Kidnapped Choruses?

Seder means order, but the Passover Seder can be disorderly, and the haggadah is not always easy to decipher. Perhaps most perplexing is the ending—“Echad Mi Yodea,” a counting song of Jewish concepts, followed by “Chad Gadya,” a nursery rhyme about a goat eaten by a cat, neither of which may be of Jewish origin.

I learned this from a Christmas carol. I recently stumbled across the great country a cappella group Home Free’s cover of an African American spiritual called “Children, Go Where I Send Thee,” which sounded a lot like “Echad Mi Yodea”: “Children, go where I send thee / How shall I send thee? / I’m gonna send thee ten by ten: / Ten for the Ten Commandments . . . five for the gospel preachers . . . three for the Hebrew children,” counting all the way down to one—the “little bitty baby . . . born in Bethlehem.” “Echad Mi Yodea” similarly begins with a question: “Who knows one? I know one! One is God in the heavens and the earth,” and then counts the three patriarchs, the four matriarchs, the Ten Commandments, and the twelve tribes of Israel, before reaching all the way to God’s thirteen attributes of mercy. Was this a coincidence?

This question sent me down a research rabbit hole, where I found . . . a goat. Actually many goats as well as, somewhat distressingly, nearly all of the other animals and objects in “Chad Gadya.” For example, the early-twentieth-century folklorist William Wells Newell transcribed a New England folk poem called “Kid Do Go,” in which a woman buys a kid goat with “a penny ha’penny” she found while “going over London Bridge.” The kid won’t walk home, so she beats it with a stick, prompting a startlingly familiar progression:

Rope began to hang butcher,
Butcher began to kill ox,
Ox began to drink water,
Water began to quench fire,
Fire began to burn stick,
Stick began to beat kid,
Kid began to go.

Similar songs turn out to be widespread. As the Israeli writer Uriel Ofek notes, “It would not be an exaggeration to claim that there isn’t a nation or language that does not have a fable, rhyme or folktale with some ‘Chad Gadya’-like format or content.” Versions of songs akin to “Chad Gadya” or “Echad Mi Yodea” have been found from France to the Caucasus Mountains.

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. This makes the songs among the final additions to the haggadah as we now know it and perhaps good candidates for having foreign origins. Newell, writing in 1905, concluded that “Had Gadya contains nothing essentially Jewish,” having been borrowed from “Old French, say of the twelfth or thirteenth century.” Leopold Zunz, the founder of the Wissenschaft des Judentums circle in nineteenth-century Germany, thought that “Echad Mi Yodea” was likely taken from a German folk song. The editors of the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia wrote that “Chad Gadya” is “simply a Jewish nursery-rime, now known to have been borrowed from, or fashioned after, a popular German ballad, the prototype of which seems to have been an old French song.” In 1960 Daniel Goldschmidt wrote that “the parallels prove [the songs] did not come from a Jewish source, but rather took non-Jewish ideas, even actual Christian ones” and adapted them. One gets the sense that these writers saw the songs as an embarrassment to the haggadah. Far better that they be external non-Jewish grafts than something indigenous.

But this isn’t the end of the story. “Echad Mi Yodea” and “Chad Gadya” may have first appeared in the haggadah in 1590, but that doesn’t tell us when they were composed. Rabbi Yedidya Tia Weil of Prague wrote in the late-eighteenth century that he had heard of a fourteenth-century manuscript containing both poems. Weil’s testimony is hearsay, but recently researchers have been finding the songs in all sorts of interesting places. “Echad Mi Yodea” is printed in a booklet of songs for Sukkot from Avignon. A volume from 1757 Amsterdam notes that it was traditionally sung at Jewish weddings in Senegal in West Africa and Cochin in India. It’s in 1678 Inquisition records from Majorca as a banned Jewish catechism. Scholars have even found fragments of “Echad Mi Yodea” in the Cairo Geniza with a refrain of Shema Yisrael. None of this proves that the song was composed before 1590—even the Geniza contains more recent documents—but its diffusion throughout the Jewish world to places the Prague Haggadah would not have been likely to reach suggests a song older than its first published appearance.

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 goat—the cat comes at the end, where it eats the mouse that nibbled the rope that tied up the ox. This slightly more plausible chain of events suggests that the manuscript version of the song is more authentic.

Most contemporary scholars caution against definitive conclusions, but it’s hard to find a written non-Jewish version of either song that predates a Jewish one. So could the popular German ballad and Old French song have borrowed from the Jews? Maybe, but maybe not. As Joseph Tabory concludes in the JPS haggadah commentary, when it comes to folk traditions, “it is usually difficult, if not impossible, to determine the directions of influence.”

Whatever their origins, “Echad Mi Yodea” and “Chad Gadya” are at the end of the haggadah, and their silliness might be the reason why. The Seder is centered around the family, and the songs are a good way to keep children interested and awake. They might not belong in a prayerbook, but they are the perfect tunes to follow an awfully long, often abstruse, and seemingly disjointed symposium on the Exodus, four cups of wine, and a good meal. And tired children aren’t too worried about the songs’ origins.

Yet I can’t help thinking that both songs really do belong at the end of the haggadah. God’s deliverance engenders faith, and “Echad Mi Yodea” is a reaffirmation of that faith: God is one, the tribes of Israel are twelve, and divine mercy is abundant. And as the Seder winds down, recounting the redemption of the Exodus yields to yearning for a more final redemption. Although we just left Egypt, Elijah has come in from the night, and there are murmurings that the messiah might be waiting on the doorstep. Next year in Jerusalem? The details remain unclear, but in “Chad Gadya,” God was ultimately there for that one little goat.