Adir Hu: A Song History

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Adir Hu is one of the hymns that medieval Jews attached to the Passover Haggadah, to be sung after the formal Seder service has ended.[1] Its stanzas run through the Hebrew alphabet, naming qualities of God one after another, and its refrain begs that the Temple be rebuilt soon.[1] The 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia counted it among the newest parts of the Haggadah, dating its appearance there to roughly the late fifteenth century and not much earlier.[2] In Ashkenazi tradition, and in no other, it is singled out above the rest of the Haggadah's songs.[1]

Round embossed and engraved silver Passover seder plate with a broad decorated rim and a central medallion

Israel Lattes, Passover seder plate, embossed and engraved silver, 1824. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

Ashkenazi Jews also used a Judeo-German version, first printed in an early sixteenth-century Prague Haggadah; because its refrain asks God to build the Temple, Jews in southern and western Germany came to call the Seder night Baunacht, the night of building.[1] Families sing the hymn to what is essentially a single melody, and synagogues have taken that melody up as a musical emblem of Passover, using it in several parts of the festival service.[1] The earliest known printing of the tune is in a Hebrew, Latin and German Haggadah published in 1644 by J. S. Rittangel, a professor of Oriental languages at Königsberg.[2] Sources differ on how much older it is: the Encyclopaedia Judaica allows that it may predate that printing,[1] while the Jewish Encyclopedia article by Francis L. Cohen judged it comparatively new in 1644 and probably "the successful inspiration of a Jewish singer" of the early 1600s.[2] Cohen also noted that a 1769 printing gave the melody almost exactly as North German Jews sang it in his own day, and that it had travelled as far as Asia and Africa.[2]

Judy House includes it in A Collection Of Jewish Music For The Mountain Dulcimer, a 71-page book of Passover and Chanukah songs and other Jewish music arranged in DAD tuning, with a page on each song's history and a pronunciation key for the Hebrew.[3]

Our book that contains the song "Adir Hu"

Sources

  1. Encyclopaedia Judaica (via Encyclopedia.com): "Addir Hu".
  2. Jewish Encyclopedia (1906): "Addir Hu".
  3. Judy House: "A Collection Of Jewish Music For The Mountain Dulcimer".
  4. Image: Israel Lattes, Passover seder plate, embossed and engraved silver, 1824. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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