Joseph Halévy, a scholar-traveler (1827–1917)

“Since my adolescence, I have been a traveler… I have walked the northern ice fields and, for long years, the dog-day heat of Egypt has riddled me with its arrows, which has done my health no harm, and I am well. My knowledge of the Oriental languages is not insignificant; I have command of Mongolian, Turkish, Arabic, Geez,¹ and Amharic.” It is in these terms that Joseph Halévy introduces himself when, in February 1865, he submits to the AIU (Alliance Israélite Universelle — the Universal Israelite Alliance) his candidacy for Ethiopia, where he is to make contact with the Falashas, the black branch of the Jewish people. This was one of Joseph Halévy’s most important journeys; today he is known for his twofold status as researcher and traveler, the one activity nourishing the other.

Born in December 1827 in Adrianople (today Edirne, on the Bulgarian border), where he worked as a schoolteacher, he very quickly distinguished himself by his command of several languages, including a Hebrew of the very greatest purity and, soon, several Ethiopian languages. For this scholar, born into a Sephardic family settled in the Netherlands after 1492, harbored a project of great journeys toward Africa. 1861 was the year of his reconnaissance trip to Morocco for the AIU. “It was his first contact with African soil. He came back from it with a damning report, convinced that only the founding of schools could come to the aid of the wretched Jews from across the Mediterranean, living in the mellahs, subject to the whims of the Muslims who surrounded them — whims that translated, most of the time, into humiliations, thefts, rapes, tortures, massacres. Shortly after his return in 1862, the AIU opened in Tetouan the first of a long series of schools in Morocco.”²

1867: The journey to Ethiopia

Joseph Halévy had submitted his candidacy for this journey as early as 1865, to the AIU, in order to serve a twofold project: to pursue his own research and to serve the AIU’s project, anxious as it was to preserve the identity of the Jewish communities of Yemen as of the whole world. As Steven Kaplan³ recalls: “Around 1860, the Falashas were confronted with a new challenge to their faith when European Protestant missionaries came among them seeking conversions… It was in 1859 that Western missionaries began organized activity among the Falashas: that year, the London Society for promoting Christianity amongst the Jews founded its Ethiopian mission… Now the influence of the missionaries on the Falashas was not always the one they or their sponsors had counted on: the first group to treat the Falashas as Jews, in the universal sense of the term, the representatives of the London Society played a decisive role in transforming the consciousness the Falashas had of themselves. Moreover, the numerous publications of the London Society were the first channel by which European Jews were informed about their coreligionists in Ethiopia;⁴ European Judaism conceived from this a growing anxiety as to the fate of its Falasha brethren.”

This is why the letter in which Joseph Halévy submits his candidacy to leave for Ethiopia specifies one particular point: “I am also practiced in controversy with the Christians, I know the Gospels almost by heart, and the summary of Christian ideas is well known to me. Thank God, I can shut the mouths of the missionaries and thoroughly ruin their effort, and I hope to be able to gag the English missionaries in Abyssinia and tear their prey from them.”⁵

Joseph Halévy got his way and undertook a harsh but rich journey, as he recounts in his letters published in the Alliance’s bulletin:

7 October 1867: “I am writing you this letter from the ruins of ancient Adulis. Bread has been lacking for a month; I eat dourra cooked in muddy water whose nauseating odor revolts the nerves.”

24 November 1867: “I write to you in haste while unloading the camel that has carried me here. I have used the time of my stay in the Anglo-Indian camp to learn Hindustani and even Chinese, which I already speak somewhat, having made the acquaintance of a few Chinese coolies who work in the navy. But while thinking of the future, I have not forgotten the principal aim of my mission. The task is not an easy one; the neighboring peoples, the Barias and the Changallas, are always at war with their neighbors, who frequently carry out raids in their country to take slaves. Neither mountain, nor barbarous peoples, nor a thousand privations and dangers will halt my desire to go and find my Abyssinian brethren, to bring them a few consolations and the sweet hope of a better future… One could easily bring back to Palestine thousands of Falasha settlers, who are all farmers and the most skilled of workmen.⁶”

The description he gives of the Falashas insists on their bond with Judaism: “Love for the Holy Land fills their warm and impressionable souls with a soft and melancholy feeling, and the great memories of the people of God are their spiritual nourishment. They claim to be the descendants of the Jewish delegates who formed a retinue of honor for Maqueda, the famous Queen of Sheba, and for her son Menelik, who had King Solomon for a father… They are Jews by their ardent faith, by their study of the Law and the Prophets, which they read in the Temples and teach to their children. They would suffer a thousand deaths rather than renounce the covenant contracted with the Eternal. The singularity of their customs arises above all from the fact that their establishment in Abyssinia predates the development of the Talmud.”⁷

Halévy, the first practicing European Jew to visit the Jews of Ethiopia, made himself “the principal advocate of his lost brethren,” and advocated the establishment of Jewish schools for their benefit. Yet “his sponsors rejected this suggestion and undertook no action.”⁸ Elisabeth Antébi recounts in her book that, while the president of the AIU refused his help (“We have no need for new Jews to give us new troubles”) and while the Ottoman Chief Rabbi exclaimed, with regard to the Falashas, “I shall always consider them Blacks and not Whites,” one man, happily, continued to subsidize the research: Edmond de Rothschild, who was at bottom the promoter of Operation Solomon, by which, in the nineteen-eighties, Israel would repatriate the imperiled Falashas.

Thus, although on his return Joseph Halévy had difficulty convincing his interlocutors at the Alliance, he sufficiently impressed the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres by the quality of his work that the latter entrusted him, the following year, with a scientific mission to Yemen.⁹

1870: The mission to Yemen and the guide Hayîm Habshûsh

It was to record ancient South Arabian inscriptions that Joseph Halévy began an uncommon and often perilous journey. These inscriptions, known today to be very numerous, prove that the ancient kingdoms of southern Arabia (present-day Yemen and neighboring regions) made great use of writing, and that there must have existed “a whole literature of religious myths, various technical treatises, translations of foreign works, and so on,” of which nothing probably remains, owing to the all-too-fragile medium of these works, papyrus — but of which we possess precious traces: writings engraved in stone or cast in metal: “it is all these documents that, by convention, are called inscriptions.”¹⁰ It was, of course, to reconstitute the history of Yemen and of the peoples who had inhabited it that, from 1589 (the journey of the Jesuit Paez, captured by the Arabs off Dhofar and sent to the Turkish pasha of Sana’a) to the nineteenth century, explorers attempted to penetrate this country — twice occupied by the Ottomans, and crossed by the incense road, one of the first great trade routes of the ancient world — in order to record inscriptions there.

The Encyclopaedia Judaica thus recounts Joseph Halévy’s expedition: “To copy on site Himyaritic inscriptions still unpublished, Halévy undertook in 1870 a foolhardy journey through a country torn by anarchy: Aden, al-Hudayda, Sana’a. He donned the Israelite costume and traveled in the capacity of a Qudsî, that is, a rabbi of Jerusalem, in order to be received and hidden by the Jewish communities. He accomplished an intrepid expedition, braving harassments, imprisonments, and threats of death. He took the torrid roads of al-Jawf, reached the vicinity of the ruins of Barâqish across sands into which one sinks up to the knees. He reached Najrân. He is the only European, since the Roman soldiers of Aelius Gallus, to penetrate into the land of the ancient Minaeans, a region unknown to the maps.”

An excellent travel narrative underscores the difficulty for a foreign Jew to travel in a region where relations with the Muslim population are, to say the least, difficult: “In view of their crossing of the desert, they engaged, in addition to their Swedish servant (…), a cook from the Greek archipelago and a young Jew, born in Sana’a, capital of Arabia Felix, but who had also traveled through India and Persia. Unfortunately, the latter, as a Jew, is little esteemed by the Arabs, and Niebuhr considers that they made a mistake in not choosing a Muslim.¹¹”

In this hostile and dangerous world, where a European could neither travel nor survive without help, Joseph Halévy was guided by a Yemeni, a Jewish coppersmith of Sana’a who directed his steps, made his contacts along the way, and copied out the precious inscriptions with and for him. We would know nothing of this guide today had he not also been, around 1890, the guide of another orientalist, Eduard Glaser. On the latter’s advice, he wrote the account of the expedition that allowed Joseph Halévy to bring back some 686 copies of inscriptions from more than 30 localities of eastern Yemen. Yémen (Yemen), recently translated into French and published by Actes Sud, is the title of this account, of extreme interest to all those drawn to that journey and that region. It is a captivating description of the daily life of the Jews settled there since “the dawn of the ages,” as the guide-narrator recalls: we thus follow our two travelers into the heart of these communities, today transferred to Israel. Their way of life, their festivals, their customary law and the resolution of various disputes, a thousand descriptions and anecdotes of daily life stud this narrative, which one reads without a second’s boredom, and in which the narrator blends astonishing tales inherited from the Yemeni oral tradition with the transcription of conversations between his master and the hosts who receive them.

On his return to France, Joseph Halévy would scarcely mention his guide: at the time, the notion of a team or a working group did not, or hardly, exist. A mystery, moreover, long hovered over their association — indeed, over the very reality of this whole journey: because the inscriptions brought back by the orientalist were often incomplete and therefore illegible, some believed he had invented the journey. And indeed, the hundreds of inscriptions the orientalist brought back to France contain only short lines, whereas the subsequent expeditions, when they would see the originals, would find long lines. “The explanation would come only several decades later, when it was discovered in his memoirs that the guide who copied the inscriptions for his master was paid by the latter by the line, and that he therefore preferred them short…”¹²

Between his journeys, Joseph Halévy’s French career took shape at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Fourth Section, from 1879 to 1916. First a tutor (répétiteur) in Ethiopian and Amharic languages, in 1879 he became librarian of the Société Asiatique; in 1880 he was made maître de conférences, then deputy director in October 1892 (Ethiopian and Turanian languages¹³), and finally director of studies in 1896. He was also President of the Société de Linguistique in 1888. In 1905, he would be made a Knight of the Legion of Honor.

Here are a few of his works published in Paris: Rapport sur une mission archéologique dans le Yémen (Report on an Archaeological Mission in Yemen), 1872; Voyage au Nadjran (Journey to Najrân), 1873; Mélanges d’épigraphie et d’archéologie sémitiques (Miscellanea of Semitic Epigraphy and Archaeology), 1874; La prétendue langue d’Assad est-elle touranienne? (Is the So-Called Language of Assad Turanian?), 1975; Prières des Falachas (Prayers of the Falashas) (Ethiopian text with translation and commentary); Documents religieux de l’Assyrie et de la Babylonie (Religious Documents of Assyria and Babylonia), 1882; Essai sur l’origine des écritures indiennes (Essay on the Origin of the Indian Scripts), 1886; La correspondance d’Aménophis et Aménophis IV (The Correspondence of Amenophis and Amenophis IV), 1893; Les tablettes gréco-babyloniennes et le Sumérisme (The Greco-Babylonian Tablets and Sumerism), 1902; etc.

On his death in 1917, one of his colleagues evoked in these terms the journeys and works of Joseph Halévy before the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres: “The Commission was unanimously agreed upon the high value of the research carried out by the courageous traveler. With very limited resources, M. Halévy succeeded in penetrating into countries that no European had ever visited since the consul Aelius Gallus, in the time of Augustus, during his expedition, as disastrous for him as it was sterile for science. The fortitude with which our modest missionary endured the fatigues and perils of his undertaking, as well as the privations inevitable amid poor, rapacious, and suspicious populations, is beyond all praise.”¹⁴

As for paying here a new tribute to Joseph Halévy, our scholar-traveler, let us say that, in concluding that the Falashas are Jews, he built the first airlift of Operation Solomon, by which, a century later, the Hebrew State would repatriate its African brethren and save their lives, honoring itself anew as a land of asylum for Jews in danger. This long but perilous cohabitation of the Falasha Jews in Arab land (at their departure there were some twenty-seven synagogues in the capital, Sana’a¹⁵) allows us to cast a different light on the current conflict, which some try to confine to Israeli-Palestinian geography alone; it is more interesting to resituate it within the far vaster history and map of the Arab-Muslim world, where, as the history of the Falashas proves, even if cohabitation was rich for the various communities, it was not always easy to be a Jew in Arab land — even in “Arabia Felix.”

Notes