A Little Story of the non-Jewish Origins of the Chanukah Dreidel

Overview: A brief history of the Dreidel, originating in the Near East and becoming popular in Europe in the 16th-century, eventually seeping into Jewish culture, and now a popular Chanukah game.

Legend has it that the Jewish children would secretly learn Torah in the caves, a study that was outlawed by Antiochus IV Epiphanes. When the Syrian guards would enter the cave, they would quickly replace their Torah scrolls with the Dreidel to fool the guards into thinking they were playing all along instead of learning Torah. This is why we play Dreidel on Chanukah – at least according to popular belief. But in reality, this legend is historically inaccurate, and the true origins of the Dreidel are, in fact, from a game played by non-Jews especially during the Christmas season in Europe.

Known as the Totum or Teetotum, this spinner was used as a dice for gambling and children’s games and is mentioned in 16th-century English and French writings. Later on, writers and paintings begin to depict the Teetotum in Central and Eastern Europe where the Jews would have adopted it. Much earlier versions of the Teetotum appear in the Near East during the Greek and Roman eras, but only became popular in Europe in the latter half of the second-millennium, and sometime later this spinner also begins to appear in Ashkenazic Jewish texts for the first time (in the 18th-century, although the custom may have been older).

As for the legend that surrounds its origins, this myth was only first recorded in the 1890s by an American Rabbi living in Pittsburgh, named Rabbi Avraham Eliezer Hirschovitz,^[1] and gained traction due to its theological appeal. Before then, there is no mention of this myth, and prior to the popularization of this spinner in the 16th-century, there is no mention whatsoever of the Dreidel in Jewish texts. The Dreidel is just another example of Jewish culture being influenced by its host cultures, from food to clothing, to games and superstitions.

A simplistic explanation for the adoption of the Dreidel is suggested in the Aveni Nezer.^[2] He theorized that the game was used to keep the children awake while the Chanukah candles burned.

The top spinner has many different forms, but the most common are 4-sided, 6-sided, and 8-sided marked with letters on each of the sides. The letters are used in a popular teetotum game called “Put and Take.” In England, the sides usually have the letters T (take all) H (half) P (put down) N (nothing). In German, the Teetotum – or what they called trendel from which the Yiddish dreidel derives – had the four letters N (nisht) G (ganz) H (halb) S (shtel ein). When these letters were converted into Hebrew/Yiddish, the letters Nun, Gimel, Hei, and Shin came to represent nes gadol haya sham (“a great miracle happened there, i.e. Israel”) in popular imagination. As a result of this misunderstanding, most modern Israeli dreidels replace the shin (there) to Peh (here) to signify that the miracle occurred in Israel itself.^[3]