(Jewish Group) The Glory of the Kings: The story of Ethiopian Jews
Terminology: Here I use “Ethiopian” and “Abyssinian” almost interchangeably. However, the Classical (Greco-Roman) authors called by name “Ethiopians” those Black Africans who lived outside the Greco-Roman world and beyond its/their control. The country we now know as Ethiopia rose from the Aksum kingdom of the first Christian centuries and was later called Abyssinia, from Arabic Ḥabash, itself from South-Arabian ḤBŚT in Yemen.
In the last centuries, the word “Abyssinia/Ḥabash” began to seem offensive to many Abyssinians/Ethiopians, and in the wake of the invasion of Fascist Italia in 1935, some local supporters of Mussolini were among those who promoted the change of the name of the country from Abyssinia to Ethiopia (though the Fascist “Ethiopian Empire” included Eritrea and Italian Somali). In recent years, especially in the U.S. diaspora, the name Abyssinia is in vogue again. Many Ethiopians, Eritreans, Djibouties, and Somalians are not part of the U.S. dichotomy of “Blacks and whites” and insist they are racially Ḥabesha/Habeshi, etc.
The term “Ethiopian” was adopted, mainly in the past, by many Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean intellectuals, among others, as a continuation of the Classical usage for all Black Africans. This usage had a role in the acceptance of the Abyssianian Crown Prince Ras Tafari as a Pan-African messianic figure. Nowadays, some claim that the Ethiopian state has no right to usurp the term for itself.
Kebra Nagast (The Glory of the Kings), Solomon, the Queen of Sheba, and the Abyssinian/Ethiopian self-image
The book called “the Ethiopian Second Bible,” Kebra Nagast, the Glory of the Kings, tells how the Queen of Sheba seduced King Solomon and gave birth to their son, Menelik I, the founder of the Solomonic Dynasty of Ethiopia. When he grew up, Menelik visited his father and returned to his country with the sons of the best men of Jerusalem and Judea. These were the ancestors of the present-day Ethiopian Christians.
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