Gondar’s Child: songs, honor and identity among Ethiopian Jews in Israel by Marylin Herman (review)

Based on the author’s 1994 dissertation, Gondar’s Child is the only monograph published thus far addressing the Amharic song repertoire of the Ethiopian Jews as performed among immigrants in Israel. Based on a prolonged fieldwork project, the work focuses on one band, Porachat HaTikvah (The Blossoming Hope): its members, activities, creative process, performances and repertoire around the years 1990–2. The band is conceived as a microcosm of the entire Betä Israel community (House of Israel, the self-referential term used by the Ethiopian Jews) that immigrated to Israel in several waves ca. 1970–90.

Written in the reflexive vein of British social anthropology, the book opens with a long introduction centred on the author’s induction in the field. Although such an introduction is a customary protocol in a doctoral dissertation, the book reads very well without it. Divided into two sections titled ‘Ethiopia’ (chapters 2–4) and ‘Israel’ (the remaining fifteen chapters), the book revolves around the concept of ‘honour’. The first section sets the historical and social background to the consolidation of a Betä Israel self in opposition to the dominant Christian Ethiopian society that marked this Judaizing community as tainted with evil-eye and even animal qualities, and marginalized it physically and socially. Marginalization was mutual, however, as the Betä Israel developed a sense of honour and pride that served as a mechanism for coping with such blunt discrimination. Immigration to Israel dramatically relocated the Betä Israel community in a totally new social setting: urban, modern, secular and Jewish versus the village, pre-modern, religious and Christian setting in Ethiopia. Herman maintains that in Israel the concept of honour was rerouted as a strategy to cope, as in Ethiopia, with a structurally similar reality of discrimination and difference, only this time marked by skin colour and a divergent practice of Judaism.

The songs of Porachat HaTikvah reflect, in Herman’s analysis, the basic tenets of this rerouting of Betä Israel’s sense of honour in Israel. The band’s members attempted to stage a live performance based on the representation of traditional Ethiopian Jewish values to both their own community and the general Israeli audience. Yet, as an organization, the band represented a new form of Ethiopian Jewish artistic expression that had no precedent prior to immigration. Its Amharic repertoire, to which only a small number of urbanized Betä Israel members had access in Ethiopia, was a departure from a traditional Betä Israel musical repertoire. The inclusion of women in the band, another unthinkable scenario in Ethiopia, reinforced the radical novelty of an organization that was supposed to cherish the values of ‘tradition’.

Herman’s thick ethnography abounds in long quotations drawn from her conversations with the members of the band and detailed observations of rehearsals and performances. From these conversations emerge paradoxes of the desire to progress within a Western-oriented society and the yearning for tradition, upheavals in gender relations, and a re-evaluation of Jewishness. Within these discourses, the concept of honour as addressed in the songs appears mostly tied to that of shameful and desirable love and their transformation in the Israeli context. Other interesting details emerge from the descriptions, such as the visits to Israel of major Christian performing artists from Ethiopia who coached the young Betä Israel artists of Porachat HaTikvah.

The transcriptions, transliterations and translations of most of the songs analysed in detail by Herman comprise the bulk of the book and enhance the value of this monograph as a source for the student interested in the Amharic repertoire that took shape in Israel. Emic concepts such as ‘receiving’ or ‘accepting’ the song as the basis for responsorial or antiphonal singing are addressed through the analysis of specific performances. Form, harmony and modality are other musical parameters thoroughly analysed.

The only shortcoming of this publication resides in its pertinence. Publishing in 2012 a text...