Dreidel

A dreidel is a four sided spinning top, each face marked with one Hebrew letter, nun, gimel, hei and shin outside Israel, read together as the initials of the phrase nes gadol haya sham, a great miracle happened there, while in Israel the shin is replaced with a pei, changing the phrase to a great miracle happened here, and the top is spun in a simple game of chance played especially by children during Hanukkah.

Popular tradition holds that Jewish children under the religious persecution of the Seleucid Empire, in the period the Hanukkah story itself commemorates, used the dreidel and its innocuous appearance as a gambling toy to disguise ongoing Torah study, quickly switching to spinning the top and pretending to play a game whenever soldiers or officials approached, so that what looked like idle gambling was in fact a cover for forbidden religious instruction.

The Encyclopaedia Judaica records this account as the popular explanatory legend surrounding the game rather than as an episode independently attested in the earliest historical sources for the Hanukkah period, a distinction worth keeping honestly in view even though the story remains a beloved and widely repeated part of how the custom is explained to children today.

Historically, the spinning top game itself appears to derive not from ancient Judea but from a much later and geographically distant source: a four sided gambling top known in English as a teetotum and in German speaking Central Europe as a trendel, already in wide secular use among the general population, which Ashkenazi Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe adopted and adapted for Hanukkah play, replacing the original letters with the Hebrew initials that gave the custom its retrospective religious meaning. This layered history, an originally secular European gambling toy repurposed with new lettering and given a legendary religious backstory that developed after the game itself was already established, is typical of how many folk customs acquire their popularly understood meaning over time, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica situates the dreidel firmly within this pattern of adaptation rather than treating the game as a continuous survival from the Maccabean period the Hanukkah holiday itself commemorates. The custom remains an active, cheerful part of Hanukkah celebration in Jewish communities worldwide today, made now in wood, clay, plastic and every material in between, entirely detached in everyday practice from the layered history behind its familiar four letters.