Yigdal

'be exalted') is a Jewish hymn which in various rituals shares with Adon Olam the place of honor at the opening of the morning and the close of the evening service.

Sephardic Jews, who sing the hymn in congregational unison throughout, use the following line as the 14th: "These are the 13 bases of the Rule of Moses and the tenets of his Law."

Leopold Zunz contends that it was written by Daniel ben Yehudah Dayan,[1] who spent eight years in improving it, completing it in 1404.

In the Spanish ritual, in its Dutch-and English-speaking tradition, the hymn is often sung, according to the general Sephardic custom (compare e.g., Yah Shimkha), to some "representative" melody of the particular day.

[4] Next in importance comes the melody reserved for the solemn evenings of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, and introduced, in the spirit of Psalm 137:6, into the service of Simhat Torah.

This melody is constructed in the harmonic major scale (EFG # ABCD # E) with its two augmented seconds (see synagogue music), and is the inspiration of some Polish precentor, dating perhaps from the early 17th century, and certainly having spread westward from the Slavic region.

In the German use of Bavaria and the Rhineland, the old tradition has preserved a contrasting "Yigdal" for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur that is equally antique, but built on a diatonic scale and reminiscent of the morning service of the day.

For the evenings of the Three Pilgrimage Festivals, the old London tradition has preserved three characteristic melodies from at least the early 18th century, probably brought from north Germany or Bohemia.

It was employed by Isaac Nathan, in 1815, as the air for one of Lord Byron's "Hebrew Melodies", being set by him to the verses "The Wild Gazelle" in such a manner as to utilize the contrasting theme then chanted by the hazzan to the last line as in the Passover "Yigdal".

Other old tunes for the hymn, such as the melody of Alsatian origin used on "Shabbat Hagadol" before Passover, are preserved in local or family tradition (cf.

The hymn The God of Abraham Praise written by Thomas Olivers around 1770 is based on one of the traditional melodies for Yigdal, the words are recognizable as a paraphrase of it.