The song in your Haggadah (mine too) is "Chad Gadya" (= "An Only Kid"). It
first appeared in the Prague Haggadah of 1590. In Glatzer's Haggadah
commentary he states that the words (Aramaic with a smattering of Hebrew)
were composed no earlier than the 15th c., reminiscent of certain types of
medieval German folksongs. But whether the Passover song came from a
German antecedent or vice versa has been argued.
The resemblance of the song to the English nursery rhyme, "The House that
Jack Built" (first publ. 1755) has not gone unnoticed. Wrote Peter & Iona
Opie: "It has often been presumed that the original of "The house that Jack
built" is a Hebrew Chant.... The chant, a fine early example of the
accumulative story, bears comparison with an English folktale, "The Old
Woman and her Pig," but a stretch of imagination is needed to connect the
subject matter with the nuptials of the tattered man and forlorn
milkmaid...."
None of this really answers your question, but an irrelevant answer is
better than none....
Norm Cohen
----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Stamler" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, August 05, 2002 11:42 PM
Subject: Jumped over the stile
> Hi folks:
>
> I'm having a memory lapse. About ten years ago I heard the English
> singer/buttonbox player John Kirkpatrick sing a cumulative song with
verses
> like "the ox wouldn't drink the water and the butcher wouldn't kill the ox
> and the pig jumped over the stile" or words to that effect. Somewhere in
the
> cumulation is a "stick to beat the dog".
>
> What the heck is the song? A version of it shows up in my Passover
haggadah,
> of all places. Can someone give me a title, and tell me how it got
connected
> with Passover? (Especially since at least this version I came across has a
> pig in it, which would make the whole thing treyf.)
>
> I ask because Helen Creighton collected a fragment of it from a singer in
> Nova Scotia, and I'm trying to put that in some kind of context.
>
> Peace,
> Paul
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