Hava Nagila

The story

The melody comes from a slow, 19th-century Hasidic niggun, a chant, attributed to the Sadigurer Hasidim, who lived in what is now Ukraine. Members of that community began to settle in Jerusalem in 1915. There Abraham Zevi Idelsohn, a professor at the Hebrew University who was cataloguing all known Jewish music and teaching composition, gave the chant to his class and set them to add rhythm and words to make a modern Hebrew song. One of his students was the cantorial student Moshe Nathanson. Both men have been named as the song's author; the text was probably refined by Idelsohn, who wrote in 1932 that the melody had inspired him.

The song was made in 1918 to celebrate the Balfour Declaration and the British victory over the Ottomans in 1917, and was first performed by a mixed choir at a concert in Jerusalem. Idelsohn printed his arrangement in 1922 in his Hebrew songbook Sefer Hashirim, and in the same year made its first commercial recording, for the Polyphon label, in a series of 39 Hebrew folk songs. The song spread quickly through the Jewish diaspora and became a fixture of weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs and other Jewish celebrations.

The version later known around the world was probably first recorded by the Israeli folk duo Ran & Nama (Ran Eliran and Nechama Hendel) on their 1959 album. In the same year Harry Belafonte recorded it at Carnegie Hall; he rarely gave a concert without it and counted it, with "The Banana Boat Song", as one of the two songs that stood out in his career. From the late 1950s it was recorded in many styles: pop and orchestral versions, surf rock by Dick Dale and the Del Tones in 1963, a talking blues by Bob Dylan in the early 1960s, and a Cantonese adaptation by George Lam in 1987. John Lennon and Yoko Ono sang it during their Bed-In in 1969.

The song also crossed into sport. Supporters of AFC Ajax in Amsterdam and of Tottenham Hotspur in London, clubs whose fans have long used Jewish imagery, sing it in their stadiums. At the 2012 Summer Olympics the American gymnast Aly Raisman won the floor exercise final, the first American woman to take gold in that event, performing to its tune.

What it says

As its title ("Let us rejoice") says, it is a call to shared happiness. It tells no story: its few words invite the company to celebrate together, and the music quickens for dancing.

The words