{"id":53997,"date":"2019-05-23T15:42:48","date_gmt":"2019-05-23T13:42:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.iemj.org\/la-musique-des-juifs-dethiopie-les-beta-israel\/"},"modified":"2025-10-06T12:58:42","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T10:58:42","slug":"la-musique-des-juifs-dethiopie-les-beta-israel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.iemj.org\/en\/la-musique-des-juifs-dethiopie-les-beta-israel\/","title":{"rendered":"The music of the Ethiopian Jews, the Beta Israel"},"content":{"rendered":"

A historic, liturgic and musicologic analysis of the music of the Beta Israel, inspired from the works by Simha Arom, Frank Alvarez-Pereyre, Shoshana Ben-Dor and Olivier Tourny.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is in the early 1980\u2019s that started the clandestine immigration of Ethiopian Jews to Israel. The latter, improperly called Falasha<\/em> (pejorative word which means \u201crootless\u201d or \u201cexiled\u201d) fled, like many of their compatriots, civil war and famine and took refuge in Sudan. In 1984, the operation Moses organized by the state of Israel, allowed to welcome 7.000 Ethiopian Jews coming from the transit camps in Sudan; shortly after, the Operation Saba (1985) repatriated 648 people; finally, the Operation Salomon succeeded in bringing by airlift 14.300 people in 24 hours.<\/p>\n

The last Beta Israel<\/em> who stayed in Ethiopia emigrated to Israel between 1991 and 1994. But in 1992 an irregular emigration began, due to the political evolution in Israel, the Falash Mura<\/em>. Between 1992 and 2013, over 35.000 Falash Mura<\/em> arrived in Israel. Officially not Jewish, once in Israel, they had to start a complete conversion to orthodox judaism before obtaining full citizenship.<\/p>\n

\"doc_2_ethiopie500px50-2.jpg\"The integration of the Ethiopian Jews into the Hebrew state wasn\u2019t done easily. Poor, often illiterate and living off of their handicraft, they had to face a modern and high technological society.
Moreover, under the pressure of Israeli religious authorities, they had to abandon their ancestral ritual practices to belong to a normalised judaism. The Great Rabbinate even tried to force them a symbolic conversion (ritual immersion, and for the men, a \u201crecircumcision\u201d by spilling a drop of blood), that was boycotted by most of them. Recognized today as full-blown Jews, the religious situation of the Beta Israel<\/em> remains complicated. Their priests, called qessotch<\/em>, got their religious and spiritual authority taken away… with the consequence of the progressive but inevitable disappearance of their rite.<\/p>\n

The Ethiopian community living in Israel numbered around 138,200 people in 2014. Nearly 30,000 children were born into the Jewish state and followed the Israeli educative curriculum. They speak Hebrew and practice the language of their ancestors less and less. The integration process started and the days of Ethiopian ritual, and of its music, are counted.<\/p>\n

A few notions about the liturgical music of the Beta Israel <\/em><\/strong>[1]<\/sup><\/a>Excerpt of the book by Herv\u00e9 Roten, Musiques liturgiques juives : parcours et escales<\/a>, Coll. Musiques du monde, Cit\u00e9 de la Musique \/ Actes Sud, 1998, pp. 107-115<\/span><\/span>