Few things are considered more jewish than the dreidel which is a game using a modified spinning top that acts a bit like a die and is commonly played by jews on the Hanukkah holiday, which – to quote myself celebrates:
‘The rededication of the second Temple of Solomon following the mass murder of Greeks, Syrians and non-jewish Palestinians by jewish religious terrorists in the Maccabean revolt as well as the forced mass circumcision of boys and men and the subsequent failure of the (Greek) Seleucid Empire to quash the revolt successfully due to the untimely death of the Seleucid king: Antiochus IV.’ (1)
Jews have long claimed that they invented the dreidel as Rabbi David Golinkin explains:
‘The dreidel or sevivon is perhaps the most famous custom associated with Hanukkah. Indeed, various rabbis have tried to find an integral connection between the dreidel and the Hanukkah story; the standard explanation is that the letters nun, gimmel, hey, shin, which appear on the dreidel in the Diaspora, stand for nes gadol haya sham–“a great miracle happened there,”while in Israel the dreidel says nun, gimmel, hey, pey, which means “a great miracle happened here.”
One 19th-century rabbi maintained that Jews played with the dreidel in order to fool the Greeks if they were caught studying Torah, which had been outlawed. Others figured out elaborate gematriot [numerological explanations based on the fact that every Hebrew letter has a numerical equivalent] and word plays for the letters nun, gimmel, hey, shin. For example, nun, gimmel, hey, shin in gematria equals 358, which is also the numerical equivalent of mashiach or Messiah!
Finally, the letters nun, gimmel, hey, shin are supposed to represent the four kingdoms that tried to destroy us [in ancient times]: N = Nebuchadnetzar = Babylon; H = Haman = Persia = Madai; G = Gog = Greece; and S = Seir = Rome.’ (2)
However, as Golinkin is honest enough to note:
‘All of these elaborate explanations were invented after the fact.’ (3)
He does not explain further but happily Chen Malul does writing that:
‘In the 19th century, a certain group of rabbis who were faced with this question, came up with a creative answer: The dreidel, they explained, is a game Jews used to play whenever a Greek person was nearby. The idea was to fool the Greek into thinking the Jews were playing a harmless game, while hiding the fact that they were actually engaged in the forbidden study of Torah.’ (4)
So, in summary then all these ‘jewish origins of the Dreidel’ explanations were simply made up to cover up the truth by rabbis in the nineteenth century, but what is the truth that the rabbis were trying to cover up?
This is the fact - as Golinkin explains – that the Dreidel’s origins are entirely non-jewish and it was simply adopted and modified by jews from the original non-jewish game.
He writes that:
‘The dreidel game originally had nothing to do with Hanukkah; it has been played by various people in various languages for many centuries.
In England and Ireland there is a game called totum or teetotum that is especially popular at Christmastime. In English, this game is first mentioned as “totum” ca. 1500-1520. The name comes from the Latin “totum,” which means “all.” By 1720, the game was called T- totum or teetotum, and by 1801 the four letters already represented four words in English: T = Take all; H = Half; P = Put down; and N = Nothing.
Our Eastern European game of dreidel (including the letters nun, gimmel, hey, shin) is directly based on the German equivalent of the totum game: N = Nichts = nothing; G = Ganz = all; H = Halb = half; and S = Stell ein = put in. In German, the spinning top was called a “torrel” or “trundl,” and in Yiddish it was called a “dreidel,” a “fargl,” a “varfl” [= something thrown], “shtel ein” [= put in], and “gor, gorin” [= all].’ (5)
In addition, the English Christmas game totum was probably originally brought to England by Roman soldiers (6) and is a Greco-Roman invention (7) subsequently adopted by the English and then the Germans where in its turn was filched by the jews and claimed as their own invention.
Thus, we can see that once again a popular ‘jewish invention’ is seen to be nothing of the kind and to have – in fact – been invented by non-jews!
References
(1) https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-symbolism-of-murder-in-the-jewish
(2) https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-origin-of-the-dreidel/
(3) Ibid.
(4) https://blog.nli.org.il/en/dreidel_origin/
(5) https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-origin-of-the-dreidel/
(6) https://blog.nli.org.il/en/dreidel_origin/
(7) https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2014-12-14/ty-article/.premium/gyration-nation-the-weird-ancient-history-of-the-dreidel/0000017f-db4a-db22-a17f-fffb3e080000