The dramatic immigration of the Ethiopian Jews from their country of origin to Israel in the 1980’s and 1990’s has moved the hearts of people all around the world. Since then, scholars from several countries have been intensively engaged in documenting and studying the diverse religious and secular musical repertoires of Ethiopian Jews. The present page directs you to projects on this topic that are related to the JMRC and its researchers.
Upon the initiative of the JMRC, a joint French and Israeli research team was set up in 1985 to document in detail the liturgy of Beta Israel (as the Ethiopian Jews refer to their community) for future generations. Our partner institution in this project has been the Laboratoire de Langues et Civilisations a Tradition Orale (LACITO) of the CNRS, Ethnomusicology Department, followed now by a new research team, Langues-Sociétés-Musique directed by Frank Alvarez-Pereyre. Distinguished ethnomusicologists Simha Arom and Olivier Tourny and Shoshana Ben Dor, expert on the liturgy of Beta Israel, joined this project.
The work was based on the understanding that collecting and analyzing the liturgical heritage of this Jewish community would lead to its preservation and to important contributions in many other fields of academic inquiry besides musicology, such as Semitic linguistics and liturgical studies. This first phase of the project was completed during the period closely following the two large waves of the Jewish Ethiopian immigration to Israel and the complete and unedited field recordings are available at the Sound Archive of the National Library of Israel. The second phase resulted in the publication of a heavily annotated three CD album that is accessible through our website. A third step includes a book that summarizes the findings on this subject and is under preparation.
About the same time that the project on the liturgy of Beta Israel was been carried out, mostly in Jerusalem, JMRC scholar Nili Belkind, then an undergraduate student, engaged in a detailed ethnography of the daily musical life of the Ethiopian Jewish youth around Israel. Her pathbreaking work is now made available through our website.
