מצאתי מקור
לפי
מה שהוא כותב, הדברים מתבססים על פיוט ידוע בשם "מה יפית" (שנכתב כמובן בעקבות הפסוק), ומכך שהיהודים הוכרחו לרקוד ולשיר שיר זה לפני הפריץ: 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.
