Songs that travel: A review article of the CD BOX the liturgy of beta israel

In 1986, a Franco-Israeli team of scholars set out to document the liturgy of the Beta Esrael, a group of Ethiopian Jews which at the time was in the process of making aliyah under dramatic circumstances. The scholars gathered a group of priests in Israel and produced an impressive corpus of recordings, covering important parts of the liturgical tradition. Over the past decades, the team has been publishing their results in a number of articles and monographs, and in 2019 presented a selection of recordings in the form of a CD box. The box contains three CDs plus a bilingual booklet with information about the liturgical tradition of the Beta Esrael: Their music, prayers, and ritual practices. In this review article, the research results presented in the booklet are evaluated, with special attention paid to the effects that migration has had on the Beta Esrael liturgical tradition. It investigates which effects the historical circumstances surrounding the recordings have had on the material and subsequent analyses of it. This review article also provides an introduction to the transmission of Beta Esrael liturgical chant, comparing it with the Ethiopian Christian tradition, and offers an overview of earlier recordings of the Beta Esrael tradition, published and unpublished.