ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role and function of their liturgical and para-liturgical music and, in particular, their increasing use of the Hebrew language, in the construction of the Abayudaya’s Jewish identity. It focuses on their strategic process of choosing and composing music as they both look inward toward their own community and outward toward an imagined world Jewish community where their formal Jewish status is uncertain, even in the face of the halachic (Jewish legal, Hebrew) conversion of approximately half of the community in 2002 by a visiting beit din (rabbinic court, Hebrew) from Judaism’s Conservative Movement. The Abayudaya’s self-conception of their core identity has changed over the past decade as they have had increasing contact with Jews from North America and Israel. A unique musical repertoire has developed among the Abayudaya. One might consider the examples of the Abayudaya looking outward towards World Jewry for an authoritative reference point as evidence of a relationship colored with “tinges of domination.”
