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Religious ceremony of Ethiopian Jews in Gondar, 1932. In 1935, armed forces of the Kingdom of Italy, headed by the fascist leader Benito Mussolini, invaded and occupied Ethiopia. The Italian regime showed hostility towards the Jews of Ethiopia. The racial laws which were enacted in Italy were also applied to Italian East Africa.
For years, Jews were unable to own land and were often persecuted by the Christian majority of Ethiopia. Ethiopian Jews were afraid to touch non-Jews because they believed non-Jews were not pure, which also ostracized them from their Christian neighbors. For this reason, many Ethiopian Jews converted to Christianity to seek a better life in ...
The largest influx of Jews to Africa came after the Spanish Inquisition after the Fall of Granada and the end of Islamic Spain. The mass exodus and expulsion of the Iberian Jews began in 1492, Sicilian Jews were affected soon afterwards. Many of these Sephardi Jews settled primarily in the Maghreb under Muslim and Ottoman patronage.
Some 1,000 Ethiopian Jews were left behind, approximately 500 of whom were evacuated later in the U.S.-led Operation Joshua. [14] More than 1,000 so-called "orphans of circumstance" existed in Israel, children separated from their families still in Africa, until five years later Operation Solomon took 14,324 more Jews to Israel in 1991.
The existence of such a kingdom somewhere in the Horn of Africa was first mentioned by the traveller Benjamin of Tudela in the 12th century CE. [2] A late Ethiopian-Jewish legend dates the establishment of a Kingdom of Simien to the 4th century CE, right after the Kingdom of Aksum turned to Christianity during the reign of Ezana.
Christianity in Ethiopia is the country's largest religion with members making up 68% of the population. [3] Christianity in Ethiopia dates back to the ancient Kingdom of Aksum, when the King Ezana first adopted the faith in the 4th century AD. This makes Ethiopia one of the first regions in the world to officially adopt Christianity. [4] [5]
By the end of 2008, there were 119,300 Ethiopian Jews living in Israel, including nearly 81,000 born in Ethiopia and about 38,500 (about 32% of the Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel) born in Israel with at least one parent born in Ethiopia or Eritrea (formerly a part of Ethiopia). [14]
Ethiopian Jews in Israel are immigrants and descendants of the immigrants from the Beta Israel communities in Ethiopia who now reside in Israel. [2] [3] [4] To a lesser, but notable, extent, the Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel is also composed of Falash Mura, a community of Beta Israel which had converted to Christianity over the course of the past two centuries, but were permitted to ...