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Stephenson:Neal:Quicksilver:605:Hava Nagila (Alan Sinder)

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

The Quicksilver page for Hava Nagila

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That the Barbary Corsairs have their galley slaves rowing to 'Hava Nagila' is eventually explained by Moseh in The Confusion.

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Hava Nagila

Here is a reasonable translation for those who don't understand transliterated Hebrew ... It may have been more appropriate to have those unhappy souls sing in Ladino -- the Mediterranean 'Jewish' tongue.

Of course, the big goof here would be that Hava Nagila was composed in 1918. Although the melody is considered traditional, it seems to be early Klezmer and thus, unlikely to date from before the mid-nineteenth century.

Though it's actually possible someone beat Cantor Moshe Nathanson to the song Hava Nagila by 3 years -- Abraham Zevi Idelsohn, and he was the father of Jewish Musicology. Larry Yudelson states: "... In the course of his research he visited a group of Sadigura Hasidim there, in 1915, and wrote down some of their Nigunim. This was one of them. It was a wordless "bim-bom" melody, a mystic chant. ... He arranged it in four parts, put some simple Hebrew lyrics to it, and performed it. The rest, as you know, is history, as this became the best-known Jewish song in the world. ..."

So the Kabalistic chant could be old ---- like even circa 700 CE.

That's mystic, not Kabbalistic :). A "bim-bom" chant is a wordless chant associated with the Hasidic tradition, so he's referring specifically to the tune and not to the lyrics of Hava Nagila. Hasidism didn't really get off the ground until the 18th century and, as I mentioned, the tune itself seems to be Klezmer and thus likely to be of relatively recent origin. Ah, there, according to the history of Hava Nagila page referenced here, the tune was juiced up with some Hora in the mid-20th cen, thus acquiring the rhythm that Neil associated with oarslaves rowing.