The Mysterious Origins of “Had Gadya”

Today’s newsletter began with seders and goats, and thus it will end—as does the seder itself—with the familiar Had Gadya, “Only a Kid.” Preceding this is another, similarly, structured song, Ehad Mi Yode’a, “Who Knows One?” These songs have parallels, some of them strikingly similar, throughout cultures across the world. For instance, there is a traditional New England poem that begins with the purchase of a kid for two coins and continues with what Yosef Lindell describes as a “startlingly familiar progression.”