Hava Nagila

Abstract

This article is about the story of a favorite Jewish song of many people around the world. Hava Nagila is one of the first modern Israeli folk songs in the Hebrew language. It went on to become a staple of band performers at Jewish weddings and bar/bat (b'nei) mitzvah celebrations. The melody is based on a Hassidic Nigun. According to sources, the melody is taken from a Ukrainian folk song from Bukovina. The text was probably the work of musicologist Abraham Zvi Idelsohn, written in 1918. The text was composed in 1918, to celebrate the Balfour Declaration and the British victory over the Turks in 1917. During World War I, Idelsohn served in the Turkish Army as a bandmaster in Gaza, returning to his research in Jerusalem at the end of the war in 1919. In 1922, he published the Hebrew song book, “Sefer Hashirim”, which includes the first publication of his arrangement of the song Hava Nagila.