Mah Yofith: Bring It Back!

By Arthur G. Sapper, September, 2001

Do you want to do a great mitzvah? All you need do is sing a certain Sabbath song that was nearly lost, and help bring it back.

The zemer is called Mah Yofith or Mah Yofis, which means "how beautiful," and for centuries it was one of the most popular zemiroth of the Jews of Poland and Russia. The song was written about nine hundred years ago by Rabbi Mordechai bar Yitzhak Chazak of France. It was sung on Friday nights, at the Shabbos table, between the fish and meat courses. It tells of the beauty and joy of keeping Shabbos, and of the rewards for those who keep it. It was later carried eastwards from France and Germany into Poland and Russia. The song became so widely known that even non-Jews learned of it - to our eventual sorrow. Wealthy Polish landowners (the paritzim or pans) had adopted the practice of, during drunken revelries, forcing Jews to sing or dance to Jewish liturgical tunes in a humiliating way. Because Mah Yofith was so well known, it was singled out by name. The drunken landowner would demand of a Jew who worked for him, or did business with him, "Sing for me Mahyufes!" Rods were prepared to strike the Jew on his back if he refused.

This treatment became so common that the song's title formed the core of pejorative expressions in Yiddish - mahyofis-yid or mahyofis-nik - to describe a cowardly Jew who would bend or crouch to non-Jews in a degrading manner, or who would make fun of Jewish culture or Judaism before non-Jews (akin to the appellation "Uncle Tom" among American blacks). All this left such a bad taste in the mouths of Polish and Russian Jewry that the song was nearly forgotten. It was even omitted from the authoritative compilation by Abraham Moshe Bernstein, MUSIKALISHER PINKES (Vilna 1927), which has 127 Shabbos zemiroth.

Years ago, I first read a short sketch of this story in a book by Phillip Birnbaum, AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF JEWISH CONCEPTS. I then and there became determined to find the tune and try to teach it to other Jews. Anti-Semitic taunts are a poor reason to lose a piece of Jewish culture. Also, I had become interested in Shabbos songs after my bubby, aleha shalom, told me how her father loved to sing songs on Shabbos in Poland. She recounted how, as a homesick young woman in Havana, Cuba, she once heard through an open window an Ashkenazi family celebrating Shabbos by singing the same songs that her father sang.

So I started asking around in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, where I live, but I could find no one who knew the tune. I wrote to the YIVO Institute in Manhattan; it had some of the words but no music. On a trip to Israel, I inquired of the staff at the Museum of the Diaspora in Israel, but its music collection had no entry for the song.

Back in the U.S., I started asking around again, and finally found the tune - in Rockville, Maryland. One Shabbos, I asked a cantor about it and he thought that he perhaps had the sheet music for it somewhere in a book of old Jewish songs. After Shabbos, I drove over to his home, where he found it and played it for me on the piano. I recorded it on tape and copied the sheet music. (That cantor later made aliyah, and he became a prominent attorney in Israel.) A few years later, my bubby spent Shabbos at my home. I sang Mah Yofith at the table. I asked, "Bubby, have you ever heard that zemer before?" She replied, "Yeh, my father used to sing it." After searching for the tune all over, on two continents, it was, so to speak, in my backyard all the while.

I have taught the song to a few Jews over the years. I once recorded it for an Israeli, who told me that he is spreading it there. But we need many more American Jews to bring it back. The words to Mah Yofith can be found -

The first two stanzas of the tune can be heard by clicking below. Although there are several tunes for the song, including a chassidic tune, this one is the tune that needs to be restored. Chazak! Chazak! V'nithchazayk!

To hear a wave file of Mah Yofith:, you can use RealJukeBox.

For more reading:

Macy Nulman, "Mah Yofit: The Intriguing Fate of the Sabbath Table Hymn," 1 Journal of Jewish Music & Liturgy 27 (June 1976) (Cantorial Council of America). An excellent source. It contains a complete text and complete translation, as well as music.

Phillip Birnbaum, An Encyclopedia of Jewish Concepts 337 (Heb. Pub. Co. 1979).

You can view a PDF file images of the Hebrew and English translation of the text of Mah Yofith. You will need an Adobe Acrobat reader. These texts from the Artscroll series of Siddurim, have been added with the kind permission of Mesorah Publications, Ltd. You can also view their website for more information about the publisher.

You can view here a PDF file of the score of Mah Yofith. Thanks again to Art Sapper.