Citizen Azmari. Ilana Webster-Kogen

      FIGURE 2.1 Site of Habesh restaurant, 2017 (author photo)

      In this chapter I introduce some of the fundamental concepts of Ethiopian musical aesthetics through description of my weekly visits to Habesh. Habesh was a hybrid of an Azmari-bet, a music house where an Azmari performs, and a “cultural restaurant,” a tourist-oriented restaurant that offers folk entertainment. The format was a self-conscious pastiche of Ethiopian culture, offering a snapshot of life in Ethiopia via the music of Addis Ababa, a place most of the patrons hadn’t visited. In the course of this discussion, I examine the ways that Ethiopian-Israeli musicians look to Ethiopian culture to define the terms of their citizenship in Israel, drawing from a set of myths of Abyssinian (Habesha) glory to reframe their contemporary social problems in Israel, from which the home country is seen as an “iconic, almost monolithic Ethiopian entity” (Salamon 1999: 12).

      Those myths are well rehearsed across the literature about Ethiopian culture, and well represented in the preeminent work of Donald Levine (1965, 1974) and Edward Ullendorff (1968). They center on the characteristics that render Ethiopia exceptional in Africa in terms of history, religion, and culture, and focus particularly on Amhara culture. Although Ethiopia is a very splintered society with no one dominant culture, most discussions of Ethiopia in a national framework take the Amhara as a starting point. Therefore, scholarship focuses on the Orthodox Church (the world’s second oldest), the Ethiopic writing system (fidal—the only indigenous writing system in Africa), and the independent past (Italy occupied briefly, but Ethiopia was never colonized). This tripartite formula puts the Christian Amhara at the center of Ethiopian culture, distinguishes Ethiopia from its African neighbors, and emerges as something of a scholarly counternarrative for a country that is famous for its heterogeneity.