Citizen Azmari. Ilana Webster-Kogen
propose that the common definition of myth as a narrative espoused by an imagined community that explains origins or values, and that promotes social cohesion, may be expanded to include nonspeech elements of storytelling. The consensual definition that myths are transmitted verbally (including song and epic) excludes nonspeech sounds and individual musical characteristics. Where my definition of myth adapts and expands that which is generally offered by folklore and comparative religion is in my association of performance style, often divorced completely from lyrics, with etiologies and social history. These individual performative elements (instrumentation and tonality in addition to lyrics) and often-decontextualized sounds (ululation, accordion, reggae beat) invoke Afrodiasporic, Ethiopianist, and Zionist ethnohistories. My proposed, expanded definition of myth provides a conceptual mechanism by which to discuss the competing, interpolating claims being made about Ethiopian-Israelis: myths of Zionism, of Ethiopianism, and of the African diaspora.
Each of these three narratives carries discrete historical baggage. When I explore Zionist myths of home and return in chapter 3, I review the alreadyaccepted terms of the Israeli school of historiography, which has for the past thirty years worked to debunk many of Zionism’s sacred cows by calling them myths (see Morris 1988 for the launch of this line of inquiry, or Raz-Krakotzkin 2013 for a good contemporary example). In the case of Israeli history, key narratives of social cohesion are already called myths, and I borrow terms that are already widespread. In the case of Ethiopian studies, scholars are consensually aware of a narrative of Ethiopian exceptionalism hinging on religion, imperial governance, and language, but their awareness that these narratives only appeal to a minority of Ethiopia’s diverse society stops short of explicitly calling the narratives myths. So when I refer to Ethiopianist myths, I refer to a common set of narratives familiar to students of Ethiopian history, but I am applying the label “myth” myself. In the dramatic case of the African diaspora, the terms on which any sense of group cohesion was established were driven by external forces practicing systemic violence and injustice. For that reason, some readers might find the term “myth,” which may imply untruth, somewhat harsh. I engage fully with the history of violence that created the black Atlantic and its attendant narratives of black solidarity, and it is not my intention to call any of these narratives unreal or illegitimate. Indeed, it is my position that a myth can make legitimate truth claims; that is the essence of a wax-and-gold approach to narrative.
My criticism is reserved for the institutions that impose a top-down integration strategy on an immigrant population for whom it is unsuited. State support for Ethiopian-Israelis is abundant but often ineffective, and musicians frequently step into the breach to produce alternative citizenship narratives. Through musical style, their narratives mobilize cultural myths from three main sets of sources. First, the Zionist myths describe return from exile and rootedness in the land (Raz-Krakotzkin 2013; Regev and Seroussi 2004 from the musical perspective; or BenEzer 2002 for emphasis on the journey to Israel as a formative communal process). Second, Ethiopianist myths reorient Ethiopia as a key theological and anticolonial site of African independence and exceptionalism (Levine 1965, 1974). Third, Afrodiasporic myths (see Gilroy 1993, Hebdige 1987, Mintz and Price 1992), the invented traditions of the black Atlantic, bind together the descendants of the Middle Passage, and insert black minorities in white societies into those narratives. Aesthetic choices in language, instrumentation, tonality, and vocal style represent the perpetual reconfiguration of Ethiopian-Israelis in their local and national contexts, and their place in the wider world.
BECOMING ETHIOPIAN-ISRAELIS
The place of Ethiopian-Israelis, whether in Israeli society today or back in rural Ethiopia before immigration, has been in a near-perpetual state of flux for the better part of five hundred years. The people I describe in this book have been known as Ethiopian-Israeli only in the twenty-first century, and that title represents a centuries-long dynamic process of consistent identity re-formation. They have been known, over the past five centuries, as Ayhud, Falasha, Ethiopian Jews, Beta Israel (or for some, Falash Mura), and Etyopim, and each name reveals the constantly shifting social status of the world’s best-known “black Jews.” Each name—apart from the self-designation of Beta Israel—reveals the disjunction of being Jewish in Ethiopia, or black and Jewish, and some understanding of what to call this group offers a window into the group’s complex history and social status.
Many of the details of Ethiopian Jewish history, immigration, and life in Israel are known outside of the Ethiopian-Israeli population because of the work of ethnomusicologists, folklorists, and anthropologists, and I touch on the main ideas in Beta Israel studies throughout this book. The main scholars of the subdiscipline whom I cite at length are Lisa Anteby-Yemini, Gadi BenEzer, Steven Kaplan, Tudor Parfitt, Hagar Salamon, Don Seeman, Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Emmanuela Trevisan Semi, and Shalva Weil. These scholars document the religious and social history of this group, their religious rites and everyday customs, personal narratives of immigration to Israel, and experience of marginality once settled in Israel. As these scholars’ work is often referenced by the authorities when the government is debating whether to allow a new wave of Ethiopian immigration to commence, their research has clear implications for Ethiopian-Israeli life.
The history of Ethiopian Jewry is peppered with dramas over religious authenticity and racial difference. The first references to Jews in Ethiopia mention the Ayhud, a South Semitic cognate of the Hebrew word for Jew (Quirin 1995: 57). This term gave way around the seventeenth century to “Falasha” (wanderer), which implied religious otherness (Shelemay 1986: 209–11) since Jews (non-Christians) were forbidden to own land. In contrast, people who claim Jewish roots in Ethiopia call themselves Beta Israel (House of Israel). These three terms vary in meaning and connotation, but they all designate Jews as outsiders in Ethiopia to some degree.
Until the later twentieth century, Beta Israel lived in villages in northern Ethiopia, where they survived as smiths and potters and maintained extended family units. As ironworkers who transformed objects through the use of fire, they were often cursed by their Christian neighbors as buda, or semihuman sorcerers capable of transforming themselves into hyenas (Salamon 1999, Seeman 2009: 69). They were indeed different both from their neighbors 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