The dramatic arrival in Israel of thousands of Beta Israel, Ethiopian Jews, beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, produced in its wake a plethora of research. One of the most ambitious scholarly projects was a joint French-Israeli collaboration to document the community’s liturgical music.

The publication under review consists of a dual language (Hebrew-English) booklet and three CDs. The booklet (all page references here are to the English text), offers an overview of the Beta Israel liturgy and discusses issues such as its sources and languages. The textual characteristics of the prayers are analyzed as well as their performance practices. Their liturgical contexts including annual and life cycle rituals are presented (pp. 36–52). Finally, the music including melody, form, rhythm and scales are discussed (pp. 53–62). Fully a third of the text (pp. 63–90) details the contents of the three CDs with a short description of each prayer and the listing of the soloists of each performance.

Although the authors give pride of place to their ethnographic work including the recording of musical performances, details of the setting and participants are rather thin. While the names of the priests (qessoch, kahenat) involved in the recording are provided, no information about their background is given. From other earlier publications it appears that most of the priests came from the Tigre region of northern Ethiopia, which is a departure from previous recordings which were made in the Gondar region. Since the Beta Israel in these two areas of settlement in Ethiopia were rather isolated from each other, this is a crucial distinction. Differences in the liturgy from previous recordings may have resulted from a Tegrean or “mixed” performance.

It should also be noted that these recordings were made from invited performances of the liturgical pieces and not during the actual celebration of the relevant holidays or rituals. Thus, the claim to eventually provide an “understanding of the Beta Israel liturgy, as it was performed in Ethiopia until the mid-1980s” (p. 2) is rather surprising.

The transliteration of the Ge’ez (Ethiopic) does not conform to any of the widely used systems of transliteration. The authors were certainly free to choose whatever system of transliteration they wanted; however, their work would have inspired greater confidence if it was scientific, systematic, and consistent. The New Year festival is written as Berhan Sāraqa (p. 20), Berhan Saraqa, (p. 42), Berhān Sarāqa (p. 72), Ber’hān Sarāqa (p. 73). Numerous other examples could be cited. Considering these inconsistencies, one must ask what other aspects of language, particularly in transcribing the text as sung, have been overlooked.

The services at a funeral are identified as Fetat (pp. 49, 51), but presumably this is the Ge’ez word Fətḥat, which means “absolution” or “judging” and is one of the terms used to identify the Ethiopian Christian funeral service. This failure to correctly identify a common Ethiopian religious term leads me directly to another major weakness of this work. The researchers began their work only a few years after the publication in 1986 of Kay Kaufman Shelemay’s groundbreaking work on Beta Israel liturgy, based on her fieldwork in Ethiopia in the early 1970s. Shelemay proposed that the Beta Israel liturgy was not an ancient Jewish survival, but rather derived from the Ethiopian Christian monastic liturgy.

The authors clearly disagree with Shelemay, although they have not presented a systematic case against her historical claim. Whenever there is an opportunity to stress the links between Beta Israel and other Jewish traditions or the difference between Ethiopian Christian practice and that of the Beta Israel they do so, but often these are not convincing. The aforementioned New Year observance of Berhan Saraqa is described in the English section as “Rosh Hashanah” (The Hebrew term for the New Year); however, the Ge’ez term translates to mean “the light has appeared.” A scholar of Ethiopian traditions might well not be familiar with the Hebrew term.

My own views based on my study of Beta Israel literature and history are largely in agreement with Shelemay’s; however, an extensive quote from my work in which I argue that “with the possible exception of Beta Israel prayers…virtually the entire corpus of Beta Israel literature is of Christian origin” is cited to present me in opposition to her (p. 10). A mere page later my “with the possible exception” is distorted into “Kaplan (1987) proposed that the liturgical corpus of texts demonstrates no noticeable Christian influence” (p. 11). My largely appreciative review article discussing Shelemay’s views (published in the Jewish Quarterly Review in 1988) is ignored.

The authors promise that a more detailed book will be forthcoming (p. 3). One can only hope that some of the issues cited above will be addressed. In the meantime, it is important to note that they have deposited their material—music, scores and ethnographies in the Jewish Musical Research Centre in Jerusalem. Here researchers and members of the 150,000-strong Ethiopian Israeli community will be able to review this priceless collection of material, which can never be duplicated, and treasure the rich musical heritage which it documents.