Im Nin'alu

The song begins with a door slamming shut, and then declines to panic. If the gates below are locked, it says, the gates above are not. It is one of the most poised opening lines in all of Jewish devotional verse: a man imagining every earthly door closed against him and answering, calmly, that the higher ones stand open anyway. That this sentiment was set to music in the mountains of Yemen some three centuries ago, and arrived in a nightclub in Frankfurt sounding entirely at home, tells you something about how well it was built.

The words are by Shalom Shabazi, the towering poet of Yemenite Jewry, and they have done a great deal of travelling on the way to the charts. For generations the poem lived where most Yemenite poetry lived: in manuscript, in memory, and above all in the voice, sung at weddings and gatherings, carried from mouth to mouth across a community that prized its poets the way other communities prized their kings. Long before anyone thought to record it, the melody had been polished smooth by use.

A poet of the mountains

Shabazi worked in the seventeenth century, in and around the town of Ta'izz, during a period that included one of the harshest episodes in Yemenite Jewish history. He wrote in Hebrew, in Aramaic and in Judeo-Arabic, often weaving the languages together within a single poem, and he produced a vast body of work: hymns, wedding songs, mystical verse, laments. To Yemenite Jews he became more than a poet. His grave near Ta'izz drew pilgrims, and stories gathered around his name the way they gather around the very great. His diwan, the collected book of his poetry, became something close to a second prayer book in Yemenite homes.

Im Nin'alu sits inside that tradition rather than apart from it. It is a piyyut, a liturgical poem, and like much of Shabazi's work it moves between the language of the lover and the language of the soul, so that the longing in it can be read as a man's for the divine, or the people's for redemption, or simply a heart refusing to give up. The form was made to be sung, and it has been sung, in the distinctive Yemenite manner, for as long as anyone can document the song at all. None of its later fame would change a syllable of what Shabazi wrote.

From the wedding to the world

The voice that carried it out was Ofra Haza's. Born in Tel Aviv to a Yemenite family, she grew up inside exactly the tradition that had kept Shabazi alive, and when she recorded Im Nin'alu she was not discovering an exotic curiosity but singing her own inheritance. Her early version honoured the Yemenite style. Then came the remix, with a modern beat under that ancient melisma, and the song did something piyyutim are not supposed to do. It became a European pop sensation.

It topped the singles charts in several countries in 1988 and reached the top twenty in Britain, and Haza's voice, that unmistakable Yemenite ornament riding over a dance track, was suddenly everywhere. Hip-hop producers sampled it. A seventeenth-century Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic devotional poem became one of the more recognisable sounds of late-eighties radio, which is not a sentence anyone could have predicted in Ta'izz. And the remarkable thing is how little was lost in transit. The beat was new; the gate of heaven was exactly where Shabazi had left it.