ABSTRACT
Jews have lived in Ethiopia for many centuries, though for exactly how long is the subject of much debate. Some scholars believe that the community has its origin in groups of Jews who were exiled from Judah with the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. Ethiopian Jews have traditionally lived mainly in northern and northwestern Ethiopia, in the Gondar and Tigrai regions, in villages that were inhabited mostly by Christians. Amharic and Tigrinya, the national language of Eritrea, are both Semitic languages closely related to Ge'ez and are thus also related to Hebrew. The Amharic spoken by the Ethiopian Jews in Ethiopia was essentially identical to that of their non-Jewish neighbours, but occasionally there were slight differences in certain words and idioms. Occasionally, as a form of wordplay, Israeli Amharic speakers replace Israeli place names or words borrowed from Hebrew with Amharic words that sound similar but have quite a different meaning.
