Recording, Migration and What Was Displaced

Kay Kaufman Shelemay went to the Gondar region in the mid 1970s and recorded the liturgy as the kessim then sang it. That fieldwork produced the first systematic transcription and analysis of the repertory, and it happened at almost the last possible moment: within a decade the community was leaving, and by 1991 the great majority of Beta Israel were in Israel.

Shelemay's conclusion has shaped the argument ever since. She found deep and specific resemblances between the Beta Israel liturgy and Ethiopian Christian monastic practice, and read the community's religious system as having taken its present form inside Ethiopia, in contact with that monasticism, rather than as a survival of a pre-rabbinic Israelite liturgy. Steven Kaplan's history of the community reached compatible conclusions about its institutions. The community's own account, and a strand of earlier scholarship, holds instead for ancient descent. The atlas records the dating of the liturgy as contested, because both readings have supporters and both are argued from the same evidence.

What has happened since is not contested. In Israel the rabbinate did not recognise the kessim as rabbis, and Beta Israel religious life has largely been absorbed into standard Israeli Jewish practice. The Ge'ez liturgy is now maintained by a small and ageing group of kessim, is not the ordinary Sabbath practice of most Ethiopian Israelis, and survives most fully in the recordings and transcriptions made before the migration. Whether it continues as a living office or only as a documented one is being decided now.