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A Song Of Longing Summary

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I read an Ethnography called "A Song Of Longing, An Ethiopian Journey", by Kay Kaufman Shelemay. Shelemay gathered a good amount of religious music in a town of Gondar, a city in Ethiopia. The Ethiopian rules and regulations upset her research and ended up studying the Ethiopian Christian service in Addis Ababa. During that time, she met and married a Jewish businessman, Jack Shelemay, from a Middle Eastern (Aden), whose family was permanently settled in Ethiopia. "A Song Of Longing" is not a book that was said it to be, she late changed it and made it about Ethiopian religious music, and also a story of Kaufman 's field experience. It is also a story of intercultural marriage, the foreign population of Addis Ababa in the early 1970s, and a descriptive narrative of the early years of the Ethiopian revolution.
The book keeps repeating the descriptions of ritual and village life, rural travel, problems for women in a society …show more content…

In reality, they were not descendants of Jews who came from the Middle East at some time in antiquity. They were more likely than residents of the Ethiopian Christian mountains who maintained a form of local Christianity that was very Jewish and who came to their remote villages with the monks in the 1400s. Multiplication of the treatment of Ethiopian Jews in Israel and their status in the Jewish world can be significant. It seems to me that Shelemay 's conclusions are valid, but after more than hundred years of increasing exposure to the prevailing Jewish tradition, the Falashas are certainly Jewish like any other person who claims to be. While her findings can clarify history, today they should not think of Judaism for anyone. It was interesting to learn about Ethiopian culture/music, although a little bit more about Jewish culture as

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