גודל הטקסט
In about a month we will return to singing. According to the Hebcal calendar, the first candle of Hanukkah 5787 will be lit on Friday, the 24th of Kislev, December 4, 2026, and "Ma'oz Tzur" will join, as is the custom, most homes. The piyyut itself was written in the Middle Ages. In its first five stanzas the name "Mordechai" is embedded as a signature, but it is unclear who he was. The accepted dating was the 13th century, while newer studies place it earlier, in the 12th century, with Avraham Frenkel proposing Germany between 1160 and 1190.
On the question of the melody, the sources testify to a complicated journey. The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 relates that the cantor Birnbaum of Königsberg, in a German-Jewish periodical from 1878, traced the familiar tune back to an old German folk song. That folk song, he said, was also widespread among the Jews of Germany around the year 1450. The encyclopedia adds that Martin Luther later used the same folk song for one of his chorales. According to this description, here is a German folk song that was already familiar to Jews, and was used by both sides separately.
One should be careful with another name mentioned in this context. The Venetian composer Benedetto Marcello printed in 1724 a melody called "the German Jews' tune," and used it for Psalm 15. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia this was not the melody familiar today, but a different tune in a minor key, which had in the past been associated with "Ma'oz Tzur." English Wikipedia presents this less clearly, and so we relied on the encyclopedia. The Jewish Music Research Centre at the Hebrew University documents that the melody Marcello recorded was preserved in versions in Ashkenazi communities in Italy, among them Verona, Ferrara and Turin.
Another interesting detail: originally, according to the same encyclopedia, the tune served for the piyyut "Shnei Zeitim," which is said before the Shema in the Shacharit service on the Shabbat of Hanukkah, and only afterward became associated with "Ma'oz Tzur" and became the hallmark of the holiday.
Even after it became fixed, it continued to change. The earliest known notation of the Jewish version was made by Isaac Nathan in 1815. In London, Julius Mombach, the music director of the Great Synagogue, arranged the melody for four voices, and his changes left two versions that cannot be sung simultaneously with each other. Until the war, an alternative melody for some of the stanzas was widespread in Germany, recorded by the cantor Israel Alter.
And what about us? According to the London Sephardi Music website, the melody common in Israel is close to the German version that Birnbaum noted. Every Hanukkah another generation of singers joins it.
Sources: Hebcal; The Jewish Encyclopedia (1906); English Wikipedia (Ma'oz Tzur); Jewish Music Research Centre, Hebrew University; London Sephardi Music
Image: Szilas, Public domain (PD-self), via Wikimedia Commons.