Dreidels (sevivonim)

One popular custom on Hanukkah is to spin the dreidel, (in Hebrew sevivon). It has been claimed that this custom goes back to the time of the Maccabees that it was a decoy to fool the Greeks that the people pretended to play with the dreidel if the Greeks caught them learning Torah. This claim is quite unbelievable since all the evidence points to the dreidel being from the Middle Ages, where the game was very popular in many Western European countries.

Sidney Hoenig (1976, pp. 264, 265) notes that the world dreidel is from the German dreihen, which means to spin. Furthermore, the sides of the dreidel have four letters, gimmel, nun, shin and heh, and all of these derive from the letters on the spinning tops in Germany. While many are taught that these letters symbolize nes gadol hayah shem, a great miracle happened there, really the letters correspond to the rules of the game. The rules of playing dreidel is that if the dreidel lands on a gimmel, then one gets all of the pot, and in German this was symbolized by a G for the word gantz (all). If the dreidel lands on a heh, then one gets half of the pot, and this is from the letter H which in German stood for the word halb. The letter nun is from the letter N the first letter in the German word, nisht, which signifies that a person gets nothing if the dreidel lands on a nun. Finally, if the dreidel lands on the letter shin, then one has to put money into the pot, as the shin comes from the letter S, which was the beginning of the German word shtel, put.

This gambling source has been almost completely forgotten, and hence in Israel, most of the dreidels have the letter peh instead of the letter heh to declare that the miracle happened po, here in Israel.

Accordingly, there is no religious significance to playing dreidel on Hanukkah, and instead it is an example of how we copied a non-Jewish gambling game.

The dreidel might also be the source of the custom on Hanukkah of giving Hanukkah gelt (money). Hoenig (1976, p. 268) writes that this custom probably originated in the seventeenth century. He writes that the custom is to give the money to the poor, and he suggests that "maybe it is a carryover from the admonition in the Book of Esther of giving gifts to the poor." Yet, he also notes that the giving of Hanukah gelt became popular since it provided children with money for playing dreidel. Probably this is the true source of the custom, as my understanding is that the Hanukkah gelt goes to the children and not necessarily to the poor.

Bibliography:

Hoenig, Sidney, 1976, A Hanukkah Anthology, Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society.