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ОглавлениеINTRODUCTION
Symbolic Codes of Citizenship
Jerusalem Promenade, November 27, 2008
Amid the joyous tumult of the crowd assembled on the promenade (tayelet), a lone voice of disapproval cuts stridently through the bustle. “Disgrace, disgrace!” (Bizayon, bizayon!), shouts a middle-aged black man in a white shirt, black trousers, and a Jewish skullcap (kippah). He has jumped up on a column, where all the revelers can see him, and where he proceeds to declaim, “Long live the nation of Israel!” (Am Yisrael Ḥai!), before shouting his disapproval again. The crowd ignores him. This is Jerusalem, after all; ostentatious finger-wagging by the religious is hardly unusual. But to the student of Ethiopian-Israeli1 culture, this public display of anger on the promenade reveals a deep fracture among Ethiopian-Israelis in their relationship to the state, religion, and their bodies.
Today is Sigd, a pilgrimage festival and the most important day on the Ethiopian Jewish calendar (Abbink 1983, Ben-Dor 1987), and it is being celebrated as a national holiday in Israel. Ethiopian-Israelis, Israeli citizens of Ethiopian lineage from across the country, have traveled to Jerusalem by bus to celebrate together, first praying in the direction of the Old City and then dancing Eskesta, the Ethiopian national shoulder dance, in the afternoon. Both halves of the day express the ambivalence of the Ethiopian experience in Israel: the first half, consisting of centuries-old ritual, gives voice to collective relief at having been brought back from exile; the second, secular part of the day epitomizes the otherness of the Ethiopian in a predominantly white country. Moreover, the state’s sponsorship of the afternoon entertainment (the stage and sound system have been set up for dancing) can hardly erase the memory of such fraught episodes as the “blood affair,” the mass disposal by the Israeli Blood Bank of Ethiopian donations revealed in 1996;2 likewise, the rabbinate’s refusal to recognize Ethiopian clergy (the Qessim in Hebrew, or Qessotch in Amharic) or to license their ordination (Kaplan 2005: 391, 2010: 82). Thus this moment of joy, solidarity, and appreciation for official recognition is tinged with an awareness of the distance still remaining toward the goal of full equality.
The aforementioned self-appointed critic, however, objects to none of these complex dynamics of integration and inclusion. His harangue is directed at the mixed dancing (men and women together), at the Ethiopian (rather than Israeli) music, and at the public display of an unusual and not widely accepted form of Jewish practice. The critic is himself well integrated into Israel, practicing a kind of normative Ashkenazi Orthodoxy prevalent across the nationalist (dati le’umi) community of religious Zionists. This group, associated in the media with the settler movement and its supporters, is often branded as intransigent because of its absolute rejection of dialogue with Arab neighbors, and of the very idea of a Palestinian state. Yet in one of the great many ironies of Israeli society, the national-religious population often welcomes Ethiopians into its midst, the criterion for membership being ideological and political (and religious) rather than strictly race-based. Together with its affiliate youth group, B’nei Akiva, the national-religious movement hosts a disproportionately high number of Ethiopian-Israelis, people who are happy to integrate even when the ideology they are joining is resolutely opposed to inclusion of certain other minorities.
How paradoxical, then, that the most vocal objection to the afternoon’s festivities 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 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 the boundaries of acceptable speech. Critical lyrics that mock patrons demonstrate the Azmari’s virtuosity, but a critique that is too biting or disrespectful can find the musician out of work immediately (Kebede 1977). For an Azmari, caustic critique is often obscured through humor or flowery language, suggesting a larger truth: that hidden within (any kind of) musical texts are messages and meanings that are subtle and obscured but that might be poignant critiques of power.
In his classic study of Amhara culture, Donald Levine explains the mechanism of wax and gold in detail, based on the flexibility of the Amharic language. He offers the following couplet as an example: “Ya-min tiqem talla ya-min tiqem tajji / Tallat sishanu buna adargaw enji” (1965: 6). He translates the couplet as: “Of what use is beer, of what use is honey-wine? / When seeing an enemy off, serve him coffee.” But he explains that when the second line is said aloud, “buna adargaw” is elided and pronounced as “bun adargaw” (reduce him to ashes). He argues that in wax and gold, we find a key to understanding northern Ethiopian culture: the possibility of communicating in several, perhaps opposing registers at once.
The sociopolitical dynamics of Azmari norms are familiar even to the Israeliborn generation, since the State of Israel requires certain behaviors as a precondition for immigration and the benefits of citizenship (see Seeman 2009: 28, 91, for the religious preconditions today). One of these implicit behaviors is obedience, and Ethiopian-Israeli social protests are frequently reactions to governmental strictures on further Ethiopian (Falash Mura) immigration. As a result, many Ethiopian-Israelis, known to Israelis as “shy and quiet” (Seeman 2009: 25) behave, whether individually, collectively, or inadvertently, like Azmaris: they learn quickly which kinds of critique of the state apparatus are acceptable and which will cause them trouble with the authorities. Therefore, as I build the concept of Azmari citizenship, or a mode of relating to the state modeled after an Azmari’s awareness of boundaries, I argue that many Ethiopian-Israeli musicians—as prominent spokespeople and social critics—take on the social characteristics of the Azmari without saying so explicitly.
Following from the work of Don Seeman (2009: 102) and Shalva Weil (1995: 3), I posit that Ethiopian-Israelis engage in wax and gold (sem-enna-werq) regularly, and that musicians make aesthetic choices according to the acknowledged parameters of critique. As I explore the different Ethiopian musical genres being created in and around Tel Aviv, I present these aesthetic choices as implicit signals that reorient Ethiopian-Israeli citizenship away from the top-down integration framework, and toward alternative narratives that build a collective sense of contribution to Israeli society based on tangible achievements and repositioning in the context of global migration flows.
I frame the Azmari figure and the technique of wax and gold as a key theoretical strand in this book, but wax and gold was also a crucial element of my fieldwork experience in Tel Aviv in 2008–2009. Working with Ethiopian-Israelis required constant navigation of taboo, veiled opinions and self-censorship because the stakes of representation were so high. In his outstanding book on the Falash Mura’s return to Judaism, One People, One Blood, anthropologist Don Seeman frames wax and gold, in effect, as etic versus emic knowledge: “The term wax and gold also stands for a pervasive cultural aesthetic that applies equally to a form of prose in which meaning is elusive and masks are common. It can take a real virtuoso to crack the code of semana worke when it is well performed, because the surface meanings themselves contain multiple levels to confuse or misdirect those who lack the perspicacity to see what lies beneath” (2009: 74).
My fieldwork experience transpired much as Seeman describes: people were willing to talk to me, but the content of what they said was often less useful than the dynamics driving what they did not say at first. The everyday practice of wax and gold as Seeman frames it is indeed partially due to a “pervasive cultural aesthetic,” and it is widespread because the stakes of working with Ethiopian-Israelis are so high.
Scholarly representation has affected Ethiopian-Israelis’ legal and immigration rights since long before they were called Ethiopian-Israelis (which is to say, back in Ethiopia). As early as the nineteenth century, the claim of Jewish ancestry, along with its endorsement by respected Jewish scholars like Jacques Faitlovitch (see Trevisan Semi 2004), has affected the group’s right to religious legitimacy and, later, Israeli citizenship. In his compelling analysis of conversion, Seeman explains that rabbinic or governmental authorities often appropriate researchers’ assertions about Ethiopian-Israeli status to determine religious legitimacy, as they did with Kay Kaufman Shelemay’s findings (1986, 1991). In an especially poignant case, Hagar Salamon offers a moving explanation of her personal battle over whether to expose the practice of slavery (barya) among Ethiopian Jews in Ethiopia (see 2002 for an intense ethnographic account). Ethiopian-Israelis are aware of this dynamic of scholarly research and often exercise reserve accordingly.
By the time I began my fieldwork in summer 2008, these issues of representation and fieldwork ethics were already well-known in the subdiscipline of Beta Israel studies, which focuses on Ethiopian Jews in Ethiopia and Israel. I embarked on fieldwork aware of the potential appropriation of research findings by interested parties. Hence at every stage I have taken issues of anonymity extremely seriously, offering often-minimalist details about my informants, some of whom are engaged in legal battles against the Israeli state. Unless an interviewee is a public figure whose identity cannot reasonably be shielded, I have anonymized all of my informants, as well as some details like the town where they live.
As I carried on my fieldwork, exercising what might be characterized as extreme caution, I soon became aware of the limitations of the semistructured interview in the context of everyday practice of wax and gold. Shalva Weil’s article “It Is Futile to Trust in Man” (1995) speaks for itself in this respect, and Seeman confirms that interviews are conducted with the wax-and-gold dynamic in the background (2009: 100–102). Recognizing that my own interview material was clouded by guarded speech, and an overwhelming hesitation among many informants about criticizing the State of Israel explicitly, I soon realized that musical style and text itself might be a site where the “gold” emerges. Therefore, this book offers far more analysis of musical text and style than it does of direct quotation of interview material. For an anthropologist left uncomfortable with my reliance on musical source material rather than the words exchanged in interviews, I contend that musical style is an area where unguarded attitudes toward the State of Israel emerge. If this book is read as especially musicological, then, it is because my analysis delves into musical style and genre as a response to what I perceive as a wax-and-gold dynamic in everyday speech about controversial issues.
It is not an overstatement, then, to say that I rely on wax and gold as a main theory and a key method in this project. I look to some of the extraordinary work done with Ethiopian-Israelis by anthropologists and folklorists as a model for using alternative forms of communication as source material. In addition to Don Seeman’s work (2009), and his outstanding recent article on the moral judgments of coffee rituals and possession among Ethiopian-Israelis (2015), I look to Hagar Salomon’s work on dream analysis (2002) and jokes (2011). Both scholars nimbly use their extensive interview material to derive their conclusions, but they also draw from a variety of nonverbal and intangible aspects of interpersonal exchange. Itsushi Kawase’s stunning documentary film work in Ethiopia on Azmaris (2010) further demonstrates the probative value of musical performance in its own right. My discussion of Azmari citizenship, then, relies primarily on analysis of musical style that engages in critique of the state, when individuals might not do so in their everyday speech.
I should add as a caveat that the concept of Azmari citizenship is inherently paradoxical: some Ethiopian-Israeli musicians would hesitate to say explicitly that their musical style is coded political statement, so overt confirmation of my interpretation is limited by the very social conventions I describe. Ultimately, though, I posit the Azmari figure, and the practice of wax and gold, as an effective way of understanding how Ethiopian-Israelis—even those too young to remember the institution of the Azmari from Ethiopia—relate to Israeli society.
MUSIC AND MYTH, MUSIC AS MYTH
Throughout this book, I describe schizophonic, decontextualized, individual sonic references as invoking Afrodiasporic, Ethiopianist, or Zionist myths. I adopt the terminology of myth as one conceptual framework for understanding sound because I interpret these decontextualized sounds as what the religiousstudies scholar Ivan Strenski terms “a dramatic development of dogma” (1992: 117, dogma being understood as religious doctrine or moral code). Only a short time after beginning my fieldwork, I came to recognize that certain performance practices represent social or political positionings that, whether intentionally or not, invoke narrative tropes of inclusion that are recognizable to most Ethiopian-Israelis. Many, like dreadlocks or biblical references in lyrics, are easy to discern as appealing to histories of blackness or Jewishness, but are only interpreted as advocating a method of integration by active listeners who are attuned to the narrative and dramatic power of performing these disembodied schizophonic sounds. Therefore, I suggest that sounds themselves, rather than (or in addition to) speech and stories, constitute a kind of multisensory myth that invokes and articulates etiologies and ideologies of belonging.
Ivan Strenski derives his definition of myth from Bronisław Malinowski’s work, rather than through the prism of folklore and comparative religion.9 Malinowski’s ethnographically informed interpretation contrasts with the work of religion scholars like Robert Segal who more or less ignore political motives underlying form insofar as they maintain that the form of myth derives from the social function it performs in society. As Strenski articulates the position of anthropology, myth is “a story which is told in order to establish a belief” (1992: 121). Malinowski thus takes the perspective that, insofar as myths address power relations within a social group, they constitute the public performance of ultimately political narrative tropes. That definition provides the theoretical underpinning of myth as I define it in this study, as does Michael Jackson’s assertion about the exchange of rumors and folktales: “It is in this two-way transformation of private into public personae, and shared worldviews into personal allegories, that narratives attain their power” (2013: 227).
I 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 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, washing dishes in Tel Aviv’s restaurants). Many of these guest workers depart after a few years, but some stay on as long-term residents, a small but visible number marrying Israelis and raising children who eventually serve in the Israeli military (military service being the ultimate symbol of integration in Zionist tropes). This urban environment full of international culture and migrant workers influenced my research immensely. Conducting fieldwork about marginalized minorities in and around Tel Aviv reveals multiple points of disparity, since the city’s assets (a vibrant arts scene and an abundance of sushi restaurants) and its downsides (the abject poverty of its many immigrants and the exploitation of labor migrants) go hand in hand. Indeed, Ethiopian-Israelis are not the only population that has troubles in Tel Aviv, but they constitute a group that encapsulates the inherent paradoxes and hypocrisies of the cosmopolitan city.
Finally, although I refer throughout this book to Tel Aviv, the city is officially called Tel Aviv-Jaffa, and the relationship of Israeli Jews to their Arab neighbors, on both sides of the Green Line (1949 armistice lines), affects everyday life profoundly. I will touch only briefly in this book on issues pertaining to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it looms in the background of any discussion of race, ethnicity, class, religion, culture, language, and national identity in modern Israel. It is relevant to this book insofar as the conflict is the source of many Israeli cultural and political anxieties, but I also submit this book as a case study of a minority trying to come to terms with Israeli citizenship through cultural output.
OVERVIEW
In the first three chapters, I unpack the narratives of Ethiopianist, Afrodiasporic, and Zionist imagery. Chapter 1 examines Afrodiasporic myths of citizenship through the work of Ester Rada, perhaps the most prominent Ethiopian-Israeli entertainer today. Through her convention of singing in English, while constructing a composite Afrodiasporic style comprising soul, reggae, jazz, gospel, and Ethio-jazz, she suggests that Ethiopian-Israelis look to the African diaspora as a mechanism for upward mobility and acceptance in Israeli society.
In chapter 2, I outline the Ethiopianist myths that glorify a certain version of Ethiopian history and frame Ethiopian-Israelis as central to it. I describe a weekly performance at Habesh, an Ethiopian restaurant in Tel Aviv, as a prism through which to understand Ethiopian musical principles. For decades scholars have relied on Michael Powne’s Ethiopian Music (1968), a descriptive work based chiefly on secondary sources, to understand the Ethiopian modal system (qignit) that descends from church modes and forms the basis for popular midcentury Ethio-jazz. The typology is contested but taught today in conservatories in Ethiopia (Weiser and Falceto 2013: 2). The first mode is called tezeta, translated as “nostalgia”; it is a feeling, a style of song, and a musical mode based on the song of the same name (the major variant is the common pentatonic C D E G A C). Tezeta is a major focus of chapter 2. The second mode, anchihoy, is the most common in Ethio-jazz, built on the tritone and played C D ♭ F G ♭ A C. The third, batti, is named after a city of the same name, and widely used in Azmari music (C E F G B C). The fourth mode is ambassel (C D ♭ F G A ♭ C). All four modes were on display at Habesh, which served as a central meeting point for the geographically scattered Ethiopian-Israeli population. Ethiopian imagery (instrumentation, tonality, ornamentation, choreography) is invoked there as a mechanism of nostalgia (tezeta) and critique of Ethiopian marginality. Ethiopianist imagery offers a foil to a dominant Israeli perception that Ethiopians “came without culture.”
Chapter 3 focuses on the work of one band: the internationally renowned group the Idan Raichel Project. This chapter offers a close reading of three of Raichel’s songs, arguing that the heavy emphasis on Israeli musical conventions renders the inclusion of Ethiopian musicians and source material an appeal to the Israeli public to accept them in Israeli society, writing them into dominant Zionist national narratives of home and return.
After exploring the three divergent narratives of citizenship, I devote the next two chapters to their reconfiguration for performance for the wider Israeli public. Chapter 4 explores public and national performances of Eskesta, the Ethiopian shoulder dance, arguing that public displays of physical virtuosity reveal and subvert the often-explicit prejudice against Ethiopian-Israelis as lesser citizens. I argue that the public display of bodily otherness borrows from Afrodiasporic conceptions of blackness, and from Ethiopianist imagery of rural life as a mechanism for framing Ethiopians as valuable citizens.
Chapter 5 further considers the reconfigurations of Afrodiasporic, Ethiopianist, and Zionist myths through Ethiopian-Israeli hip-hop. Hebrew lyrics and consistent invocation of the repressive state apparatus render Ethiopian-Israeli hip-hop more concerned with integration into Israeli society than with political subversion. Through a close examination of the best-known Ethiopian-Israeli hip-hop/reggae song to date, Axum’s “Ma Im Hakesef” (What About the Money), I demonstrate that Afrodiasporic narratives of exclusion and Ethiopianist iconography of exceptionalism ultimately serve a narrative of Israeli multiculturalism. I deal in this chapter exclusively with music created by Ethiopian-Israelis, and not with the primarily imported hip-hop that Ethiopian-Israeli teenagers listen to. That material is treated thoroughly and sensitively by David Ratner in his Hebrew-language book about (usually African American) rap shaping the lives of young Ethiopian-Israelis (2015). In effect, Ratner engages in reception theory while this book’s chapter engages in close reading of a locally produced song.
Throughout my examination of Ethiopian music as framing the rights of struggling citizens, I acknowledge that the city of Tel Aviv has been thoroughly transformed over the past decade by a wave of immigration from Eritrea, consisting primarily of asylum seekers who live in the poor southern districts of town. Chapter 6 describes Levinski Street, the nerve center of Tel Aviv’s Ethiopian life, and I map the city’s Ethiopian music scene around it. The encounter along Levinski between Ethiopian citizens and Eritrean asylum seekers sets the tone for the frameworks and challenges of citizenship for Ethiopian-Israelis. By mapping the emerging local Horn of Africa mediascape, I establish the limitations of Ethiopian-Israeli citizenship in tension with other black cohabitants and with other citizen minorities.
Finally, in the conclusion, I frame Tel Aviv as an emerging node in the Ethiopian transnational migration network—a stop on the tour circuit for Ethiopian musicians like Rome, London, or Washington, DC (the latter already written about by Shelemay 2006a and 2009). By facilitating the establishment of discrete citizenship narratives, Ethiopian-Israeli musicians have opened a dialogue with Ethiopia that the rupture of emigration curtailed. Therefore, Ethiopian-Israeli musical influence is beginning to feed back into Ethiopia and across the network, establishing new peripheries and dialogues across Ethiopian cultural life.
As a mechanism for the Azmari, wax and gold facilitates the negotiation of ostensibly fixed boundaries of speech. Ethiopian-Israeli musicians challenge the seemingly inflexible boundaries of Israeli citizenship through the same mechanism; they occasionally do so through lyrics, but more commonly by invoking schizophonic, often decontextualized sounds as challenges to accepted ideologies. Across musical styles, rappers, dancers, and instrumentalists mobilize nonverbal mythologies of cultural history to reposition and reimagine their status in Israeli society, proposing an alternative to the state’s unfinished attempts at immigrant absorption. Considering the tension in Israel-Palestine over citizenship and belonging, evidence that musicians bypass the policymakers’ top-down frameworks effectively might offer some alternatives to the nationalist narratives dominating the headlines today.
