Most of this project was completed during my time at SOAS, and I thank everyone who was involved there. First and foremost, Abigail Wood supervised my dissertation and supported the project from the beginning. Angela Impey has been my most important mentor, and Lucy Duran and Rachel Harris are dear colleague-friends. Caspar Melville and Simon Webster read significant portions of this book, and I am extremely grateful for their editorial eye. I have benefited from guidance and collegiality over the years from Carli Coetzee, Yair Wallach, Mehmet Izbudak, Jaeho Kang, Gil Karpas, Richard Widdess, Owen Wright, Nick Gray, Keith Howard, Tom Selwyn, and Miia Laine. Many thanks go to Yoseph Mengistu for Amharic lessons. I was fortunate to have a distinguished group of people in or around my PhD cohort—Moshe Morad, Sabina Rakcheyeva, Chris Mau, Shzr Ee Tan, Chloe Alaghband-Zadeh, and Joe Browning are dear colleagues, as are Anna Morcom, Oliver Shao, and Phil Alexander, with whom I almost overlapped. I am always inspired by the energy and creativity of my wonderful PhD students Clara Wenz, Robbie Campbell, Rasika Ajotikar, and Vicky Tadros. Special appreciation goes to Mehryar Golestani (Reveal), working with whom has been life-changing.
I am grateful as well to those who helped make fieldwork and writing run smoothly. Sam Thrope has been my launchpad in Israel for many years, and Joyce Klein has always made me feel more comfortable in Jerusalem. I always look forward to meeting with Tamar Warburg, Varda Makovsky, Navah and Seffi Kogen, and Herb Rosenblum when we overlap in Tel Aviv. I would not have embarked on this project without the crucial music education I received from Isaac Malkin. Closer to home, Katherine Williams and Tim Schaap, Virina Laskaridou, Vanessa Springer-Treiber, Arash Yomtobian, Brian Lobel, Tina Elliott, Ben Mandelson, Donna Aranson, Barbara and Ish Rosenblit, and Howard Ellison have been supportive throughout this project. I am particularly grateful to Katie Allen and Stephanie Wells for taking such good care of my young daughter Mika during its last stages.
And finally, thanks are due to my family. My grandparents David and Dina Kogen and Eugenia von Valtier were instrumental in my education; my grand-father understood better than anyone what it took for immigrants to succeed. Catherine and Richard Webster, Anthony Webster, and the late Louise Harries tolerated my working on this project through many visits over the years, and accompanied me to hear a lot of Ethiopian music. My cousins Mira and Josh Resnick, Dov Kogen and Rebecca Shapiro, William Schlanger, and Karl and Fritz von Valtier know this project extremely well by now. Aunts and Uncles Bill and Cheryl von Valtier and Herb and Sheila Rosenblum have been constant sources of encouragement in my life, especially in the areas of music and Hebrew. Isaac and Shaya Woloff have been wonderful companions, and Isaac made my last week of fieldwork especially memorable. My father, Rabbi Judah Kogen, has always been ready to offer assistance on this project, driving me to an interview at an absorption center, and instilling in me a love of ancient text. My mother, Lisa Kogen, has been my lifelong role model in curiosity, resilience, and empathy. Together they have been my most important teachers, and my sisters Shira Kogen and Abigail Woloff have been my dearest friends. Simon Webster has shared his life with this project and with me since the project’s inception, and I am so grateful for his editorial contributions and moral support, for sharing my interests, for helping with the book title and tracking down sources when I need them, and for always finding new music for me. It’s hard to believe that this research was completed before Mika came into the world, and I’m so delighted that she already loves books!
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
In transliterating Hebrew, I have generally adopted the Library of Congress system. In the case of proper nouns for people, places, and musical ensembles, I use their preferred nonstandard spelling. In some cases I add an h at the end of a word that ends in the letter hay, and sometimes I transliterate the letter ayin as a instead of ’. The letters “ḥ” and “kh” make basically the same sound in English but represent different letters in Hebrew. I sometimes separate syllables surrounding the sound “ai” with a single prime ('). I have also adopted the Library of Congress system for Amharic words.
INTRODUCTION
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,