The Hanukkah Dreydle

Contrary to what is commonly thought, the dreydl did not exist in Ancient Greece and it was never used to hide the fact that Jewish children were being taught Torah. In fact, spinnig top games have existed throughout Europe and Asia for years. One example comes from Ireland, where a game with exactly the same rules as the dreydl game but played with a considerably larger top called teetotum or totum has been played for centuries.

In the early Middle Ages, this top game was brought from Ireland to Germany. Soon, people all over Europe were playing "trendle".

Jews substituted Hebrew/Yiddish characters on the tops for their Germanic couterparts, yielding the letters shin, giml, nun, hey. Shin stands for the Yiddish "shtel arayn" (put in), gimmel stands for gants (everything), nun stands for nisht (nothing) and hey stands for halb (half). They also changed the name of the top from trendle to dreydl.

As the dreydl game spread to Sephardic Jewish communities, the Sephardim, who did not understand the original Yiddish pneumonic device, created explanations for the meaning of the letters. An early folk etymology was that the letters corresponded to the Hebrew names for the four nations which tried to destroy the Jews in biblical times: Babylonia, Persia, Greece and Rome. A competing explanation was that the four letters, when converted to numeric code (known as Gematria) added up to the number 358, which corresponded to the number for Moshiakh, the Jewish Messiah.

As the game began to become associated with Hanukkah, Jews looked for a connection between it and the holiday. In the 19th century, a rabbi noticed that the letters formed a Hebrew acronym for nes gadol haya sham, "a great miracle happened there", linking the dreydl to the miracle of the oil lasting for eight days. This version of the dreydl's meaning soon became so popular that within a generation it was taught in Jewish heders and Yeshivas as history. All the while, the original rules to the dreydl game were never forgotten, even generations after the corresponding Yiddish words were.

So this Hanukkah, when you're playing dreydl with your mishpokhe, teach them the Yiddish, as well as the Hebrew, meaning of the letters on the dreydl.