Stern, Henry A. Wanderings among the Falashas in Abyssinia; Together with a Description of the Country and Its Various Inhabitants. Illustrated by a Map and Twenty Engravings

(ETHIOPIA)

Wertheim, Macintosh, and Hunt

London

1862

FIRST EDITION

Henry Stern, a Jewish convert to Christianity, was a Protestant missionary who attempted to convert the Ethiopian Jews (referred to by their Christian countrymen as "Falashas"). His efforts were unsuccessful, the Falashas telling him: "Every Jew and Jewess wil resist, even to death, the faintest attempt at coercion" (p. 205). Nevertheless, in the attempt, Stern uncovered much of the history and practices of this far-flung tribe: "Under their own kings and queens, called Gideon and Judith, they maintained till the beginning of the 17th century a chequered and independent existence" (p. 186). The author goes on to describe the local Jews' adherence to Biblical Judaism. Stern found that "in physiognomy, most of the Falashas bear striking traces of their Semitic origin; there were some whose Jewish features no one could have mistaken, who had ever seen the descendants of Abraham either in London or Berlin" (p. 197). One notes that in 1864 Rabbi Ezriel Hildesheimer appealed to leaders of world Jewry to rescue the remnants of the Abyssinian Jewish community from the clutches of the English missionaries, then making a concerted efforted to convert them to Christianity. See Hildesheimer's letter to S. J. Rapaport, Chief Rabbi of Prague, in: Igroth Rabbi Ezriel Hildesheimer / Rabbiner Esriel Hildesheimer Briefe (1965), Hebrew section, pp. 32-3