[The eight-day Jewish holiday of Hanukkah (or, less commonly, Chanukah), often called the Festival of Lights, just passed in the middle of last month. (In 2023, the celebration went from sunset on Thursday, 7 December, to sunset on Friday. 15 December; this year’s dates will be sunset on Wednesday, 25 December, to sunset on Thursday, 2 January 2025. All Jewish religious holidays, including the Sabbath, or Shabbat – Friday evening to Saturday evening, run from sunset to sunset.)
[The date discrepancy is due to the reliance on the Hebrew calendar, a basically lunar calendar coordinated to the phases of the moon. The dates for Hanukkah on the Hebrew calendar are regular: 25 Kislev (the Hebrew calendar’s third month) to 2 or 3 Tevet (the fourth month; the date depends on whether Kislev has 29 or 30 days that year).
[For those who are unfamiliar with the Hanukkah story, I’ll only briefly say that it celebrates the Maccabees’ victory over the Seleucid, or Syrian-Greek, army in 164 BCE, evicting the foreign rulers from Jerusalem and Judea (until, that is, the Romans reconquered the province in 63 BCE)). The Greeks had defiled the Temple by celebrating pagan rites within it, so the victorious Jews had to rededicate it, including relighting the eternal flame.
[This required pure olive oil and the victors could only find one cruse of unprofaned oil, enough to last only a single day. Nevertheless, the eternal light miraculously burned for eight days while the Jews pressed a fresh supply of oil.
[I’m not going to go into either the scheduling of the holiday, however, nor its religious meaning or secular significance. I’m going to look exclusively at one aspect of the celebration, a non-ecclesiastic plaything of Jewish children during this holiday: the dreidel.]
Hanukkah (the initial sound represented by H, or Ch in alternative English spellings, is similar to the Scottish ch in loch or the German in Buch) is a joyous holiday, celebrating a miracle and the historical recovery of Jerusalem and the rededication of the Second Temple in the 2nd century BCE.
Rosh Hashanah (New Year) and Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), Jewry’s High Holy Days, are solemn holidays, but Hanukkah is a festival. Singing, exchanging gifts, passing out Hanukkah gelt (literally, Hanukkah money – chocolate coins), and playing games, especially among the children, are an important part of the celebration.
Those last two are connected. The most common game the little ones play at Hannukah is dreidel—the name for both a toy and the game that’s played with it—and the chocolate coins are a traditional part of the game. But before I discuss the game itself—it’s actually very simple, by the way—let me go back and sketch out the history of the dreidel itself.
A dreidel, sometimes also dreidle or dreidl (pronounced dray-d’l) is a four-sided spinning top. The name ‘dreidel’ is the romanization of the Yiddish name dreydl, which comes from the word dreyen (‘to turn’ or ‘to rotate,’ derived from the homonymous German verb drehen, meaning ‘to turn’ or ‘to spin’).
The four faces of the top are each labeled with a Hebrew letter, representing a Yiddish word. (Yiddish, as most readers will know, is a Germanic dialect written in the Hebrew alphabet. It’s the lingua franca of the Ashkenazim, the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe and the nations to which they eventually spread. There’s a brief history of the evolution of Yiddish in “National Yiddish Theatre – Folksbiene, Part 1: Yiddish Language & Literature,” 23 August 2012.) They are abbreviations for the instructions for the rules of the game. (I’ll get to the details in a bit.) The letters and what they mean are:
• Gimel (ג), standing for gantz or ‘everything.’
• Hey (ה), standing for halb or ‘half.’
• Shin (ש), standing for ה shtel arayn or ‘put in.’
Dreidels can be fashioned in clay, ceramic, wood, silver, brass. iron, lead, aluminum, ivory, and, of course, good ol’ plastic. Home-made dreidels can be constructed from cardboard, such as discarded cereal boxes. The lettering and other decorations can be painted or drawn on, stained, carved, or inlaid—whatever a clever dreidel-maker, artisan or DIY-er, can imagine.
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| Assorted dreidels |
The Guinness World Record-holder for the most expensive dreidel was created by a jeweler in 2019. It’s yellow gold with the letters on the four sides in white gold encrusted with diamonds. It was valued at $70,000—over $81,000 today. Playing dreidel with this specimen would be a delicate endeavor: its tip is a 4.2-carat diamond!
Old dreidels, found all over the world, have become collectors items and some are housed in such collections as the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago, Yeshiva University Museum at the Center for Jewish History in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City, and the Herbert & Eileen Bernard Museum of Judaica at Temple Emanu-El in New York
There are also dreidels in the collections at the Spinning Top & Yo-Yo Museum in Burlington, Wisconsin, and Don’s Lair, a private collection of toys, now open to the public, in what was Don Olney’s Toycrafter factory in Rochester, New York.
The game’s exact origins are unknown, but there’s evidence that Babylonian (ca. 19th-6th centuries BCE) players used blocks adorned with images of Ishtar—goddess of love, war, and fertility, and associated with beauty, sex, divine law, and political power (known to the Romans as Venus and the Greeks as Aphrodite)—and Ninurta—god of farming, healing, hunting, law, scribes, and war (Saturn or Chronos)—that signified winning and losing.
One legend, which may well be apocryphal (though I confess it’s what I heard as a boy), recounts that when Torah study was banned in ancient Greece (during the reigns of Seleucid Kings Antiochus IV [175-163 BCE] and Antiochus V [163-161 BCE]), the Jews would evade the law by playing with a spinning top – a popular gambling device at the time – while learning Torah orally. If the soldiers raided the illicit Torah scholars, they’d just find a group of dissolute “gamblers.”
Some say the game was introduced in India and made its way to Europe. Other sources find that the game was initiated in ancient Rome or Greece and brought to Britain by soldiers or settlers during the Roman occupation of Britain (43-410 CE.) This may explain why the letters on some ancient English tops refer to Latin words: N for nihil (‘nothing’), T for totum (‘take all’), A for aufer (‘take from the pot’), and D for depone (‘put into the pot’).
By the 16th century, the game of teetotum (sometimes “T-totum”), the predecessor of dreidel, had become popular in England and Ireland, and by 1801, the letters adorning the sides of the top referring to Latin words were swapped out for English references to serve as a mnemonic for the rules of the game: N stood for ‘nothing,’ T for ‘take all,’ H for ‘half,’ and P for ‘put down.’
The game was particularly popular around Christmastime, and eventually sailed across the Channel to other parts of Europe. In the painting Children’s Games (De Kinderspelen), painted in 1560 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Flemish; b. ca. 1525-30, d. 1569), depicting many children’s pastimes from the Netherlands, one girl in the lower left-hand corner is playing with a teetotum top. (The work is currently in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum [literally, “Museum of Art History,” often called the “Museum of Fine Arts”].)
When teetotum got to Germany in the 16th century, the letters on the faces of the top were changed to reflect the local language: N stood for nicht (‘nothing’), G for ganz (‘all’), H for halb (‘half’), and S for stell ein (‘put in’)—almost certainly in Frakturschrift, the Gothic-like typeface used in Germany at the time: 𝕹 𝕲 𝕳 𝕾.
It seems that Germany, home to Europe’s largest and most influential Ashkenazi community and the center of Yiddish culture, was where Jewish children were introduced to the game. It was probably there, too, that, like the Christmas-inspired gift-giving that’s been incorporated into Hanukkah festivities, it was transformed into a Jewish holiday pastime.
The Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim changed the name of the top and the game to dreydl and once again replaced the letters on the top—this time with the Hebrew counterparts of Yiddish words. (The Yiddish name for the top and the game, as romanized into English, as I explained earlier, is rooted in the word ‘to turn,’ but the one-letter suffix -l is a common attachment in southern German dialects as a diminutive suffix—a truncation of the standard German diminutive suffix -lein. Dreidels are small toys.)
An irony of the dreidel’s history concerns Hanukkah as a holiday dedicated to celebrating the rejection of cultural assimilation. The Maccabean rebels resisted the Seleucid rulers who wanted the Jews to adopt Greek lifestyles, including accepting their gods and religious beliefs.
Part of the story Jews tell about the dreidel is that it was a means to resist Hellenization. It was, in the legend, a cover for maintaining Jewish identity by studying Torah in secret. But the dreidel was actually a secular pastime adopted from non-Jewish Greeks and others and, thus, is a manifestation of the cultural assimilation it was supposed to have been used to resist.
Teetotum is a gambling game and actual money is used, though it was probably always a penny-ante stake. (In addition to dreidel, teetotum is an ancestor to dice games.) When it transformed into dreidel, it was still a game on which cash—coins, rather than large sums—was risked. Even as a children’s game, some played for real pocket money—to be spent on candy and little playthings.
Later, however, as it became more of an innocent pastime for Hanukkah celebrations, many substitutes for the coins were used, such as raisins, beans, nuts, toothpicks, matchsticks, or poker chips. The most common token today, I’d say, is Hanukkah gelt, generally chocolate coins given to the children as treats and party favors.
(Gelt is the Yiddish word for ‘money’ or ‘cash’; it’s derived from the German word Geld that means the same thing. In the past, Hanukkah gelt was real coins, generally the equivalent of pennies or nickels. When the children receive actual cash, they’re encouraged to donate it to charity to teach them about the importance of giving to those in need.)
As I said, the game itself is very simple. It’s played with two or more participants (even numbers are best) . . . and you need a dreidel, obviously. Every player starts with the same number of tokens, enough so that no one runs out too quickly and players start to drop out before the game gets going. (The number of tokens needs to be evenly divisible by the number of players. The more tokens, the longer the game will last.) Then follow these steps:
1. As soon as the game starts, each player antes
one token for the “the pot.” Whenever the
pot is down to one or zero tokens, every player should put one in the pot.
2. Each player spins the dreidel in turn. Each turn is one spin of the dreidel. The letter which comes up once the top stops
determines what action the spinner should perform: for nun (נ), the spinner does
nothing; for gimel (ג), the spinner takes all the tokens in the pot; for
hey (ה), the player takes half the pot (in the case of an odd number of
tokens in the pot, round up); for shin (ש), the spinner puts one token
into the pot.
3. Pass the dreidel on to the next player.
4. When a player runs out of tokens, she or he may
ask another player for a loan; if no one comes across, the player without
tokens is “out.”
5. The game is over when one player has collected all the tokens. That player is the winner.
There are a few anomalies in the story of dreidel. Aside from the myth of Torah study cover (no one’s found a reliable historical reference to confirm this folktale), there are all sorts of significance ascribed to the dreidel couched in numerology (study of numbers, such as the figures in a birth date, and of their supposed influence on events, phenomena, and human character) or gematria (assigning numerical values to words based on the fixed numerical values of their letters). This is given force in Hebrew culture because each letter in the Hebrew alphabet also represents a number and is largely practiced by followers of Jewish mysticism, Kabbalism.
Another “meaning” of the dreidel comes from an interpretation of the four letters on the top’s faces. Many people see נ (nun), ג (gimel), ה (hey), ש (shin) as a mnemonic for the Hebrew affirmation נֵס גָּדוֹל הָיָה שָׁם (nes gadol hayah sham), which means “a great miracle happened there,” referring to the miracle of the oil for the Temple lamps, the “Miracle of Hanukkah.”
In Israel, the shin on the dreidel has been replaced by pe (or pey – פ), which for dreidel stands for the Yiddish word peyde or ‘place’ (i.e., . . . a token in the pot). The prophetic statement that the letters are said to abbreviate now reads “a great miracle happened here” (נֵס גָּדוֹל הָיָה פֹּה – nes gadol hayah poh).
Just to add to the mix, many Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews insist that shin continue to be used in Israel because the reference to “there” means “in the Temple in Jerusalem” and not “in Israel.” So, a five-sided dreidel was invented in 2022 to represent the Hebrew proclamation נֵס גָּדוֹל הָיָה שָׁם פֹּה (nes gadol hayah sham poh – “a great miracle happened here and there”).
On a more prosaic level, there are even competitive dreidel tournaments (played on a portable dreidel stadium called the Spinagogue!). In 2007, a dreidel game called No Limit Texas Dreidel was released; it’s a cross between traditional dreidel and Texas Hold’em poker. Jettisoning the gambling aspect of dreidel, a version of Major League Dreidel requires spinners to compete for the longest spin.
In 1993, astronaut Jeffrey A. Hoffman, while a member of the crew of the Space Shuttle Endeavour, spun a dreidel for Hanukkah before a live audience watching via satellite during his fourth space flight. At some 250 miles above the Earth, in zero gravity and with friction only from the drag of the air in the shuttle, but none from whatever surface the top spun on, the dreidel turned for an hour. On Earth, the longest a standard dreidel would spin would be about 18 seconds.
(If Hoffman had taken the dreidel outside the shuttle during his space walk on that trip, theoretically it could have spun in the vacuum of space forever!)
Jewish ritual doesn’t include hymns; during a Jewish service, even among Reform or Liberal Jews, there really are no sacred songs. That may be—and I’ve never looked into this, so it’s just my conclusion—because much of a Jewish service is traditionally sung or chanted, specifically most of the prayers.
We do, however, have songs associated with various holidays, such as “Had Gadya” (or “Chad Gadya” – "One Little Goat”), which is sung at the end of the Passover Seder. “Chag Purim” (“Purim Festival”) is a folk song for, as you can guess from the title, Purim. These songs are secular, but they’re often sung both at home and in synagogues. In synagogues, they’re sung after the religious service is over.
A song popular with children at Hanukkah is “I Have a Little Dreidel” (also known as the “Dreidel Song”), written in English (with a Yiddish translation). Written by Chayim B. Alevsky (b. 1967), a New York rabbi, it’s so popular in the United States that even non-Jews know it. Appropriately for this article, it’s all about making a dreidel and then playing with it.
“Drey dreydl” (“Turn, dreidel”) is a Yiddish-language Hanukkah song by Moyshe Oysher (1906-58), which includes the lyric “Turn, dreidel, from nothing to all, / Turn, dreidel, and turn out well.” Another traditional folk song, with origins in Israel, is “Chanukah, Chanukah,” with Hebrew words by Levin Kipnis (1894-1990). It contains the line translated as “Chanukah, Chanukah, The dreidel spins and spins. Spin your top until it stops, Have a good time, see who wins!”
An interesting thing about the English rendition of that line is that the Hebrew for dreidel in the original lyrics is sevivon (סביבון). That’s the word for the top in Israel, from the Hebrew word for ‘to spin’ or ‘to rotate.’ There’s even a Hebrew Hanukkah song called “Sevivon,” also by Kipnis, that’s very popular in Israel.
Now, you’ve learned that Hanukkah can start anywhere from late November to late December according to the Gregorian calendar and end between early December and early January. So, every year somewhere during that span, stores all over the country will have displays of gold- and silver-foil-wrapped chocolate coins, known to Jews, especially the children, as Hanukkah gelt.
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| Hanukkah gelt in a mesh pouch |
(Some of the chocolates’ wrapping may also be light blue, especially those imported from Israel, because it’s the color of the flag of the modern state of Israel. The discs are usually also molded with decorations including the Star of David and the menorah. The menorah is sometimes the seven-branched candelabrum, which is the most ancient symbol of Judaism—and the symbol of modern Jerusalem—predating the Star of David by many centuries, but more often it’s the eight-branched candelabrum, called a “hanukkiah” or a “Hanukkah menorah,” which is the central device of the observance of the holiday.)
As I noted, Hanukkah gelt isn’t a necessary part of dreidel, but it is the most common token used for playing the game today. Let’s have a look at its history and development, too.
As I explained above, gelt is Yiddish for ‘money.’ There are many explanations for the origins of this tradition, some of which are certainly apocryphal.
One tradition has it that the gift of money refers to the distribution among Jerusalem’s soldiers, widows, and orphans of the spoils collected by the victorious Maccabean rebels when they retook the city. In later justifications, when the practice was still for adults, not children, the money was basically an end-of-year gratuity for people who did a regular service: the butcher, your child’s teacher, the postman, the milkman, your hairdresser. Hanukkah was a time to pay these men and women a little extra.
The inclusion of teachers in this version of the custom is significant because another exegesis is related to the etymology of the word hanukkah, which means ‘dedication’ in Hebrew but is related to hinuch, the word for ‘education.’
Most readers will be aware that one characteristic of the Jewish people is that they revere education. A common explanation for this is that Jews had become so accustomed from early in their history, starting from the beginning of the diaspora following the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, to the deprivations suffered in the less-than-welcoming host countries into which they migrated.
The societies of the dominant cultures where the wandering Jews settled quickly relieved them of most of their possessions, including money, homes, and goods. Jews quickly saw that the one thing that could not be taken from them was learning—and, of course, religious learning, the study of Torah, was an obligation set out in the Bible (Deuteronomy 6:7). So, education, particularly Jewish education, became a cultural touchstone.
Teachers were admired and valued in Jewish communities. It’s no coincidence that rabbi means ‘teacher’ or ‘master.’ In ancient Judea, a priest, or spiritual leader, was a kohen, not a rabbi. In the Renaissance era (15th and 16th centuries), rabbis traveled from village to village to give instruction on Jewish law and history, usually without payment. At Hanukkah, however, the rabbis accepted coins and food as expressions of the villagers’ gratitude, giving rise to the practice of Hanukkah gelt as a sign of appreciation for valued services.
It wasn’t until the 19th century that giving money shifted from a practice of tipping helpful adult workers to giving gifts to children. This coincided with the time that Hanukkah, historically a minor holiday in Judaism, grew in importance, particularly in the U.S., because of its proximity to Christmas, as the focus shifted from adults and historical commemoration to children and gift-giving.
The shift from real coins to chocolate was a long process, starting in the 16th century when the Spanish explorers and settlers in the New World had their first encounters with the cocoa bean and its byproducts. Chocolate was introduced into Europe in the early part of the century as a drink, and that remained its form for 200 years.
Solid chocolate was produced in Europe starting in the 18th century and immediately became very popular. Some historians record that chocolate coins were fashioned in Europe by Jewish chocolatiers as early as then and continued into the next century. But the most common history of the development of chocolate Hanukkah gelt credits a U.S. candy manufacturer in the 1920s who marketed the first foil-covered chocolate coins in a small, mesh bag with a draw-string closure that resembled a coin purse. It’s still sold that way today (though the candy inside is reputedly of much higher quality and better flavor than the earlier versions, according to those who remember).
By the way, if this account makes you yearn to treat yourself to some Hanukkah gelt, forget it. Wait till next year. Like the panettones, Stollen, and Pfeffernüsse of Christmas, which disappear by 2 January on the dot, and the haroseth some shops offer at Passover, gone by a few days after the holiday ends, the gelt is off the store shelves no later than a day or two after the last day of Hanukkah. Sic transeunt the gustatory pleasures of the world.
I have a little dreidel. I made it out of clay.
And when it’s dry and ready, then dreidel I shall play.
VerY nice
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