• 1 “Nous sommes tellement habitués à opposer le faux au vrai qu’en lisant ce titre [La guerre du faux] (...)

“We are so accustomed to opposing the false to the true that when reading this title [The War of the False], the reader will be led to think that it speaks of false speeches that mask the truth of things. As if, underpinning analyses of false discourse, there were a reassuring and debonair metaphysics of truth. Well, this is not the case. What is at issue here are discourses that mask other discourses. Discourses that think they say a to suggest b; or discourses that think they say a but that should in fact be interpreted as b; or discourses that think they say something and that mask their own inconsistency, their own contradiction, or their own impossibility.”1

• 2 See Anaïs Wion, “L’histoire d’un vrai faux traité philosophique (Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā‘eqob et Ḥatatā Wal (...)

1The first part of this study, entitled “The Time of Discovery. From Being Part of a Collection to Becoming a Scholarly Publication (1852-1904)”,2 showed how the texts of the Ḥatatā were discovered by the Capuchin missionary Giusto d’Urbino between 1852 and 1854. This Catholic monk lived in Ethiopia from 1846 to 1855. He was a missionary who defied his hierarchy, who had little desire to evangelize, and who above all sought to devote himself to the study of Ethiopian languages – particularly Ge’ez, the learned language. Giusto d’Urbino sent about twenty Ethiopian works to Antoine d’Abbadie, a French scholar who had built up a collection of Ethiopian manuscripts. Among these were the only two known manuscripts of two extraordinary texts, the Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā’eqob and the Ḥatatā Walda Ḥeywat. Antoine d’Abbadie considered these texts to be original but quite simple. He included them in his collection, whose catalogue he published in 1859. Fifty years later, when d’Abbadie’s collection became public after it was deposited at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (the French National Library) in 1902, these texts were edited and translated under the title ‘Philosophie abyssine’ (‘Abyssian Philosophy’). They thus reached a wider public and could begin to be widely disseminated.

• 3 C. Conti Rossini first published an in extenso translation of Takla Hāymānot's manuscript, in Itali (...)
• 4 See for example his letter to Antoine d'Abbadie dated January 1854, ms BnF NAF 23852, fol. 49-50. H (...)
• 5 This accusation would have significant repercussions within the Propaganda Fide since, after Giusto (...)
• 6 C. Conti Rossini, 1916, p. 76-77.

5Scholarly doubt concerning the authenticity of the Ḥatatā as philosophical texts of the seventeenth century was instigated by C. Conti Rossini. Whereas in 1914 he had catalogued Giusto d’Urbino’s two manuscripts without any suspicion, citing the critical editions as sufficient academic references to define these texts as philosophy, in 1920 he completely reversed his initial acceptance of the academic doxa of the time. What were the new findings that made him change his mind? It was the writings of an Ethiopian Catholic monk, abbā Takla Hāymānot, a contemporary of Giusto d’Urbino, which instilled his suspicions. Takla Hāymānot was part of Bishop de Jacobis’ mission in Tegrāy; he then travelled to Gondar with Giovanni Stella. He moved in the same circles as Giusto d’Urbino but was much more active in evangelization activities than the latter. Giusto was a recluse at Bētaleḥēm, but his activities were nevertheless observed and reported by his co-religionists. In Takla Hāymānot’s Memoirs, published by C. Conti Rossini in 1916, the Ethiopian Lazarist thus mentions the collaboration of Giusto d’Urbino, at Bētaleḥēm, with the Dabtara Amārkañ and the Liqa kahenāt Gošu, with whom he allegedly bought a book containing “freemasonic” and heretical theories. Giusto apparently had copies made of this work; he was probably its author, but attributed a fictitious authority to it. This book was allegedly known as Warqē, after the name of its supposed author.3 Takla Hāymānot, who had not read the text in question, nevertheless unambiguously designated it by the title Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā’eqob, since Zar’a Yā’eqob’s other name was Warqē. The first was his Christian name, or his baptismal name, while the second was his nickname, meaning “My Gold”. The latter would have been used in family life and would not customarily have been written down. Was this name – a rather ordinary one, as it happens – a nod to the art of double meaning, which was highly prized in Ethiopian dialectic, one of the most common techniques of which was that of “Wax and Gold”, Semma-nā Warq? We know that Giusto d’Urbino was familiar with this technique, and that he eagerly took it up.4 Takla Hāymānot was familiar with Giusto d’Urbino’s intellectual profile in terms of philosophy, biblical writing, and Ethiopian languages, which is why he explicitly attributed this work to him. Takla Hāymānot’s accusation was therefore precise.5 It shows that he knew enough about d’Urbino to know where he worked, those with whom he collaborated, and what his intellectual background was. Moreover, it shows that he must not have been the only one to know about Giusto d’Urbino’s activities, since he himself did not see the incriminated work. He seems also to have had little appreciation for his colleague, whose lifestyle and faith seemed to him suspicious, partly because he found him far too isolated as not to be “caught in the devil’s net”.6

• 7 Letter of 14 July 1854, ms Bnf NAF 23852, fol. 59-60.
• 8 “J’ai eu presque tous les jours de ces dialogues avec mon maître de langue éthiopiques [sic] et ave (...)

6In his correspondence, Giusto d’Urbino makes little mention of his Ethiopian intellectual environment. He gives Antoine d’Abbadie news of Ethiopians he knew, but he says almost nothing about his own friends or acquaintances, except that he paid a “mocking dabtara” to make progress in the pronunciation of Ge’ez and in particular to master the art of gemination.7 Among the manuscripts that he did not send to Antoine d’Abbadie was a collection of Ge’ez dialogues introduced by the following remark: “I had these dialogues almost every day with my Ethiopian language instructor and with the other scholars around me.”8 It is therefore clear that Giusto had developed a practice that was not only erudite but also fully anchored in the present moment. For him, Ge’ez was not an ancient, disembodied language, a language of study and history. Rather, it was a language with which it was possible to develop a thought, to express complex things. Yet his correspondence with Antoine d’Abbadie constantly goes on about his sense of isolation and intellectual solitude. Moreover, he scarcely speaks of the Europeans he had contact with, apart from the British consul Plowden, the only person he trusted to pass on his letters. Very little is said about the Catholic mission and its members. In Giusto’s letters, the outside world is perceived as a relatively malevolent entity. For example, in a letter of September 1852, he complains very bitterly about the enmity he allegedly received from Arnaud, Antoine d’Abbadie’s brother, along with his friends, even though they did not know him. He believed that it was his poverty that accounted for great men’s contempt of him. He deplored the “injustice of foreigners” to which the French government’s alleged “protection” of the missions condemned him. In other letters, he mentions mockeries made at his expense, but without ever giving precise information as to their motive or the perpetrators’ identities. Perhaps these already consisted in accusations to the effect that he was circulating a text under a pseudonym. Such accusations were clearly expressed by his contemporary, Takla Hāymānot, while the latter was writing his Memoirs.

• 9 To be continued in the fourth article in this series.

7In 1920, being a conscientious and honest scholar, C. Conti Rossini examined the question of the authority of the Ḥatatā, even though he admitted finding it difficult to doubt the authenticity of these texts. Having presented a body of evidence, within a few pages he came to seriously question the authenticity of the Ḥatatā and, following Takla Hāymānot, attributed its authorship to Giusto d’Urbino. His arguments are wide-ranging in nature; each will be examined here in detail, as they were all picked up from the 1970s onwards when it came to rehabilitating the texts.9 In following the path of C. Conti Rossini step by step, I invite the reader to take part in the investigation. We are now entering into the realm of demonstrative proof, the discrimen veri ac falsi dear to modern history and the criticism of sources. C. Conti Rossini’s article was already deliberately drawing on the register of the judicial enquiry, since, to present his very first argument, he promised that he held the probatio probatissima, the “evidence of the evidence”!

• 10 “J’ai appris assez bien le ግዕዝ [ge‘ez] et je suis très content d’avoir suivi votre conseil de l’app (...)

9We still have one last card to play to win this first trick. Giusto d’Urbino’s first letters contain a few passages in Ge’ez, which reflect his concern to prove to Antoine that he had conscientiously followed his advice. Thus, as early as September 1850, he told him: “I have learnt ግዕዝ [Ge’ez] quite well and I am very glad I took your advice to learn it. It has cost me a lot of patience, but now I am a living witness of the proverb ትዕግሥትሰ፡ በጊዜሁ፡ ይከውን፡ መሪረ፡ ወድኅሬሁ፡ ይጥዕም፡ እመዓር። [“Perseverance is bitter in its time, then it becomes sweeter than honey”].”10

• 11 Ms NAF 23852, fol. 17-18.

10Over a year later, in March 1852, Giusto grew angry at Antoine’s silence and at his failure to react to the many letters he received. In a long letter,11 Giusto reproaches him for having incited him to write and for not rewarding him in return, not even with letters. He presents himself as being very poor, with only his knowledge to share. He then uses the proverb ሀብታም፡ በከብት፡ ደኃ፡ በጕልበት። [“to the rich man the cattle, to the poor man the work”], which can also be found in the Latin address accompanying the first copy of the Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā’eqob (Éth. Abb. 234), written at the beginning of 1853. The porosity between this letter and the text of the Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā’eqob is not limited to the latter’s exergue, as displayed by the long passage in Ge’ez transcribed below, which is taken from the same missive dated March 1852. This was the first time that Giusto d’Urbino allowed himself such a long insertion in Ge’ez in his correspondence. The tone of the passage – that of complaint – is a familiar one. Giusto d’Urbino requested, once again, Antoine’s financial support for his work.

• 16 E. Littmann, 1904, txt, p. 21- 22: ወአበድር፡ ፍሬ፡ ፃማየ፡ እሴሰይ, p. 48.

11At the end of this long exhortation urging him to support financially and materially his intellectual activities, in the present and in the future, we find a sentence that echoes the narrative thread of the Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā’eqob. The scholar places himself under the protection of the one who will support him (“I will sell the fruits of my labour to the one who will feed me”). This need for patronage is described at length in chapter 11 of the Ḥatatā Zar’a Y ā’eqob: during Zar’a Yā’eqob’s meeting with Habtu, in Enfrāz, the latter agrees to pay him for his work as a scribe, allowing Zar’a Yā’eqob to establish himself in the region, while remaining under Habtu’s protection. The latter thus becomes his master and even provides him with an adoptive family. It is this patronage that would allow Zar’a Yā’eqob to free himself from the enslaving guardianship of the Church and to develop a professional skill that could be exchanged for money like any other craft activity. The same Ge’ez terms are used in Giusto’s letter and in the text of the Ḥatatā, in particular the expression “fruits of my labour”, ፍሬ፡ ፃማየ፡, which can be found twice in the Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā’eqob and once in the Ḥatatā Walda Ḥeywat, in all cases linked to the idea of securing one’s own subsistence.16

• 17 See below the double copy of qenē accompanying the Ge'ez manuscript of the Soirées de Carthage whic (...)

13Such a process of “recycling” his writings in Ge’ez can also be observed elsewhere.17 It shows that Giusto assimilated Ge’ez words and sentences on the basis of examples, selected pieces, and reminders. He created a collage in a form that suited the Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā’eqob quite well: the biographical framework served as a narrative thread running through a somewhat disparate assemblage of considerations.

• 18 F. Tarducci, 1899, p. 23, citing the notizie dell’Archivio Provinciale dei Cappuccini della Marche, (...)
• 19 And this stands whether in the year 1851, 1852 or even 1853.
• 20 Manfred Kropp had come to the same conclusions, according to notes prepared for a seminar which he (...)

15C. Conti Rossini’s second argument is biographical: Giusto d’Urbino and Zar’a Yā’eqob were allegedly born on the same day and shared the same name. Giusto d’Urbino was born on 30 August 1814, according to F. Tarducci and his investigations in the archives.18 Zar’a Yā’eqob was born on 25 nāhāsē 1592, that is to say on 28 August 1600 – a reconstruction that is easy to make today thanks to the many calendar tables establishing reliable correspondences. This two-day gap was deemed sufficient, in the following stage of the controversy, to invalidate the argument put forward by C. Conti Rossini. But Giusto d’Urbino had no such computing tools at his disposal and, while he was in Ethiopia, his own birthday fell on 25 nāhāsē.19 He seems simply to have transposed this date.20

• 21 Letter of 14 July 1854, ms NAF 23852, fol. 59-60.
• 22 Thus the following names mean: Ḫāyla Sellāsē, “Strength of the Trinity”; Takla Hāymānot, “Plant of (...)

16Furthermore, Giusto d’Urbino’s baptismal name was apparently Iacopo, that is to say, Jacob, and Zar’a Yā ’eqob means ’Seed of Jacob’. While Jacopo or Iacopo is the first name which F. Tarducci gave for d’Urbino in 1899 and that repeated thereafter in every study dedicated to Giusto d’Urbino, the latter says in one of his letters to Antoine d’Abbadie that he was named Gian-Giacomo, or in French Jean-Jacques, like Rousseau.21 But whether it be Iacopo [Jacob] or Giacomo [James], the assimilation with Yā’eqob remains. It should be noted, moreover, that in his very first letter mentioning the Ḥatatā, Giusto entitled the text Maṣḥafa Yā’eqob or Ḥatatā Yā’eqob (Book of Jacob/James or Examination of Jacob/James), and it was only later that the author-narrator was named Zar’a Yā’eqob. It was no longer directly his homonym that he placed centre stage; rather, he skilfully used the classical formation of Ethiopian Christian names, composed of a noun associated with a saint’s name or a divine principle in the genitive.22 The author-narrator was thereafter called “Seed of James”, a name that echoes an extremely important theme in the Ḥatatā: that of fertility, the human need to reproduce and raise children within a family. This theme is obviously linked to the condemnation of celibacy.

• 23 See especially chapters 8 and 12 of the Ḥatatā Zar'a Yā'eqob.
• 24 “Une servante, âgée environ de 30 ans, laide comme un démon mais bonne comme un ange, et sage trois (...)
• 25 Letter of Easter 1854, ms NAF 23852, fol. 51-54.
• 26 Dove aveva lasciata tutta la sua famigilia [“Where he had left his entire family”], G. Massaja, 198 (...)
• 27 On the assumption that the Catholic monk Takla Hāymānot’s version of Giusto’s arrest can be trusted (...)

17In fact, once Zar’a Yā’eqob had settled in with his master Habtu, he married one of the latter’s servants, named Hirut. She was an ugly, good, and intelligent woman, whom he loved and to whom he gave a social status; she also bore him children.23 Now Giusto d’Urbino, who made so little mention of his Ethiopian environment in his letters, described at length the death by smallpox of the woman who ran his house: “A maid, about 30 years old, ugly like a demon but good like an angel, and three times as wise as an Abyssinian.”24 He mourned her, fell ill, and became delirious after her death; he confessed that he struggled to recover from the grief caused by her disappearance.25 Could this woman he mourned and who looked so much like the portrait of Zar’a Yā ’eqob ’s wife have been d’Urbino’s concubine? It might well be the case. Massaja’s writings suggest that, as early as 1852, Giusto d’Urbino had an Ethiopian family. Indeed, after their last meeting in Ifāg in June 1852, Giusto returned quickly to Bētaleḥēm before the rainy season, since, as Massaja wrote: he “had left his whole family there.”26 This information provided by Massaja, and which he committed to writing several decades after Giusto d’Urbino’s death and after the consecration of his own missionary enterprise, is quite surprising. It suggests the extent to which Giusto d’Urbino was now perceived as an outsider within the Catholic mission and within his order. Did Giusto d’Urbino have children? Could this be the reason why he tried not to be expelled from Ethiopia27 and why he chose to return to Ethiopia after his exile in Egypt? An investigation in Bētaleḥēm, more than one hundred and fifty years later, could perhaps put us on the path to a genealogy – might there be a document attesting to the presence of a European who knew Ge’ez and Amharic, and who lived for a few years in the parish and left behind children?

• 28 “Seeing in Ludolf that he had a book of Philosophy in Ethiopic, I looked for it everywhere. I was g (...)

20C. Conti Rossini’s third argument is based on a similarity between the Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā’eqob on the one hand, and Giusto D’Urbino’s expression of his faith and of his religious and philosophical feelings – which he lays out in his correspondence with his friend Nascimbeni, edited by F. Tarducci – on the other. C. Conti Rossini points out the importance of the figure of a providential God, but does not further pursue this promising lead. Thus, in Giusto’s correspondence with Antoine d’Abbadie, numerous passages draw on the philosophical notions dear to Giusto as well as his intense need to think for himself: what he calls his “hypotheses” and “examinations”. From the time that he first pursued research in the field of Ethiopian literature, in 1850, he said that he had looked for Ethiopian philosophical texts based on a lead from a sentence in Hiob Ludolf, but unfortunately he found nothing of the kind.28 From 1854 onwards, philosophy became an openly present theme in his correspondence, which coincided with an aggravation of his illnesses (ophthalmia, a skin disease) and of his depression, which he called taedium vitae, the disgust of life, and about which he spoke from March 1853. The civil war and the resulting decline in the economic and sanitary conditions in which Giusto lived strengthened his feelings of despair.

• 29 “Since for now my mind does not have what it takes to fill this letter = I put my soul into babblin (...)

21An especially verbose letter of 5 May 1854 displays an intense intellectual effort to put man at the centre of the sensory and logical universe, and to apprehend the world and man’s place in it. The same philosophical concerns as those at issue in the Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā’eqob can be found here. But the Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā’eqob had been “discovered” by Giusto d’Urbino two years earlier, so here we are at another stage of his thinking, perhaps more confused, and expressed in the somewhat lax style that epistolary correspondence allowed him to use. I do not return here to the analysis of this excerpt,29 which I already discussed in the previous article. I will however take it up again in the following article, wherein the question whether the Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā’eqob can be a seventeenth-century text, or whether it is dependent upon the achievements of nineteenth-century scientific and theological thought, will be addressed in greater detail.

• 30 “Si je sais quelque chose, je ne le dois qu’à Dieu et à moi. Personne ne m’a instruit ni fait instr (...)
• 31 All translated passages are taken from Claude Sumner’s 1976 English translation, unless otherwise s (...)

22Then in July 1854, he boasted: “If I know anything, I owe it only to God and to myself. Nobody instructed me or had me instructed. All that has been done is to prevent or delay the development of my mind. I believe that my views about God and his providence are quite right, and I am proud that I received them from no one. I have been my own teacher”30. This affirmation of the power of his thinking concludes a passage in which he says he owes nothing to anyone, neither to his family of poor French expatriates nor to religious institutions. He possesses nothing, he is even disinterested in his body since he wishes to die; only God and his soul are topics that matter to him. The Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā’eqob is entirely based on this very same idea. Already in chapter 2, after fleeing the jealousy and slander of an enemy, the wickedness of the priests of the Orthodox Church and the persecutions of royal power, Zar’a Yā’eqob tells us: “Alone in my cave, I felt I was living in heaven. Knowing the boundless badness of men, I disliked contact with them.”31 Chapter 4 is entirely devoted to these critical observations concerning the relativity of beliefs and cultures that limits man’s access to the truth. This enables him to develop, in the following chapters, a critical analysis which is supposed to be free from contingency. In chapter 9, Zar’a Yā’eqob returns to the necessary need for solitude, which gives him a legitimate foundation on which to build his thought: “I have learnt more by living alone in a cave than when I was living with scholars. What I wrote in this book is very little; but in my cave I have meditated on many other such things.”. The end of the Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā’eqob is a plea for freedom of thought that summarizes this critical approach and passes it on to future generations:

• 33 “In my despair yesterday I burnt six of my manuscripts’ notebooks, which were worthless. I will bur (...)

25What emerges again and again from this paragraph is the vital need to think in an autonomous way about man in his relationship with God and the universe, without having recourse to pre-established dogmas. Giusto d’Urbino here clearly tells us that his life’s work is of a philosophical nature. He has rejected the “old stories”; he has reconstructed with the strength of his mind an interpretation of the world that he is satisfied with, and he does not want to die without this being acknowledged of him. Antoine d’Abbadie would become the custodian of his work, and therefore the one in charge of making it known to the world. He ends the letter by confessing to having burnt his work, committing himself – together with his “productions” which are nothing but “nonsense33” – to oblivion. What might Giusto d’Urbino have written in these six notebooks which he said he burnt before sending his manuscripts to Antoine? Giusto’s intellectual legacy remains to be read in his Ḥatatā.

• 34 “As for my grammar and any other work, good or bad, were it a masterpiece, I would never publish it (...)

26There is a contradiction in Giusto d’Urbino’s statements to Antoine d’Abbadie concerning the nature of the recognition he wished to receive for his work. On many occasions he demanded material recognition, i.e. compensation for acquiring the knowledge as well as the manuscript books which Antoine had asked of him. What is more ambiguous in this correspondence is Giusto d’Urbino’s relationship to his own intellectual production. He constantly refrained from signing his own works. He was conscious of their value and, in the same movement, vehemently denied wanting to draw any personal glory from them.34 His quest for social recognition was immense, yet he still felt a sense of shame that compelled him, as an individual, to hide himself behind his work. Such ambivalence, combined with the distance separating him from his interlocutor – to whom he dedicated and entrusted this work – did not help matters. It exacerbated his depressive state. Giusto d’Urbino often said of himself that he was a “madman”, “only good at giving birth to a novel”. He was proud of this madness, which distinguished him among humans even as he suffered from it; for it condemned him to isolation and to at times distressing intellectual turbulence.

• 35 J. Simon, 1937, p. 101.

29C. Conti Rossini’s fourth argument proved the most influential, both as evidence for the prosecution, for those who wanted to establish that Giusto d’Urbino was indeed the author of Ḥatatā, and as a foil for those who wanted to prove the opposite. It relates to possible comparisons between the Ḥatatā and a work that Giusto d’Urbino translated into Ge’ez, the Soirées de Carthage (Evenings of Carthage). This “philological demonstration35” was promising since it was based on the methods of textual criticism, a tried and tested method for detecting the relationships of filiation between texts, for tracing interpolations and retrieving the “original” text, for defining authors or authorities, and for anchoring words in time periods. Alas, this demonstration also contained a formal flaw that invalidated the legitimacy of its results, for it proposed to compare a text of which Giusto d’Urbino was the mere translator with two texts of which he was the purported author. The point of commonality, of course, is the language in which the texts were written, Ge’ez, the Ethiopian scholarly language that Giusto d’Urbino was studying.

• 36 F. Bourgade, 1847.
• 37 It was about nothing less than “forming a religious and civilizing association for Africa” (“former (...)
• 38 G. Massaja, 1984, vol. 1, p. 278.
• 39 G. Massaja, vol. 2, 1886¹, p. 128; 1984², p. 278.
• 40 In October 1851, he wrote to Antoine: “They sent me the Soirées de Carthage by Mr Abbot Bourgade. B (...)
• 41 “I translated into ግዕዝ፡ [Ge'ez] the Soirées de Carthage by Bourgade, which መምህራን [scholars] from Ab (...)
• 42 G. Massaja, 1984, vol. 1, p. 278.
• 43 S. Grébaut, 1926.
• 44 S. Grébaut, E. Tisserand, 1935, p. 613-614.

30Let us resume this laborious debate. To strike the blow that could have been fatal to the destiny of the Ḥatatā, C. Conti Rossini relied on the text that Giusto d’Urbino translated from French to Ge’ez: the Soirées de Carthage, a work of Catholic propaganda staging dialogues between a nun working as a nurse, a Catholic priest, a mufti, and a cadi. It takes place in Carthage, that is to say in Tunis, where its author, Abbot Bourgade, “chaplain of the royal chapel of Saint-Louis, in Carthage, apostolic missionary, honorary canon of Algiers, knight of the Legion of Honour”, was based. It was published in 1847 in Paris.36 The work was supposed to demonstrate the superiority of the Christian faith over Islam. It is structured in simple dialogues between representatives of the Christian Catholic religion and Muslims. Its maieutic thrust is aimed at showing, with the help of quotations from the Koran, that Islam is a corruption of the divine message, which only Christians have been able to transmit and preserve in its integrity. This work of propaganda, which had ecumenical pretensions but with a vocation of Catholic evangelization in Eastern and African lands37, had just been published when the mission led by Massaja started. As the latter says in his Memoirs, he found it in the library of the Congregation and believed that “it would do the greatest good in Abyssinia, where Islam does a lot of harm”.38 He then entrusted it to Father Giusto for him to translate it, thereby exploiting the only talent that Giusto deigned to put at the service of the mission, that is, his knowledge of Ge’ez.39 Giusto d’Urbino therefore set to work and produced a Ge’ez translation of the Soirées.40 As early as March 1852, he had several copies made because the text seemed to please Ethiopian scholars, who found it very useful for discussions with Muslims41. He gave a copy to Massaja during their last interview in June 1852, in Ifāg. This manuscript thus became a part of Massaja’s collection – a collection that he lost in the Oromo country in 1861.42 But it found its way back to Western collections, as S. Grébaut acquired a copy near Addis Ababa in 1926 and then gave it to the Vatican library, where it entered the Ethiopian collection under the number 165.43 It was catalogued by S. Grébaut and E. Tisserand in 1935.44 The colophon (fol. 106) is explicit about the attribution of the translation to Giusto d’Urbino:

• 47 The identification of the hand as well as all the information relating to this manuscript (to which (...)

31The manuscript opens with a note in folio 2v in the hand of Father Giusto47, most probably written for the attention of Massaja. It is an address placed in Father Giusto’s own mouth – direct speech in the form of a long rhyming poem – which is rather difficult to translate and interpret. The Ge’ez text is as follows:

• 50 “Dicit Abba Yostos : Ab amico, quem amo, non me separet, Iacobe, illa cui dictum est “unus”, suffic (...)
• 51 I would like to thank Daniel Assefa and Emmanuel Fritsch, with whom I conducted a first reading of (...)

32The cataloguer translated it into Latin;50 I propose an English translation which runs as follows:51

• 54 F. Bourgade, 1847, p. 39-41 (and not Chapter 1, paragraph 1, as mentioned by C. Conti Rossini).
• 55 F. Bourgade, 1847, p. 101-103, is the only reference given by C. Conti Rossini, 1920, p. 8; but thi (...)

38But let us return to C. Conti Rossini’s demonstration. He knew, from reading Massaja, that Giusto d’Urbino had translated the Soirées, but he had no knowledge of the Ge’ez text, nor of the Amharic versions that derive from it (I will come back to this). He therefore set out to provide a comparative analysis of the Ḥatatā and the Soirées based on his reading of the original French work by Abbot Bourgade, which Giusto d’Urbino was of course thoroughly familiar with given that he translated it. Hence C. Conti Rossini’s arguments are solely based on similarities in content; and he mentions at the outset that the two texts are very different in terms of the opinions they express. What interested him was his suspicion that the Soirées had provided the material from which Giusto d’Urbino derived his information concerning Islam. He analyzed chapter 5 of the Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā’eqob, which partly deals with Islam, and saw in each of the mentions of the Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā’eqob a ’Bourgadian’ origin. Thus the long explanation of the harmful effects of polygamy on fertility, as expressed in Dialogue 3, Part III54 of the Soirées, is allegedly reprised at the beginning of Chapter 5 of the Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā’eqob, in which it is said that if there are as many men as women on earth, then necessarily the natural law must be that of the couple. The Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā’eqob nevertheless goes much further. It links this argument to the fact that, since Muhammad preached polygamy, which is necessarily harmful, he could not have been sent by God. It further argues that these unnatural laws contained in the Koran, but also in the Old and New Testaments, prove that all “prophets” are human inventions, and that the only relationship man should have with God is that which he himself establishes. The passage about Muhammad being a false prophet can also be found in the Soirées de Carthage, as C. Conti Rossini points out.55 Quite so. However, it must be recognized that the theme of the authenticity of prophetic missions runs through the whole range of theological controversies between Christians and Muslims. The fact that it is present in the Soirées and in the Ḥatatā is interesting, but it is not sufficient to prove a genetic link between the two, or even a direct or unique influence.

• 56 C. Sumner, 1976, p. 238.
• 57 “Son of man, discern what is before you; the camel, the ox, and the donkey are created for your ser (...)

39Two further arguments are developed in Chapter 5 of the Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā’eqob. The first is that of the rejection of slavery, because “the creator […] made us equal, like brothers”,56 which is allegedly derived from dialogue 11, paragraph 2 of the Soirées. Of course, the Soirées also uses the term “brothers”57 as part of a broader rhetoric intended to condemn slavery, but this again seems to me to be a relatively common argument expressed in very banal biblical terminology. Furthermore, a few lines later in chapter 5 of the Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā’eqob, the author ridicules different fasting practices, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim, and defends the claim that a temperate diet is the only beneficial one for mankind. Here again, C. Conti Rossini mentions that the Soirées condemns the practice of Ramadan and derides Muslims’ fasting practises. Without wishing to take away from the effectiveness of C. Conti Rossini’s arguments, it must be stressed that these are banalities of the discourse against Muslim practices, which are indeed found in both the Soirées and chapter 5 of the Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā’eqob. But this is not a decisive demonstration of a link between the two texts.

• 58 It would be useful to compare them to one another to ascertain whether they come from the same tran (...)
• 59 See Alemé Esheté, 1974; G. Hudson, Tekeste Negash, 1987.
• 60 E. Mittwoch published it as early as 1929 in Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprache, 3 (...)
• 61 ወአባ፡ ዮስጦስ፡ ተርጐሞ፡ በልሳነ፡ ግዕዝ፡ በ፲ወ፰፻፵ወ፬ዓመት፡ እምልደተ፡ እግዚእነ፡ ወመድኃኒነ፡ ኢየሱስ፡ ክርስቶስ፡ ሎቱ፡ ስብሐት፡ በዘመነ፡ ዮሐንስ፡ ወ (...)

40In his Memoirs, Massaja states that Giusto d’Urbino’s translation of the Soirées was a great success in Ethiopia, that it was copied many times, and that the Ethiopians referred to it as The Mufti. But he does not specify the language in which the copies were made. It is not only in Ge’ez that this text seems to have been know to posterity. The manuscript Vatican Et. 165 is the only known copy of the Ge’ez version of the Soirées, although Giusto d’Urbino says in his correspondence that he produced several copies. In addition, two manuscripts of the text of the Soirées in Amharic are attested,58 one of which reached Europe before the Ge’ez version. This manuscript was brought by the alaqā Tāya Gabra Māryām59, an Ethiopian intellectual who had been educated by a Protestant mission. He arrived in Berlin in 1905 and worked with the Orientalist Eugen Mittwoch for three years. E. Mittwoch based his edition and translation into German in 1934 on this copy.60 Another copy in Amharic is known as manuscript EMML 1470, a historiographical compilation made by the daǧǧāzmāč Mikā’ēl Germu. The latter was an early-twentieth-century historian and scholar, whose library and academic archives are today kept at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa. The manuscript was copied in the years 1911-1913. The Amharic version of the Soirées thus circulated among Ethiopian intellectuals in the early twentieth century. Given the information currently available to us, it is difficult to uncover the conditions under which the transition from the Ge’ez text to the Amharic text took place, as the colophon of the Amharic version61 seems to be a mere translation of the colophon of the Ge’ez version, and abbā Yosṭos, i.e. Father Giusto, is described as the author of the Ge’ez translation and not of the Amharic translation. The latter was probably made independently, with a view to making the text more accessible.

• 62 ሮማዊ፡ ነው፡ የሚሉትም፡ መርማሪዎች፡ እንዲህ፡ ያለ፡ ሊቅ፡ በኢትዮጵያ፡ አይገኝም፡ በማለት፡ ነው፡እንጂ፡ እርሱ፡ ግን፡ ፍጹም፡ ኢትዮጵያዊ፡ እንደሆነ፡ ካጻጽ (...)

42E. Mittwoch then presents the arguments of two authors who, since C. Conti Rossini’s article, had tried to defend the opposite hypothesis, namely the Ethiopian authenticity of the Ḥatatā. Indeed, as early as 1924, I. Kračkovskij, a pupil of B. Turaev – the Russian editor of the Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā’eqob – tried to demonstrate that the two Ḥatatā could not have had the same author, given their profound differences, and that thus Giusto d’Urbino could not have been the author of either text. E. Mittwoch then extensively quotes an Ethiopian intellectual, “alaqā Destā of Harrar”, whose arguments as reproduced by E. Mittwoch were very weak since they were limited to accusing Westerners who denied any authenticity to the Ḥatatā of not wanting to admit that such a philosophy was possible in Ethiopia.62 Such accusations of racism would be used extensively a few decades later when these texts again found themselves at the heart of intellectual, ideological, and political stakes.

• 63 E. Mittwoch, 1934, p. 7. This is indeed what J. Simon would reproach him shortly afterwards in a lo (...)

43E. Mittwoch’s article becomes more original at the point where he compares the linguistic peculiarities of the corpus of texts produced by Giusto d’Urbino, at the same time that he acknowledges that this analysis would be more relevant if he had access to the Ge’ez text of the Soirées rather than its translation into Amharic.63 He carries out a linguistic study of the Ge’ez of the two Ḥatatā, which allows him to show that they have common grammatical and syntactical characteristics. He thus notes the frequent and unorthodox use of the subject placed before the verb, especially in adverbial sentences, as well as the excessive use of the adverb ‘why’, bayna mentu, and the word bāhtu, ‘alone’. He lists terms used extensively in both Ḥatatā and notes a similarity in these recurring lexicons. Thus the terms tasana’āwa, ’to be in agreement, in harmony’, ’light’ in ’light of reason’, or nebrat, ’state, situation’, as well as the causative aṭayaqa, ’to make known, to demonstrate’, to name but a few examples, are used with very high frequency in both texts. The two Ḥatatā could therefore have had the same author. This would then undermine the internal discourse of the texts, which present themselves as being written by two different authors. Finally, E. Mittwoch compares these peculiarities of the Ḥatatā with the Amharic version of the Soirées, and he notes striking similarities, particularly in the use of similar nominal groups. While these demonstrations are precise, erudite, and rigorously conducted, it is nevertheless striking how much the author seeks to demonstrate a Giusto d’Urbino authorship.

• 64 F. Bourgade, 1847, p. 86, quotation from the Koran: “Those who believe, and the Jews, and the Sabia (...)
• 65 Ḥatatā Gabra Heywat, chap. 5, in E. Littmann, 1904, p. 34: ወለሰብአ፡ ህንድ፡ ቦሙ፡ ሊሉይ፡ ሃይማኖት።ወለሰብአ፡ ሖማር፡ ወ (...)

44One example in particular epitomizes E. Mittwoch’s relentless use of textual criticism to try and unmask the forger. He believes that the Amharic translation of the Soirées is faulty with respect to the French original, and that this mistake has crept into the Ḥatatā Walda Ḥeywat. Within philology, contamination from one manuscript to another is always a good indication of a filiation of copies. This is a kind of methodological demonstration, albeit based on arguments which, once again, are not decisive. Let me therefore resume and develop his demonstration. E. Mittwoch notes that the translation of the term ‘Sabians’ [‘sabéens’] – which should be understood as “practitioners of the religion of Sabianism” in the Soirées,64 is similar to the term that the author of the Ḥatatā Walda Ḥeywat uses to refer to the “People of Saba”,65 which represents the Sabaeans of Antiquity. In the first case we have, in Amharic, ya-Sābā sawoč, and in the second, in Ge’ez, la-sab’a Sābā. However, for E. Mittwoch, these should have been two very different terms, especially since in German one is rendered as die Sabier while the other is die Sabäer. Thus this common “error” in the two Ethiopian texts supposedly proves their common origin. But can there be two different terms in Ge’ez and consequently in Amharic? Or rather, were the Ethiopians aware of the modern Sabians’ religion at the time of the translation of the Soirées? Could Giusto d’Urbino therefore have translated the term differently? And could the author of the Ḥatatā Walda Ḥeywat have used another term? This does not seem to be possible, in both cases. Thus this demonstration is by no means conclusive. What it does show is the obsession to prove, by appeal to textual genetics, a filiation between the two texts.

• 66 It would also be worth identifying those authors who did not take C. Conti Rossini’s article into a (...)
• 67 B. Turaev, 1920, p. 159, following E. Mittwoch, 1934.
• 68 E. Littmann, 1930, in the context of a review of a work which makes reference to the “philosophical (...)
• 69 E. Cerulli, 1926, p. 173, n. 2.
• 70 I. Guidi, 1932, p. 77.

48Let us briefly consider a (non-exhaustive) overview of the numerous historians and philologists who have come down on the side of a Giusto d’Urbino authorship.66 The first scholars to reckon with C. Conti Rossini’s refutation were the editors of the Ḥatatā; they were both quick to agree with C. Conti Rossini – B. Turaev as early as 192067 and E. Littmann in 1930.68 In the same period, in a 1926 article on Amharic literature, E. Cerulli – another great figure of Italian scholarly authority in the field of Ethiopian studies – also agreed with C. Conti Rossini.69 In a concluding note, he suggested comparing the work of Heruy Walda Sellāsē, a “Europeanized Ethiopian”, with that of Giusto d’Urbino, an “Abyssinized European”, in order to better understand how the two cultures – Western and Abyssinian – had profoundly influenced one another. He did not deem a demonstration useful, judging C. Conti Rossini’s authority and his 1920 article to be conclusive. In 1932, in his work La letteratura etiopica, Ignazio Guidi placed the Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā’eqob in the literature of the seventeenth century, while at the same time mentioning it as a forgery and acknowledging the “sagacity” of C. Conti Rossini’s conclusions as to the attribution of the work to Giusto d’Urbino.70

• 71 J. Simon, 1936, p. 101.
• 72 J. Simon, 1937, p. 214, n. 2.
• 73 L. Ricci, 1969, p. 849.

49In 1934, E. Mittwoch’s philological demonstration brought grist to this mill. In 1936 and 1937, J. Simon studied other aspects of Giusto d’Urbino’s work, but without questioning the presupposition that it was a forgery. He concludes his 1936 article as follows: “As for the unusual psychological and moral problem posed by the composition of these treatises, it has been resolved by C. Conti Rossini, with supporting documentation. In the present essay, therefore, Mr. Mittwoch has been able to dispens with returning to this troublesome subject. His philological demonstration is sufficiently convincing”.71 He notes, moreover, that the sole proponent of the thesis of Ethiopian authenticity of the Ḥatatā, I. Kračkovskij, had eventually changed his opinion following E. Mittwoch’s article.72 Much later, L. Ricci in turn published a history of Ethiopian literature in 1969, in which he endorsed the same conclusions, placing the Ḥatatā directly in the section on missionary literature of the nineteenth century and this time presenting Takla Hāymānot as the first person to have unveiled the forgery.73

• 74 I would like to thank Gérard Colin for proofreading this translation with me.

52Let us therefore return to the two versions of the texts to see how the Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā’eqob evolved during this year of work. In order to do this, I have translated a chapter of the Ḥatatā Zar’a Yā’eqob74, namely, chapter 7, which seemed to me to be the densest in philosophical concepts.

• 106 M. Kamel, 1945.
• 107 Zamanfas Qeddus Abrehā, 1948 E.C. (1955-1956).
• 108 Zamanfas Qeddus Abrehā, 1956.
• 109 L. Ricci, 1964; L. Ricci, 1969, p. 901, note 29.
• 110 S. Pankhurst, 1955, p. 359-365.

57And yet, after the Second World War, a few publications in Ethiopia showed that the Ḥatatā were considered to be authentically Ethiopian philosophical texts. All of these publications ignored the Western academic debate. As early as 1945, an article by Murad Kamel in the Ethiopian Herald drew attention to this text and to its contents, and offered a literal summary of it.106 Subsequently, in 1955-1956, the Ge’ez texts of the Ḥatatā were edited, without any introduction or mention of the origin of the texts, by Zamanfas Qeddus Abrehā of Adwā.107 The same author also produced a translation into Amharic.108 Nevertheless, the intentions of Zamanfas Qeddus Abrehā, who presided over the re-circulation of these texts, were, to say the least, biased. Indeed, L. Ricci accused him of having published these texts to defend his Protestant faith and to harm the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, which value celibacy and fasting.109 Around the same time, Sylvia Pankhurst, in her work entitled Ethiopia. A Cultural History, in turn presented a summary of the Ḥatatā without contextualizing it in any way other than by placing it in the context of the “civil war” opposing Roman Catholics to the Church of Alexandria in Ethiopia at the beginning of the seventeenth century.110 The path was opened for the text to be rehabilitated. This will be the subject of the fourth article in this series, which looks at the second life of the Ḥatatā in the context of African philosophy.