been transplanted to Israel, I focus primarily on new musical styles being generated by the Israeli-born Ethiopians who are embedded in Israeli society. In insisting on the centrality of music in establishing alternative frameworks of immigrant rights and responsibilities, I engage in a similar mode of cultural analysis to some of the outstanding research about music among Israeli minorities (Brinner 2009, Horowitz 2010, McDonald 2013, Regev and Seroussi 2004). Yet this book represents a departure from a heavily liturgy-focused body of scholarship about Ethiopian-Israeli/Jewish music. The work of ethnomusicologists Alvarez-Pereyre and Ben-Dor (1999), Arom and Tourny (1999), Atar (2005), and Tourny (2010) follows from Kay Kaufman Shelemay’s groundbreaking analysis of Beta Israel (a term for Ethiopian Jewry) liturgy (1986). But with the gradual integration of Ethiopians into Israeli society, and the tendency to join mainstream Orthodox synagogues, soon the Jewish liturgical music of Ethiopia may be little more than an artifact in Israel, and the analysis of liturgy a final phase of research into a nearly extinct musical culture.
Looking at how Ethiopian-Israelis experience music today as Israelis, my research engages the most important principle of Ethiopian musical aesthetics, the concept of sem-enna-werq or “wax and gold,” the impulse to hide meaning in plain sight. The literary term refers to the technique of lost-wax casting in which wax is poured over gold and then chipped away, revealing the gold beneath (Levine 1965). The technique is employed most notably by the Azmari, who uses dual meaning to praise and lambast patrons succinctly (Kebede 1977), and I mobilize the concept to address what is perhaps Shelemay’s underlying assertion: that music is the key to understanding Ethiopian (Jewish) culture.
This book reports on how Ethiopian-Israelis leverage music as participation in national life and the public sphere in the absence of what were once the primary routes into Israeli society: religion and the military (see Shabtay 1999: 176, who argues that military service has been successful for integration, especially where religion has failed). The troubles of Ethiopian integration came to the fore in the 1990s, after 1991’s Operation Solomon rendered Ethiopian-Israelis a permanent visible minority in Israeli society, the first major population group in Israel who could lay claim to being both black and Jewish. This historical moment coincided with Paul Gilroy’s (1993) exposition of the black Atlantic (the transnational circuit of the slave trade that facilitated cultural exchange across Africa, Britain, the Caribbean, and the Americas) as an alternative public sphere represented through music. Meanwhile, multiculturalism and the fall of the Eastern bloc facilitated sociological interest in citizenship and identity-based analyses within ethnomusicology. For Ethiopian-Israelis, the legacy of this period has been a search for black consciousness as an alternative to assimilation into an Israeli national identity from which they found themselves largely excluded. Accordingly, over the past twenty years, scholars in the subdiscipline of Beta Israel studies (the study of Ethiopian-Israeli history, religion, and culture) have couched much of their work in the conceptual language of identity. Yet Ethiopian-Israeli social problems emanate from a fundamental rupture in the social contract: that the rights and privileges of citizenship have been compromised by a public consensus, reported across this book, that renders Ethiopian-Israelis a special, sometimes disadvantaged category of citizen.
The sociologist T. H. Marshall argues that the twentieth century’s framing of citizenship is based on an economic and social contract that guarantees the rights of the welfare state, or what he calls social citizenship. He explains that social citizenship derives from older models of political citizenship (the right to participate in public life and decision-making) and civil citizenship (the right to liberty and property) (1949: 10–12). Jürgen Habermas expands on Marshall’s formulation by broadening the rights and responsibilities of citizenship beyond “political membership” (1994: 24) to “active participation” (ibid.) in “deliberative democracy” (1994: 32). For Ethiopian-Israelis, Habermas’s formulation of rights (the right to immigrate to Israel because of Jewish ancestry) and responsibilities (serving in the military, making a discernible contribution to the state’s security) has not yielded the opportunity for active participation in deliberative democracy. More specifically, while participating in state institutions (like the military) might help to integrate young Ethiopian-Israelis, that integration does not automatically lead to upward mobility.
Ethiopian-Israeli citizenship might be better understood in the context of newer articulations of citizenship that have emerged since the 1990s with the fall of the Soviet Union, the breakup of the Balkan states, and the rapid globalization of migration flows. Bart van Steenbergen (1994:151) surveys the emerging ideas of neorepublican citizenship (considering each individual as officeholder), cultural citizenship (the ability to participate in national culture), global citizenship (participation beyond the boundaries of the nation-state), and ecological citizenship of the earth citizen. All of these configurations of the individual’s relationship to the nation-state, based on the global flows of migrants and the reformulations of national boundaries, apply to some degree to Israel’s idiosyncratic political history as an ethnic democracy (Smooha 1997) that is composed primarily of the descendants of immigrants, and favors Jews over its non-Jewish (Arab, Bedouin, Druze, etc.) constituents. Fundamentally, though, the Ethiopian-Israeli case is sui generis because of religious baggage (antisemitism in Ethiopia being contrasted with religious delegitimization in Israel), racial elements (blackness in a “white” society), and the diasporic imaginings of being part of the Jewish community-in-exile in the past, and, currently, at least for young people, part of the African diaspora.
In this book, I unpack the Ethiopian-Israeli relationship with the state, but I do so through the back channel of musical style. I argue that Ethiopian-Israelis use wax and gold to navigate the rights (to immigrate) and responsibilities (military service) of citizenship, effectively behaving like Azmaris. I call this process Azmari citizenship, and following from Hagar Salamon’s description of Ethiopian-Israeli folk stories that are “coded and indirect” (2010: 165), I demonstrate that a widespread wax-and-gold musical habitus navigates Ethiopian-Israeli exclusion and belonging. Since political activism—public protest, formation of political parties—has yielded few tangible victories for this population, music offers an alternative political framework whereby nonspeech can be performed and interpreted as political statements. Musical style thus constitutes an alternative argument for civil rights, whether through Azmari music, Eskesta dance, hip-hop, soul, reggae, or fusion projects. Across musical styles, musical acceptance in the broader Israeli mainstream translates quite directly into civil rights and even the right to immigrate. Hence musicians and their audiences use music (and sound more broadly) as a forum for establishing political principles about how to vote, where to live, and how to react to top-down state initiatives.
My analysis of these musical strategies rests on a series of myths, mobilized and reconfigured through music and sound, and I dedicate a chapter to each of the myth clusters before presenting their reconfiguration in targeted Israeli contexts. Each myth cluster comprises a variety of cultural touchstones, clichés, and narratives whose imagery (sometimes visually, but more often through sonic references) can—notwithstanding Steven Feld’s labeling of these references as “schizophonic” (1996)—be as richly evocative as they are succinct. I frame aesthetic choices through the terminology of myths because conventions of tonality, instrumentation, and repertoire are often clustered together seemingly indiscriminately, without necessarily considering original source material. This is not a criticism; indeed, musicians creatively reappropriate schizophonic sounds that signal blackness, Ethiopianness, or Israeliness as a mechanism for framing themselves within an idealized tradition. An accordion implies Israeli folk song; a “Yo” indicates debt to African American culture; and ululation signals an Ethiopian wedding. Working through the way these myths inform the construction of a soundworld to compensate for an unstable immigrant identity, Ethiopian-Israelis navigate their uncertain status in Israeli society through sound with an effectiveness notably lacking in political organization and community work.8
AZMARI CITIZENSHIP: WAX AND GOLD AS THEORY AND METHOD
I take the figure of the Azmari as point of departure for this study of music and citizenship. The Azmari lives in perpetual debt to patrons, who can revoke lodging and financial support at any time; hence the folk-poet must recognize
