He insisted, however, that the little that he had already said was the sum of his knowledge about them. ‘I heard their names’, he sighed, ‘in stories told to me by my grandfather. He was a wise man … but he is gone … Soon we will all be gone.’
Ceremony of the Ark
Everything that I learned during my stay in Gondar reinforced my view that it had been to precisely this region of Ethiopia that the Jewish faith had first been brought in antiquity. The Falashas were Jewish through and through, and this was their homeland. Their near neighbours the Qemant also showed convincing signs of an archaic and deeply ingrained Judaic influence.
The Sign and the Seal Page 28