Hava Nagila: A Song History

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Hava Nagila began as a nigun, a wordless Hasidic melody, sung among the Sadigura Hasidim, a group named for the Bukovina town of Sadigora.[1][2] Abraham Zvi Idelsohn, the pioneering scholar of Jewish music then living in Jerusalem, wrote that he notated the tune from a Sadigura Hasid there in 1915.[1][2] He later printed the original nigun in the tenth volume, devoted to Hasidic songs, of his multi-volume Thesaurus.[2][3]

Wooden tambourine with a calfskin head and metal jingles

Tambourine, various woods, metal hardware, calfskin head, 19th century. Shown in the spirit of the song; it has no connection to it.

In 1918 Idelsohn reshaped the melody, reordering its motifs and adding a Hebrew text that echoes Psalm 118:24, and a choir introduced the new song at a celebratory concert in Jerusalem.[2][1][4] Sources tie the song to the rejoicing in Jerusalem after the Balfour Declaration and the British capture of the city in late 1917, though the exact occasion and venue of the first performance are uncertain.[2][3][1][4] Authorship of the words is disputed: an account cited by the National Library of Israel credits Idelsohn, alone or with help from his students, while his student Cantor Moshe Nathanson later said he had suggested the verse, and Nathanson's descendants have long maintained that he set the words to the tune.[3][1][4] A Tel Aviv court case in the 1960s also aired a bitter quarrel over the song's royalties.[4] The 2012 documentary Hava Nagila: The Movie put members of both families on screen to argue the point.[4]

Idelsohn recorded the song with a small men's choir in Berlin in 1922, the same year he first published it in a Hebrew songbook.[2][1][4] By the 1940s it had become a staple of Jewish weddings and bar mitzvahs, danced as a hora, and in the 1950s Harry Belafonte routinely ended his concerts with it, while his 1959 live recording at Carnegie Hall became a best seller.[1] Judy House includes it in A Collection Of Jewish Music For The Mountain Dulcimer, a book of Jewish music arranged in DAD tuning.[5]

Our book that contains the song "Hava Nagila"

Sources

  1. My Jewish Learning (James Loeffler): "Hava Nagila's Long, Strange Trip".
  2. National Library of Israel (Gila Flam and Tamar Zigman): "Hava Nagila".
  3. National Library of Israel (Chen Malul): "Hava Nagilah – The Birth of a Song".
  4. Tablet (Edwin Seroussi and James Loeffler): "The Secret History of 'Hava Nagila'".
  5. Judy House: "A Collection Of Jewish Music For The Mountain Dulcimer".
  6. Image: Tambourine, various woods, metal hardware, calfskin head, 19th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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