An original Ladino adaptation of the song “Oy Khanike” (derived from the Yiddish poem of the same name by Mordkhe Rivesman) also known in English as “Oh Chanukah” or in Hebrew as “Y’mei ha-Ḥanukka.” I’m aware that the custom of spinning tops was not originally a Sefaradi one. So sue me, I was looking for something to rhyme with “libertaḏ.” I’ve included the Rashi script, the Aki Yerushalaim orthography, and (as an added bonus) the Cyrillic transcription used by the Jews of the Balkans. . . .

An original Judeo-Arabic adaptation of the song “Oy Khanike” (derived from the Yiddish poem of the same name by Mordkhe Rivesman) also known in English as “Oh Ḥanukkah” or in Hebrew as “Y’mei ha-Ḥanukka.” With thanks to Mazen Haddad for his help with the Arabic! Some notes: 1) Case endings and nunation, which would (in colloquial dialects) often be skipped or dropped, are transcribed in brackets. 2) The word “sufnāj” is a Moroccan Arabic dialectal word which is the agent noun for sfenj, a traditional type of North African doughnut. . . .

Variations of the original three lines culminating with “…walk beside me…” first appear in high school yearbooks beginning in 1970. The earliest recorded mention we could find was in The Northern Light, the 1970 yearbook of North Attleboro High School, Massachusetts. In the Jewish world of the early to mid-1970s, a young Moshe Tanenbaum began transmitting the lines at Jewish summer camps. In 1979, as Uncle Moishy, Tanenbaum published a recording of the song under the title “v’Ohavta” (track A4 on The Adventures of Uncle Moishy and the Mitzvah Men, volume 2). . . .

Did you know that the great songwriter and activist Woody Guthrie wrote Ḥanukkah music? It’s true. Though Guthrie himself was not Jewish, Marjorie Greenblatt, his second wife and their children were, and he would write Ḥanukkah songs for the kids in his neighborhood in the 1940s. Two of these songs were recorded by Moses Asch, head of Folkways Records, in 1949 — a kid’s song called “Hanuka Dance,” and a twenty-verse ballad retelling the story of Ḥanukkah called “The Many and the Few.” Below is an original Hebrew translation of “The Many and the Few,” preserving the meter of the original. With a simple melody and a lot of historical research, it could certainly be sung at a Ḥanukkah event. . . .

This “Shir Mizmor l’Purim” by Rabbi Sabato Morais (we think) was first published in The Jewish Exponent on 15 March 1889. It was preserved by Rabbi Sabato Morais in his ledger, an archive of newsclippings recording material he contributed to the press, among other announcements. . . .

The African-American Christian spiritual adapted for a Pesaḥ song in Hebrew and English. . . .

This is a parody riffing on the piyyut Yom Zeh Mekhubad for Purim by Avraham Menaḥem Mendel Mohr from his Kol Bo l’Purim (1855) transcribed and translated from Hebrew into English by Isaac Gantwerk Mayer. . . .

“Yom Purim” is a parody riffing on the piyyut Yom Shabbaton for Purim by Avraham Menaḥem Mendel Mohr from his Kol Bo l’Purim (1855) transcribed and translated from Hebrew into English by Isaac Gantwerk Mayer. . . .

This is a parody riffing on the piyyut Kol Meqadesh Shevi’i for Purim by Avraham Menaḥem Mendel Mohr from his Kol Bo l’Purim (1855) transcribed and translated from Hebrew into English by Isaac Gantwerk Mayer. . . .

This Western Yiddish alphabetical adaptation of Adir Hu is first found in the 1769 Selig Haggadah, under the name of “Baugesang” (meaning Building Song). It grew to be a beloved part of the Western Ashkenazi rite, to the point where the traditional German Jewish greeting after the Seder was “Bau gut,” or “build well!” . . .

This is a variation of Mipi El in Hebrew with a Judeo-Arabic translation found in the Seder al-Tawḥid for Rosh Ḥodesh Nissan, compiled by Mosheh Asher ibn Shmuel in 1887 in Alexandria. . . .

According to Joseph Judah Chorny’s On the Caucasian Jews, this acrostic piyyuṭ was customarily used as an epithalion before a wedding. He writes, “Before morning light, the bride is led to the groom’s house accompanied by many women and men, all carrying lit wax candles in their hands, and singing this song along the way.” Variants of this piyyut are found throughout the greater Sephardic world, generally in an abbreviated and slightly altered form. In Syria it is sung during the haqafot for Simḥat Torah, while in Livorno Sephardic practice (and subsequently in most Eastern Sephardic maḥzorim) it is a Shavu’ot piyyut. . . .

A Judeo-Moroccan Arabic (Darija) adaptation of the Passover counting song Eḥad Mi Yodeaȝ, as found in Mahzor Moȝadé Hashem. . . .

The text of the popular counting song “Who Knows One?” in its original Hebrew, with a translation in Latin. . . .

Ḥad Gadya has a place in Seder tables throughout the Jewish quadrant, and in many communities it was read in translation. This adaptation into the language of the Na’vi is very useful when celebrating liberation from the tyrannical RDA. . . .

Ḥad Gadya has a place in Seder tables throughout Arda, and in many communities it was read in translation. This translation into Quenya is necessary for any good Lothlórien sedarim. But to be serious, Quenya was one of several languages developed by J.R.R. Tolkien. It serves as the sacred ancestral language of the Noldorin elves in the Middle-Earth legendarium. The editor here has developed this adaptation of the well-known seder table-song Ḥad Gadya into Quenya, as well as a home-brewed transcription system into Hebrew script included here (PDF | ODT). This translation uses several fan-made terms, such as cuimacir for “butcher” and luhtya- for “extinguish”, as well as one original neologism, yacincë for “kid-goat.” . . .

This is the translation of Ḥad Gadya into Judeo-Valyrian with a Hebraicization schema for Valyrian by Isaac Gantwerk Mayer. . . .

Ḥad Gadya has a place in Seder tables throughout the Jewish quadrant, and in many communities it was read in translation. This adaptation into tlhIngan Hol is very useful for when your universal translator is malfunctioning at a Seder on Qo’noS. Okay, but to be serious for a moment, while the many connections between the canon of Star Trek and the Jewish community are well known, one of the lesser-known ones is that the inventor of tlhIngan Hol (the Klingon language), Marc Okrand, is Jewish, and a substantial number of Klingon terms come from Hebrew or Yiddish. In honor of that connection, the editor has developed this adaptation of the well-known seder table-song Ḥad Gadya into tlhIngan Hol, as well as a home-brewed transcription system into Hebrew script called pIluy. The wildlife has also been adapted, so instead of a goat the story begins with one little targ. (Sure, they might LOOK like pigs, but who knows if they chew cud or not!) . . .

Ḥad Gadya has a place in Seder tables throughout the Jewish world, and in many communities it was read in translation. Probably not this one though, seeing as it was written more than five hundred years after the Tocharian language family went extinct. But maybe, in an alternate timeline, some of the Radhanites who traded along the Silk Road in the heyday of the Tocharians ended up settling in the Tarim Basin (in present-day Xinjiang/East Turkestan), and in this timeline where Tocharian survived the Jews of that region might sing something like this at their sedarim. This is a Tocharian B translation and Hebrew-script transcription of Ḥad Gadya. Unicode does not currently have Tocharian-script coverage, but in the event that it is ever introduced I’ll type it up! . . .

In our timeline, the Kaifeng Jewish community had originally spoken Persian as their lingua franca, before adopting the Kaifeng dialect of Mandarin that their neighbors spoke. But just change a little and all of history could be different! This is a translation of Ḥad Gadya in a timeline where Judeo-Aramaic was a little more prevalent in eastern Persia all those years ago. In this timeline, instead of speaking Judeo-Persian before adopting Chinese, the Kaifeng Jews spoke Aramaic. And this dialect of Aramaic, like many other languages spoken in the greater Chinese cultural sphere, underwent tonogenesis! . . .