Why you’re hearing ‘Hatikvah’ everywhere — or are you?
A number of songs sound similar to ‘Hatikvah’ — including one in a new movie from China.
Photo by Hector Retamal/AFPAlex Wong/Getty Images/Canva
By Olivia Haynie May 30, 2025
Caught by the Tides, directed by Jia Zhangke, is a film about two individuals and their changing relationship over the course of two decades against the backdrop of a rapidly-evolving China. It premiered last spring at the Cannes Film Festival to critical acclaim and has started to make its way to theaters in the United States. It’s a film about love, identity, and technology in China — so why does the trailer, as it shifts from a lighter to a more dramatic tone, feature the Israeli national anthem “Hatikvah?”
Well, actually, it only does to the untrained ear (mine). A representative for the film clarified that the music was taken from a 2014 performance by the Berlin Philharmoniker of Czech composer Bedřich Smetana’s The Moldau, or Vltava in Czech. But for anyone familiar with “Hatikvah,” the opening is startlingly similar.
Scholar Neil W. Levin, the artistic director of the Milken Archive of Jewish Music, wrote in an article about “Hatikvah” that although the two songs have similar opening measures, the confusion is simply result of the fact that they follow the same scale, or set organization of notes. Even then, he points out, the rhythm and embellishment of the notes are different.
The Moldau isn’t the only composition that sounds like “Hatikvah.” There’s the 16th-century Italian song “La Montovana” and the Andantino section of French composer Camille Saint-Saëns’ Rhapsodie Bretonne Opus 7b.
Jeff Janezcko, curator of the Milken Archive, told me that folk tunes often come from a collection of melodies shared by multiple cultures in an area. In his article about “Hatikvah,” Levin refers to this shared repertoire as a “tune family”
“Just because two things sound similar doesn’t necessarily mean that one is borrowed from the other, or that one came first,” Janezcko said. “It could be that they came from some kind of common source, or it could just be random.”
In the modern age of trademarks and copyright suits, Janezcko told me, the general public is more attuned to the idea of melodies being owned by one person or one group.
“We get these cases that come into the news, it seems like maybe once every five or ten years, where somebody’s getting sued for copying another artist’s work,” he said. “And they maybe claim that they didn’t even realize they were doing it, and sometimes it’s artists that inhabit completely different worlds.”
Janezcko pointed out that “there are only so many notes in the scale” and the same handful of chord progressions is used in most compositions. A viral video from the Australian comedy group “Axis of Awesome” demonstrates how dozens of hit songs, including “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey and Men at Work’s “Down Under,” have the same four chords.
Most scholars of Jewish music history have settled on an origin story of “Hatikvah”: The lyrics came first, penned as Tikvatenu (“Our Hope”) around 1877 or ‘78 by poet Naphtali Herz Imber, who immigrated to British Occupied Palestine in 1882. Samuel Cohen, another early settler in Palestine from Moldova is credited with setting the words to a Moldova-Romanian folk tune. Overtime, before its adoption as the official anthem of Israel in 1948, the lyrics and melody have undergone numerous edits.
Still, Levin writes, some attribute the melody to the Sephardic tradition, Polish folk songs, and the Basque region. Given that folk music often has an untraceable origin, why has the true author of “Hatikvah” remained the subject of such fierce speculation?
Janezcko, who has researched the relationship between Jewish music and Jewish identity, thinks it’s part of a longing to have a fixed piece of culture.
“Because of the Jewish experience in the Diaspora being so long and Jews having endured so much change over that period, there’s just a real desire to kind of try to anchor something into the past in a very defined kind of way,” he said.
