Friedrich Salomon Hall's parents were Moritz and Katarina Hall. Moritz was born in Cracow in partitioned Poland and Katarina was born in Ethiopia to an Ethiopian mother and a German father. The couple met while Moritz was in Ethiopia as a missionary; he later produced cannon for the Ethiopian Emperor Tewodros II. He fell out of favour, was imprisoned by Tewodros and rescued by the 1868 British Expedition to Abyssinia. Friedrich was born in 1879, after his parents left Ethiopia and settled in the Middle East, and was the seventh of thirteen children. The family had moved to Jaffa in the Holy Land, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire.