This article surveys the diasporic life and legacy of the Ethiopian ecclesiastic Täsfa Ṣeyon. After examining his origins in the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia and the circumstances of his arrival in mid-sixteenth-century Rome, the article outlines his contributions to the evolving Latin Catholic understanding of Ethiopia. Täsfa Ṣeyon was a librarian, copyist, teacher, translator, author, and community leader, as well as a prominent adviser to European humanist scholars and Church authorities concerned with orientalist philologia sacra as it pertained to Ethiopian Orthodox (täwaḥedo) Christianity. As such, he was a key extra-European agent in the Tridentine project of Ethiopianist and Eastern Christian knowledge production. The article also surveys the complex modern legacy of Täsfa Ṣeyon's career, documenting his posthumous influence in the fields of Ethiopianist Semitic studies and Ethiopian vernacular historiography.

Comprehensively surveys Ethiopia and Eritrea's rich and dynamic tradition of historical writing, from the ancient Aksumite era to the present day.

No abstract

This article examines the United Nations War Crimes Commission’s ruling against Enrico Cerulli, the distinguished Italian scholar and senior colonial administrator. It reconstructs the UNWCC debate concerning jurisdiction over Italian crimes in Ethiopia, set against the backdrop of postwar decolonization, and then outlines the specific case against Cerulli, the committee and extra-committee deliberations, and the inconclusive aftermath of these events. The conclusion critiques Cerulli’s conception of colonial guilt and briefly considers the implications of Ethiopia’s experience at the Commission for current debates about the International Criminal Court.

This article examines how European concepts of progress and race transformed relations between non-European Christians in the nineteenth century. The travel narrative of Timoteos Saprichian, an Armenian visitor to Ethiopia from the Ottoman Empire, suggests that some Orthodox Christians set themselves apart from their African coreligionists by using new ideas about the hierarchy of human communities to reorder the Christian ecumene. The article concludes by using Walter Benjamin’s model of progress to understand changes in religious identity during the imperial age.