Halévy, Joseph. Seder Tephiloth HaFalashim [prayers according to the rite of the Beta Israel]

(ETHIOPIA).

D. Jouaust, for the Society of Hebrew Literature, London

Paris

1876

Text in Hebrew and Ge'ez.

Halévy, a schoolmaster for the Alliance Israelite Universelle in Adrianople and Bucharest with an extraordinary facility for languages, was sent by the Alliance as the first emissary of European Jewry to the so-called Falashas of Ethiopia. Available accounts of the Falashas there, all by Christian travelers, were impressionistic, but Halévy was able to investigate their customs, beliefs, and history in depth, attempting to determine whether they were, as generally believed, a Judaizing sect that had broken away from the Abyssinian Orthodox Church, or had a more directly Jewish origin and identity. In this work Halévy published, in its original Ethiopic, the liturgy written out for him by the local scribe Zerubabel ben Jacob. To this he adds a Hebrew translation of his own, designed, as noted in the introduction, to demonstrate that the Falashas and European Jews share an identical faith and that differences of practice are relatively superficial and relatively late. Halévy’s report made a deep impression in academic as well as Jewish circles.