Citizen Azmari. Ilana Webster-Kogen
comes from the exceptional example of an Ethiopian who has managed, against the odds, to find a cohort of Israelis that welcomes him into their religious-nationalist community. But this embrace comes at a price: he has to shed the distinct Judaism of his preimmigration life in the rural Ethiopian highlands. He has to discard the secular music of his country of birth, instead embracing the biblically inspired and frequently militant music of religious Zionists. And indeed, despite the legendary “humility” of his kin group (see Salamon 2010: 165), he is sufficiently alienated from them that the behavioral norms of his rural ancestors now appear “immodest.” And all of this tension erupts from music and dancing, which embody signals and sounds that, as I shall show, function as political statements in the public sphere. Race may render Ethiopian-Israelis instantly recognizable in Israel, but their complex integration into Israeli society rests on more than skin color. Whether it is in the thousands of celebrants or in the private thoughts of this individual, the soundworlds3 of Ethiopian-Israelis have become an alternative political framework for articulating and contesting their relationships among themselves and with broader Israeli society.
Tower of David, Jerusalem, September 4, 2015
Ester Rada is currently Israel’s most celebrated musical export and the first Ethiopian-Israeli international celebrity. Yet it is with a modest “Thank you” that she steps quietly offstage and into the DJ booth, surprising me along with much of the audience. Israelis are accustomed to hearing emotional explanations of the symbolic meaning and historical weight of a performance, especially when staged in a highly charged locale such as the Tower of David in Jerusalem’s Old City.4 I cast my mind back and remember Ron Ḥuldai, the mayor of Tel Aviv, saying, “I was asked to give a blessing, but I already feel blessed being here” (aval ani kvar margish mevorakh) on the steps of the Tel Aviv Opera House in August 2008. Or the sentimentality of the performance by the pop star and conscientious objector Aviv Geffen on the banks of the Dead Sea in April 2000. When Israeli musicians and politicians perform in locations with historical significance, they tend to testify to the personal and historical significance the location and performance have for them. Not so with Ester Rada. Against a backdrop of the Tower of David and the Old City’s Jaffa Gate, Rada closes her performance at the Jerusalem Sacred Music Festival without fanfare.
As the daughter of Ethiopians who risked their lives to journey to Israel in the 1980s and raised her within the religious-Zionist movement, Rada could hardly have been unaware of the ideological and religious significance of being invited to perform in the Old City. It is by virtue of this vivid personal history that she serves as a sort of informal Israeli ambassador to African and Afrodiasporic culture, introducing both Ethio-color, a performance troupe from Addis Ababa, and an encore performance of reggae star Max Romeo at the festival’s closing celebration. Thus Rada has every reason to invoke the symbolic meaning of performing at the citadel. Yet, for her, speeches are invariably de trop. Her musical style, the vehicle of her worldview, conveys her ambivalence toward Israel. She sings almost exclusively in English, even at this venue, while her band plays a combination of soul, 1970s Ethio-jazz,5 funk, and reggae, excluding the Israeli popular music that was the repertoire of her musical training. For source material she draws heavily from the work of Nina Simone, the African American composer and performer who stood at the forefront of the civil rights movement. Indeed, Rada’s musical style is so heavily influenced by the lyricism and pathos of the African American experience that it is impossible not to discern in her repertoire and throaty vocal style a form of social commentary on Israeli society and politics, even though she shies away from explicitly political statements. Rada’s musical style fills the void left by her discursive silence—as she declines to make speeches about how moved she is to be there—and encourages her audience to listen for clues in her music. The bodily and sonic codes of her performance replace speech as political statement in this particular—national—public sphere. Taken alone, this nongesture means little, but as I describe a pattern of public Ethiopian-Israeli behavior, I will portray a dynamic that is, in the words of the folklorist Hagar Salamon, “coded and indirect” (2010: 165). A listener paying attention to the use of silence would see this as a moment laden with meaning.
These two contrasting episodes provide an aperçu into the constructed soundworlds of Israel’s others. This book argues that soundworlds are central to the process of establishing an alternative framework of citizenship for Ethiopian-Israelis, the 135,000 “Ethiopian Jews” who have migrated to the State of Israel over the past forty years, and whose integration into Israeli society is consensually considered unfinished and uneasy (Kaplan 2005, Parfitt and Trevisan Semi 1999, 2005, Weil 2004). And among the musicians who inform this research, the Azmari features prominently. In Ethiopia, the Azmari is a self-accompanied folk-poet, often described in the literature as a “wandering minstrel” (Kebede 1975). Although Israeli anxiety over the integration of Ethiopian immigrants is characterized in the impression, widespread among the Azmaris and other folk musicians I worked with, that Israelis think that they “came without culture” (ba’u bli tarbut),6 in this book I focus on the transformation of the rich musical cultures Ethiopian-Israelis brought with them. I describe how these have been enlarged and adapted by creating unique soundworlds through which this Ethiopian-Israeli population has explored the fraught dynamics of citizenship and developed new ways of being black and Israeli. Whereas sociologists and psychologists occupy themselves with the question of why Ethiopians do not integrate into Israel7—and attempt to explain why male unemployment has reached 85 percent (Kaplan 2010: 78)—I draw from the methods of ethnomusicology to propose an alternative perspective.
My approach investigates how Ethiopian-Israelis mobilize their soundworlds as a means of proposing alternative political frameworks that serve them as Israeli citizens. Looking at cultural life reveals dynamics and influences that all too often fall outside the scope of studies focused on social pathologies and their attendant data sets. Investigating the sensory experience, and particularly the soundworld, through music but also ritual, dance, and soundscape provides a better understanding of how Ethiopian-Israeli citizenship works, rather than rehashing debates over why integration has failed.
Working primarily with source material from traditional and popular music (like Herman 2012, Shabtay 2001, or Tourny 2007), and drawing from the invaluable resources of the work of Ezra Abate (2007), Francis Falceto, and Kay Kaufman Shelemay, this book analyzes musical sources to clarify a political repositioning that is under way of Ethiopian-Israelis as active citizens in contemporary Israeli society. Whereas the secondary literature mainly considers music in Ethiopia, or music from Ethiopia that has 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