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Kidnapped Choruses?

JL;DR SUMMARY Exploring the origins of the beloved Passover Seder songs "Echad Mi Yodea" and "Chad Gadya," Yosef Lindell delves into their historical roots, which potentially trace back to non-Jewish folk traditions. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude. Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.

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Tags

Jewish TraditionsJewish FaithPassoverSederRedemptionFolk MusicHaggadahChad GadyaEchad Mi YodeaCultural Origins

Places mentioned

Prague, Prague, Hlavní mešto, Czechia
"Who came first? Echad Mi Yodea and Chad Gadya first appeared in the woodcut-illustrated 1590 Prague Haggadah, each with a Yiddish translation beside it."
Avignon, Vaucluse, France
"Echad Mi Yodea is printed in a booklet of songs for Sukkot from Avignon."
Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands
"A volume from 1757 Amsterdam notes that it was traditionally sung at Jewish weddings in Senegal in West Africa and Cochin in India."
Senegal
"A volume from 1757 Amsterdam notes that it was traditionally sung at Jewish weddings in Senegal in West Africa and Cochin in India."
Cochin, Kerala, India
"A volume from 1757 Amsterdam notes that it was traditionally sung at Jewish weddings in Senegal in West Africa and Cochin in India."
Majorca, Balearic Islands, Spain
"It's in 1678 Inquisition records from Majorca as a banned Jewish catechism."
Provence, Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur, France
"As for Chad Gadya, two manuscripts of the song have been discovered that likely date from the fifteenth or early-sixteenth centuries. One of these, from Provence, has the dog, not the cat, eating the goatthe cat comes at the end, where it eats the mouse that nibbled the rope that tied up the ox."
Cairo, Egypt
"Scholars have even found fragments of Echad Mi Yodea in the Cairo Geniza with a refrain of Shema Yisrael."
This item was indexed and curated by Cairo, JL;DR's web crawler.
Cairo Item ID 48489
Cairo Source ID 11
Retrieved 2025-04-07 05:30:45 UTC
Curated 2025-04-07 08:31:46 UTC