Hava Nagila, Jewish ‘business card’

“Hava Nagila, Hava Nagila…” and Jerusalem flags pop up in the head with the image of happy dancing people at the traditional Jewish wedding sing in excitement holding the just-married on the two chairs as an old-time tradition. That’s exactly the rejoicing in its pure form as sung in the lyrics of Hava Nagila – “Let's rejoice and be happy”, in translation from Hebrew.

Jewish wedding

So well-recognized today, the song has a long and pretty obscure story behind it and not many are familiar with its roots. Would you be surprised if found out that its homeland represents a mixture of Russia and Ukraine, where this Hasidic melody first was born being called a ‘nigun’ – a single melody not accompanied with any words.  After some time the nigun immigrated to Jerusalem and Avraham Idelsohn – the father of Jewish music – gave it a second birth in a form of a folklore song. There is was, a business card of the Jew with a mix of German, Russian, Yemenite communities’ features in it. The song with lyrics taken from the Psalms was included into the Hebrew folklore songbook and was selected as a celebration song to mark the defeat of Turks by the British during the World War I. The tune caught up immediately and soon the whole Jerusalem was performing it.

Rabbi

So many times was the song re-made, re-sung, re-arranged that counting them would be barely possible. At a certain point it even became the object of various parodies and humor sketches by both Jewish and non-Jewish artists. But let’s stick closer to the beautiful original-like versions. And here’s a lovely one – arrangement of Hava Nagila by Tal Zilber. And the author himself performing his work on piano: