Let’s start with a little history. What we know as the dreidel game goes back to ancient Greek and Roman times. It was originally designed as a gambling game. A spinning top with multiple sides called a teetotum was inscribed with letters on each side. Each letter referred to a word the meaning of which were take, leave, nothing, and everything. The game begins with everyone putting equal amounts of coins or in modern times chocolate candies into the pot, for each turn you would either take, leave, do nothing, or get everything in the pot. Hence the gambling association.
One story goes that Jews adopted the game from Roman soldiers who brought the game to England. The game was played around the winter holidays and became increasingly popular. There is a theory that the unfamiliar lettering was changed by jews as reminders of the rules of the game. Those letters in turn became symbols of Judaism and the game was adopted into the Jewish holidays.
Another story states during Greek and Roman times, Jews were in hiding and would keep dreidels with them to make the Roman soldiers believe they were simply gambling when in fact they were studying the Torah. The Torah would quickly be hidden and out came the dreidels. The letters on each side of the dreidel in Hebrew are: נ (nun), ג (gimel), ה (hei), ש (shin). “Nun” meaning not or nothing, “gimel” meaning whole, “hei” meaning half, and “shin” meaning put in. According to Jewish folklore, the words also represent the phrase “a great miracle happened there.” Dreidels made in Israel often swap the letter shin for פ (pe), meaning “here,” changing the phrase to “a great miracle happened here.”
Today the dreidel game is played during Hannukah by children around the world. Most often children use chocolate coins covered in gold foil known as Hannukah gelt. Gelt is derived from the German and Yiddish words meaning money.
In 2019, a New York City jeweler in created the world’s most expensive dreidel according to the Guinness Book of World Records. At the time it was valued at $70,000.
Dreidels or teetotum are often used in board games instead of dice. In fact, the original 1860 Game of Life board game used a teetotum rather than dice to avoid the association with gambling. To learn more about the history and meaning of dreidels check out this site, or Wikipedia here.
