The Story of Gelt

If you’re anything like me, while passing around the latkes by the light of the menorah at your cousin’s Hanukkah party, you’ve probably accidentally smashed some chocolate into their carpet. Not just any chocolate, of course. Gelt. Thin, foil-wrapped fake coins given as a reward for those victorious at dreidel-spinning, after all, are as beloved as those boundlessly courageous Greek-defeating Maccabees of old.

Where did this holiday treat emerge from? Gelt, from the German word for money, seems to have made its first appearance on the Festival of Lights in the writings of the 14th-century Barcelona-born sage Shlomo ben Avraham ibn Aderet. In a response he composed to a question of Jewish law, he mentions a certain charitable individual who had a practice of distributing money to widows and orphans during Hanukkah. Presumably, this was to provide them with the financial means to share in the community’s celebration.

Perhaps, some modern scholars have proposed, distributing gold coins on Hanukkah commemorates the coinage minted by the Maccabees after their military achievement. The right to mint their own currency following their hard-fought success, after all, is specifically mentioned in the First Book of Maccabees.

Sources in the 16th century emerging from Italian and Sephardic Jewish communities record a tradition of collecting money for teachers and poor children during Hanukkah. In Ashkenazi countries, rabbis, ritual slaughterers, and other communal workers went door to door over its eight days, as well as on Purim, that other gift-giving-centric holiday. This was a crucial means of eliciting their yearly salary for their services.

Later scholars sought to relate the practice to the holiday’s themes. Some, as the Israeli scholar Zvi Ron has noted in his study of Jewish customs, suggested an etymological connection between hinukh, education, and the word hanukkah. Rabbi Menashe Klein noted that since those hearty Hasmoneans fought those Seleucid Greeks to defend Jews’ devotion to their religious beliefs it made perfect sense to extend appreciation to today’s Torah teachers in turn. Others added that it wasn’t only religious study Israel’s enemies sought to stamp out. It was the other two pillars on which, per the Mishnaic tractate Ethics of Our Fathers, the world stands: prayer and kindness. Thus, on Hanukkah we light candles (per Proverbs 6:23’s declaration that the Torah is a source of light), recite additional prayers to synagogue services, and donate charity.

The 17th-century Rabbi Shaul ben David added a measure of mysticism. He noted that the at-bash gematria (swapping out the alphabet’s first word for its last and calculating the letters’ numerological equivalents), “Hanukkah” has the same value, 269, as “the secret of charity.” Young students going door to door singing and collecting charity in support of their studies, in his estimation, were living jugs of oil, the embodiment of that ancient container containing the miraculous modicum that enabled the Jerusalem Temple’s menorah to be lit following the Maccabean triumph (not a bad fundraising pitch).

The students’ roaming performances, no doubt, ring familiar. In medieval times, wassailing was a common pre-harvest-season habit originating in the Roman Saturnalia, in which young people would seek to evoke an auspicious and bountiful spring through song and the exchange of neighborly blessings. Its Christian iteration led to the emergence of Christmas caroling.

The rise of the Hasidic movement spread the custom of gelt-giving further, beyond the indigent to all those looking to enjoy the festivities. Per the Lubavitcher Rebbe, R. Menachem Mendel Schneerson, funds were traditionally distributed specifically on the fifth of the eight days—both because that day could never, due to complex calendrical calculations, fall out on Shabbat (when money is forbidden to the touch), and because at the holiday halfway point it couldn’t hurt to spike children’s enthusiasm with some shekels. A kindly contemporary of the Rebbe’s added that perhaps by giving out money to the masses, those in actual financial need wouldn’t be embarrassed to receive it.

As Jenna Weissman Joselit documented in her book The Wonders of America, by the 1940s the custom had already become an essential component of American Jews’ Hanukkah experience. Parents believed, as Miriam Isaacs and Trude Weiss Rosmarin wrote in What Every Jewish Woman Should Know: A Guide for Jewish Women in 1941, “Jewish children should be showered with gifts, Hanukkah gifts, as a perhaps primitive but most effective means of making them immune against envy of the Christian children and their Christmas presents.” Gelt to underpaid teachers had morphed into gifts for kids.

In more recent decades, contemporary observers—such as Sharon Duke Estroff in her Can I Have a Cell Phone for Hanukkah?: The Essential Scoop on Raising Modern Jewish Kids—have encouraged young people to swap out commercialism for kindhearted generosity through charity projects for the needy, rerouting the custom back to its origins.

The next time you tear open that mesh baggie and chow down on some chocolate faux funds, then, do so intentionally. Whether you recall Judah and Co.’s sword and spear defense of Jewish practice or medieval strolling minstrels eliciting sparks of joy amid winter’s darkness, or take the occasion to pledge to share some of what you have with those who have just a bit less, spend these eight days with meaning accompanying your munching, and your money.