The dreidel is a four-sided top used for a simple betting game during Hanukkah. Each side indicates what the player should do. The game’s origin is uncertain, but it may have come from an English and Irish point game. The letters on the dreidel represent the words “a great miracle happened there” and the four ancient kingdoms that tried to exterminate the Jews.
A dreidel is a four-sided top used for play during Hanukkah. The four sides each show a different character: nun, gimel, hey and shin.
The game played with a dreidel is a simple betting game, with each of the sides of the top indicating what the spinning player is to do. Each player starts with a small amount of any currency used for the game, whether it’s cents, small candy, or some other token. At the start of a player’s turn, he puts a token into the collective pot, then spins the dreidel.
If the dreidel lands face up, the player does nothing and play passes to the next player. If it lands on gimel, the player takes the whole pot for the turn. If it lands on hey, the player takes half of the pot, and if the dreidel lands on shin, the player puts a small number of chips into the pot.
A popular apocryphal story for the dreidel holds that the game originated in the time of the Greco-Syrians. During this period the Jewish people were prevented from studying their Torah by the Greek-Syrians. Legend has it that as a way to justify gathering for Torah readings, the Jews would keep a dreidel around, so if any Greek-Syrians arrived they could hide the Torah and act as if they were just playing the game. A similar account holds that the dreidel served as an excuse to gather for Torah discussions, which would have taken place during the crown’s rotation.
A more probable origin of the dreidel has linked it to an English and Irish point game that is very similar in nature. This game, called teetotum or totum, was played throughout the 16th century. The letters used on the top of the totum were N for ‘nothing’, T for ‘take all’, H for ‘take half’ and P for ‘put in’. When the game arrived in Germany, the letters changed to N for nichts meaning “nothing”, G for ganz meaning “all”, H for halb meaning “half” and S for stell ein meaning “put in”. . When Yiddish-speaking German Jews first started playing the game, they used the Hebrew letters that make the same sounds and the accompanying words: nischt, gantz, halb, and shtel.
The letters used on the dreidel are also used to represent the words “nes gadol haya sham” which means “a great miracle happened there”. Since the creation of the Israeli state in 1948, there has been a slight variation, replacing the letter shin with the letter pay and changing the sentence to “nes gadol haya po” which means “a great miracle happened here”.
A teaching in the midrash indicates that the four sides of the dreidel, in addition to their representation of the sentence above, also represent the four major ancient kingdoms that attempted to exterminate the Jews. This has nun representing Nebuchadnezzar and his kingdom of Babylon, gimel representing Gog and the kingdom of Greece, hay representing Haman and the kingdom of Persia, and shin representing Se’ir and the kingdom of Rome.
The dreidel is also known as a fargle or varfl in Yiddish and as a sevivon in Israel.
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