Di shvue (Yidd.; “the oath”) is a Jewish workers’ song from Eastern Europe. Its starting point was a religious oath, which was carried over into a song. At the beginning of the 20th century, the General Jewish Labor Bund in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia (Bund) adopted a version by the Russian-Jewish poet S. An-Ski (Dybbuk) as their hymn.

The Yiddish song Di shvue has its roots in the Jewish revolutionary labor movement that emerged in the Pale of Settlement around the end of the 19th century to campaign for improvement in the economic situation and for autonomous righ…