ABSTRACT
“I Rejoice: There Are White Jews Too!” This exclamation came from the mouth of one of the newly arrived Jews from Ethiopia in his first day at Israel’s national absorption center for his people in the seaside town of Ashkelon. Typically, the missionaries were apostate Jews who represented themselves to the Beta-Yisrael as “white Falashas.” Probably the most intrepid of these was Henry Stern, a German-Jewish convert who had been ordained by the Prussian-Jewish apostate Anglican bishop of Jerusalem, Michael Solomon Alexander. European Jewry became aware of the Beta-Yisrael only as a result of the publicity attaching to the efforts of the Church Militant in Ethiopia. In 1868 Professor Joseph Hal’e’vy, a Turkish-born, French-Jewish linguist, was sent by the Alliance Isra’e’lite Universelle to assess the situation of the Beta-Yisrael. Hal’e’vy was less successful in persuading his European sponsors that the Ethiopian Falashas were a living Jewish reality, and that they needed and deserved help.
