The Falasha ('exiles' or 'strangers') are Ethiopian Jews, some 16,000 of whom migrated to Israel in Israel's 'Operation Moses' under the provisions of the Law of Return (1950). 'Operation Moses' came to an abrupt halt in 1985, leaving many Falasha still in Ethiopia, The Falasha come from a Jewish enclave in Ethiopia which is said to have lost contact with other Jewish communities until the 1860s. Popularly touted as a 'lost tribe', the Falasha at first found many cultural barriers to acculturating in Israel. Their tradition relates that they are descendants of Jews who came to Ethiopia with Menelik I, alleged to be the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. They once spoke Qwara (Kayla), a Cushitic language, but now they speak Amharic, a Semitic language. The term Falasha is considered pejorative and today they prefer the term Beta Israel for themselves.
Gerard Lucotte and Pierre Smets in Human Biology (vol 71, Dece 1999, pp989-993) studied the DNA of 38 unrelated Falasha males living in Israel and 104 Ethiopians living in regions located north of Addis Ababa and concluded that "the distinctiveness of the Y-chromosome haplotype distribution of Falasha Jews from conventional Jewish populations and their relatively greater similarity in haplotype profile to non-Jewish Ethiopians are consistent with the view that the Falasha people descended from ancient inhabitants of Ethiopia who converted to Judaism."
Scholars are divided on when and how Judaism was adopted by the Falasha: whether from Jews living in Yemen, from the Jewish community in southern Egypt (Elephantine), or even from a permanent Jewish community in Ethiopia implied in Isaiah 11:11 (ca 740 BCE)
The utter isolation of the Falasha was reported by an explorer James Bruce, who published his Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile in Edinburgh in 1790. But 1860 before a converted Jew actually went to Ethiopia to convert the Falasha.
