and from world Jewry, as they followed biblical law meticulously without reference to the rabbinic Judaism practiced across the Jewish world. By the time they were “discovered” by Jewish scholars from around the world like the Polish-French Zionist Jacques Faitlovitch, they lived immersed in distinct ritual, family life, and folklore (see Trevisan Semi 2004 for an excellent Hebrew-language biography of Faitlovitch).
The Beta Israel musical tradition is unique in Jewish liturgy. The Torah (Orit) is written in the South Semitic language of Ge’ez, and some passages of liturgy are in Agau because of links to the Agau peoples of Ethiopia (according to Don Seeman, Beta Israel spoke Agau in the nineteenth century and Amharic in the twentieth century before learning Hebrew when they moved to Israel). Being nonrabbinic, they did not adopt the laws of the Talmud and thus do not observe some key practices that unite rabbinic Jews worldwide (Shelemay 1986: 56). The differences include but are not limited to liturgy, festival observance, dietary laws, family and purity laws, and laws of sacrifice (Teferi 2005: 188). For example, the festivals of Purim and Chanukah, which are central celebrations on the Jewish calendar today, probably did not exist in Beta Israel custom until the twentieth century (Shelemay 1986: 56). On the other hand, they observed the laws of ritual purity especially carefully, continuing to separate menstruating women from the family home until their immigration to Israel.
Ritual difference may emanate from Beta Israel origins: ethnomusicologist Kay Kaufman Shelemay’s flagship study on Beta Israel liturgy analyzes Christian liturgy to demonstrate that they may have emerged as a discrete religious group in the fifteenth century (1986). And regardless of their origins, Beta Israel—most commonly known to world Jewry as Ethiopian Jews—were totally cut off from rabbinic, i.e., Ashkenazi (European) and Sephardi/Mizrahi (of Spanish origin/from Muslim lands) Jews for most of their history. Following extended trips to Ethiopia by Faitlovitch throughout the twentieth century (Trevisan Semi 2004) and advocacy from diaspora groups, they were accepted in 1973 as the “lost tribe of Dan” by then-Sephardi Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. The reconnection with world Jewry was welcomed by the community in Ethiopia, but they were not universally accepted by religious authorities in Israel. Although Ovadia Yosef’s ruling entitled Beta Israel to immigrate to Israel as Jews (which they saw as a renewal of the biblical covenant), once they arrived the rabbinate grew suspicious of their legitimacy and requested symbolic conversion (Seeman 2009). The conditions of immigration were already traumatizing, and this request was widely denounced by Beta Israel.
I will discuss the dramatic immigration process in chapter 4. The first major wave took place in 1984–1985, when Beta Israel villagers left their homes in Gondar and descended the Ethiopian highlands at great personal risk (several thousand are estimated to have died en route), settling temporarily over the Sudanese border in refugee camps such as Gedaref (Parfitt 1985). The Israeli government airlifted eight thousand Beta Israel clandestinely in January 1985 in what came to be known as Operation Moses (Mivtsa Moshe). Some of the villagers who were left behind moved to Addis Ababa to await later transport to Israel, and a second airlift called Operation Solomon (Mivtsa Shlomo) brought fourteen thousand Beta Israel to Israel in May 1991 during the last days of the Ethiopian Derg regime.
The Beta Israel were thrilled to arrive in Israel but found it difficult to adjust to life there. They did not yet speak the language (and some never learned it), their skills as smiths and potters were unsuited to the Israeli economy, and their extended family networks were broken up by a housing policy that favored the nuclear family (mishpaḥa garinit). The extended families that lived together in households of up to thirty people are scattered today across Israel, with major populations as far apart as Netanya, Rehovot, Kiryat Malakhi, Haifa, and Be’er Sheva. The uprooting of the extended family unit in Israel has caused substantial damage to Ethiopian-Israeli family life (Davids 1999: 139, Elias and Kemp 2010, Weil 2004, Westheimer and Kaplan 1992: 59), fostering ongoing problems of crime, domestic violence, and suicide.
In Israel, Beta Israel are referred to simply as Etyopim, the Hebrew word for Ethiopians, or yotsei Etyopia (those who left Ethiopia). This is a descriptive reference to ethnic origins (edah), consistent with the labeling of other Jewish groups (“Iraqis,” “Yemenites”). It is perhaps not insignificant, though, that the Hebrew term contains no acknowledgment of Jewishness: there has been extensive debate in the rabbinic courts and in the government over whether or not Beta Israel are “really” Jewish (Salomon 1995: 127, 1999: 5). The academic subdiscipline called Beta Israel studies addresses this debate in detail, and the work of scholars is often used to support or deny the credibility of a new group of immigrants. There is no doubt a racialized angle to the rabbinic suspicion, but it is framed in terms of roots and validity of religious practice.
In the past fifteen years the debate over Jewishness has become more complex, since the majority of Ethiopians who have immigrated to Israel since 1992 have been members of a small group known as Falash Mura, or people who converted from Judaism to Christianity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Seeman 2009 explains the paths to and from Judaism in detail).10 They began to immigrate to Israel in the 1990s under family reunification laws, and since then many thousands have converted back to Judaism (Seeman 2009: 91). Today they make up approximately a third of the total Ethiopian-Israeli population, or 45,000 out of an estimated population of 135,000. In the same vein as a Beta Israel-Falash Mura schism (which existed in Ethiopia and remains today in Israel), some Ethiopians in Israel prefer to identify through religious practice, calling themselves Oritawi (Torah-true) or Maryam Wodet (lovers of Mary, or Christians). To avoid wading into debates over religious authenticity, I refer throughout this book to all Ethiopians in Israel as Ethiopian-Israelis. Also, I find that the metaphorical hyphen that separates the two sides of contemporary Beta Israel status—the Ethiopian from the Israeli—succinctly articulates much of the intersectionality and disjunction of the experience of being black in Israel.
GREATER TEL AVIV
This book deals with national imaginaries of citizenship, but most of the action takes place in and around Tel Aviv, a city that is at once distinct (politically, religiously) from the rest of the country and representative of it demographically. Initially I spent a year in south Tel Aviv (July 2008 to July 2009), conducting ethnographic research through participant observation there and in many venues around Israel. I spent little time in Rehovot, the suburb that for two decades had the largest Ethiopian-Israeli population, or Tiberias in the Galilee, which has an enormous absorption center (merkaz klita). I spent no time in Kiryat Malakhi, the “development town” (that is, a town created after the establishment of the state in peripheral regions such as the Galilee and the Negev—see Yiftachel and Meir 1998) with a disproportionately large Ethiopian population relative to its size and remoteness. Instead I carried out most of my research in the major urban centers of Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem, as well as smaller cities like Ashkelon that are home to significant Ethiopian-Israeli populations. This multisited work, conducted in Hebrew but with use of Amharic words and phrases, highlights the emergence of new immigrant population cores in urban areas. I cover many of the institutions enumerated by Alex Perullo in his conception of a “music economy” (2011) comprising live music venues (nightclubs and Azmari houses, where I attended live music performances several times per week), music vendors (record stores, where I chatted with patrons and employees and increased my knowledge of contemporary music from Addis Ababa), state-run support bodies (absorption and community centers, where I interviewed musicians and social workers and took lessons in the massenqo, the Azmari’s one-stringed fiddle), and musicians themselves (approximately a dozen of whom I cite by name from interviews in this book, and many more of whom I anonymize).
Tel Aviv’s city center is home to only a small Ethiopian population,11 most Ethiopian-Israelis being dispersed across more remote towns, but as the cultural core of the State of Israel it hosts an avant-garde arts scene and a multicultural atmosphere. Like other urban cultural centers worldwide, it attracts tens of thousands of migrant workers who do the more thankless jobs rejected by Israelis, from cleaning office buildings to picking fruit to caring for the elderly (or, in the case of Eritreans,
