Beta Israel Liturgical Chant

The Beta Israel prayed in Ge'ez, the liturgical language of Ethiopian Christianity, and not in Hebrew. Their services were led not by rabbis but by the kessim, a priesthood of their own, and the shape of the office owed nothing to the rabbinic prayer book that structures Jewish worship almost everywhere else. To a visitor from a synagogue in Europe or the Middle East, very little about a Beta Israel service would have been recognisable except its subject.

The sound was closer to what could be heard across the road. The liturgy was chanted rather than read, accompanied by the kabaro, a double headed drum, by the sistrum, a metal rattle, and by the prayer staff on which the standing clergy leaned and which they struck against the ground to mark the rhythm. Every one of those instruments is also an instrument of Ethiopian Orthodox worship, and the manner of chanting has features in common with it too. The community understood itself as Israelite and ancient; its liturgical toolkit was recognisably Ethiopian.

That combination is what makes the tradition important and what makes it hard to read. It is not a variant of a Jewish liturgy known from elsewhere, because there is no elsewhere it can be compared to. It is a body of practice that has to be interpreted on its own evidence, and the evidence is thin, because nothing about it was written down as music until the twentieth century and the written prayer texts that do survive are not a complete record of what was sung.

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.