[Avodah] dreidel

[Micha Berger]

On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 04:44:58PM -0500, Zev Sero wrote:
: There's nothing specifically goyish about it, any more than wagons or
: dolls or blocks, or any other toy.  The inventor of the game is more
: likely to have been a goy than a yid, just because there were a lot
: more goyim than yidden in Europe at the time; but nobody knows, and it
: may even have been invented independently several times.

By the 1700s, it was associated with Christmas. Jamieson's Dictionary,
in the appendix titled "Yul", writes about how kids would prepare for
the holiday by collecting pins for playing teetotum (vol II, pg 714)
<http://www.scotsdictionary.com>.

That's not to say it was only played that time of year, but certainly
was associated with the season.

However:
: The original letters were in Latin, where T was like the gimmel, and
: stood for "totum".  Then it was translated into Yiddish, with "Nisht,
: Gantz, Halb, Shtel"; and then someone came up with the "Nes Godol Hoyo
: Shom" thing to give it a Chanukah flavour.

The other sides had (A)ufer (take), (D)epone (put) and (N)ihil (nothing).

Getting rid of Latin was one of the key point of the English Reformation,
so the practice of using a Latin-labeled top as a holiday celebration
would have to (1) predate their current version of Christmas, or (2)
imply that the top was used year around, and only later got associate
with the season.

And Joseph Strutt (b. 1749) "Make it a Pleasure and Not a Task" mentions
playing teetotum as a child and makes no mention of Christmas.

The above was produced by excessive Googlingk, starting with checking
wikipedia's sources. My previous exposure to the concept of a teetotum
was Alice Through the Looking Glass (ch. 5). "'Are you a child or a
teetotum?' the Sheep said, as she took up another pair of needles. 'You'll
make me giddy soon, if you go on turning round like that.'" Martin
Gardner discusses it in his peirush.

My gut instinct is that the teetotum was a serious gambling instrument
before it was redueced to a children's toy. That seems to be the
implication of the old (public domain) Britannica. Both Jews and
Christians needed something indoors to entertain the kids during a cold
holiday, so they both hit upon giving out cheap tops.

Since we have a whole thing about gambling in this season, extended to
nitl nacht, kvitlach, etc... I would bet (sorry!) we were first. But
if my theory is correct, it really isn't the least bit religious.

(The word "tot", for a chlid just learning to walk similarly traces
itself back to teetotum as I found in Jamieson, a couple of hundred
pages earlier.)

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Our greatest fear is not that we're inadequate,
micha at aishdas.org        Our greatest fear is that we're powerful
http://www.aishdas.org   beyond measure
Fax: (270) 514-1507                        - Anonymous