My intention, as indicated in this past Friday’s Raspberry Patch post, was to post this special item tomorrow, on the eve of Hanukah. But I decided to do it a bit in advance for two reasons: December 24 is always a slow day, unless someone drags you along on a last-minute shopping fling (as my old friend Lynn Harrison did to me on December 24, 1968…..to Tyson’s Corner, no less, since I had use of a car and she didn’t); and it may take some earnest readers more than one stab to assimilate the substance below before candle-lighting time tomorrow, twenty minutes before sunset. Hence:
Lily Ong[1]: My first question to you, please: How the heck do you spell it? I see several variations, and it’s confusing.
Adam Garfinkle: It’s spelled, right to left, using these five Hebrew letters: חנוכה. But I know that’s not what you’re asking, Lily.
All spellings of those five Hebrew letters rendered into other phonetic systems, including the Roman alphabet we use for English, are transliterations. By their nature, transliterations lose etymological information and often lose sounds in the original language. So the answer to your question is that it doesn’t matter how you spell Hanukah in the Roman alphabet as long as it leads a reader to a reasonably accurate pronunciation.
That said, some spellings are more prone than others to mislead readers into errant pronunciations. In this case that applies to any English spelling beginning with “c-h” because it can tempt pronunciations with the initial sound coming out like the “c-h” in chime or cha-cha. Same goes for misleading transliterations of other words beginning with the same Hebrew letter: The Hebrew name “Hayim” is better than “Chaim”, the toast “l’haim” is better than “l’chaim”, and the word for audacity, “hutzpah”, is better than “chutzpah”.
LO: So what’s the right way to pronounce Hanukah?
AG: The proper pronunciation begins with a light airy guttural “h” sound, not a deep back-of-the-throat guttural like the pronunciation of the “c-h” in the Scottish loch. Neither guttural sound exists in English, and the pronunciation of the two varieties in Hebrew have been conflated over the years in places where the majority-spoken language has also lacked these sounds. That’s where imperfect pronunciations come from, but only sticklers care about such things.
LO: I can imagine the struggle to pronounce sounds non-native to English. Maybe it’s a bit like non-native Chinese learning to hear and pronounce the tonal differences in Chinese. Moving on to less trivial matters, how did the holiday come about?
AG: You’ve asked an obvious, clear, and straightforward question. I wish the answer could be as neat and simple, but it isn’t.
In a narrow historical sense the holiday called Hanukah was originally a celebration of the re-dedication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in the year 164 BCE following successful military operations led by a priestly family called the Maccabees against the occupying Seleucid Empire. The root of the word Hanukah means “dedication”, as in of an altar. And that really happened.
The story most Jews learn through their families or in Hebrew school starts there, but it then simplifies, prettifies, distorts, truncates, and reinterprets what actually occurred. This reinterpretation, undertaken beginning roughly 250 years later, was done knowingly and for what was believed at the time to be a good reason—more on that in a moment. Here’s a simple test that shows if someone is aware of the narrative jujitsu that took place: If a Jew today celebrates Hanukah but has never heard the names Jason and Menelaus associated with the events of the mid-2nd century BCE, then that person knows a theologized re-imagination of the holiday created by a small but influential group of rabbis long after the events it purports to describe. That person likely does not know what actually happened.
Just one more note here while your mouth is agape with surprise, Lily: Jews did not use the name “Hanukah” for the holiday until around the third century of the Common Era. The name had to pass through Aramaic—the Near Eastern vernacular of that time—back into Hebrew: from Hanukta to Hanukah. The most important near-contemporary historical sources for the holiday—the books of Maccabees I and II and the writings of Flavius Josephus and others—never use the term Hanukah and, as already suggested, they relate a history unknown to most Jews today.
The ancient Near East had been rich with winter solstice rituals and festivals going back into the mists of time. After Alexander the Great arrived in Jerusalem in 332 BCE, the solstice celebrations fell under the rubric of the Feast of Dionysus, more specifically “rural Dionysia” that fell in the month of Poseidon. Naturally enough, whatever the name was at the time, the rituals included a lot of torches and lights symbolizing the hopeful return of longer days. So, not surprisingly, after 164 BCE Jews called their holiday Hag Ha-Urim, “the festival of lights”, and it consisted of the celebration of a military victory layered over what people had been doing already for many centuries. Incidentally, Hag Ha-Urim is what the holiday is most often called today in Israel, particularly among secular Israelis.
LO: What happened between 164 BCE and the 3rd century CE to cause the transformation of the story you mentioned?
A lot happened, of course, over almost 500 years in a civilizational crossroads like the Eastern Mediterranean, which even then was a busy trading corridor between Mesopotamia and Egypt, and hence a spoil of imperial competition and ambition. Library shelves are filled with books in many languages about this rich history. We have time only for a very brief summary targeted on the topic to hand.
Alexander the Great died in 323 BCE and his great empire soon broke into four parts, opening a protracted period of competition, intrigue, political instability, and war. The entire Eastern Mediterranean, including what is today Israel, fell under the control of the part known as the Seleucid Empire. Despite the divisions and instability that followed the shattering of Alexander’s empire, cultural Hellenism grew increasingly dominant in otherwise diverse ethno-linguistic regions. It was against the wave of Hellenistic culture that the Maccabees rose up against their Seleucid overlords, whose capital was the great ancient city of Antioch (today at the core of the city of Iskandurun, in Turkey).
You wouldn’t know it from the story Jewish children usually learn about Hanukah, but Hellenistic culture was very popular among Jews or that time, even among some of the hereditary priesthood who performed the Temple rituals. This is easier to understand if one knows that under Alexander no infringement on Jewish religious practice occurred, and Jews benefitted from the enlarged trade and security that the empire provided. But after Alexander’s death conditions began to change. First a High Priest with the Hellenized name Jason, and then a successor with the equally Greek name Menelaus, accommodated and advanced the effort of the Hellenizing Seleucid kings to turn Jerusalem into a then-“modern” Hellenic city—and that effort did infringe on Jewish autonomy in Jerusalem. The priests’ motives included the fact that the Seleucid overlords controlled their appointments and salaries, so it served their interests to befriend and accommodate the powerful.
In the sanitized holiday story it’s the good Jews against the bad “Greeks”, sometimes called Assyrians as well as Seleucids. In reality it was mainly Jew against Jew, priestly faction against priestly faction. This is the beginning of wisdom for understanding Hanukah as realists. Seleucid rulers, for their part, were far more concerned with other adversaries—the Parthians, ancient Iranians, in particular—and could barely have cared less about Judea or Jewish religious practices. They cared only that this small country pay its taxes and not make distracting trouble.
But Jewish rivalries and subsequent communal violence did make trouble. So the Seleucid rulers in Antioch sought local allies to support, and sent troops to help them quell the instability. It wasn’t as easy as it might have been, and this angered the Seleucid king Antiochus. Anger gives bad advice: Antiochus banned Sabbath observance and ordered the defilement of the Temple with idols, pigs, and more besides; some pro-Hellenist Temple priests, eagerly and not, followed his orders. This outrage turned Jewish wrath against the Seleucids and their Jewish associates. That’s what triggered the war, which Jewish guerrilla fighters eventually won, and that’s what enabled the re-dedication of the Temple in 164 B.C.E.
LO: I assume this background is necessary to understand what happened afterwards.
AG: It absolutely is.
In the standard religious school story, the war ended with total victory and renewed national independence in 164 BCE. But it actually did no such thing. A treaty ending the fighting gave the Jews control over the Temple Mount, assuring their religious freedom, and it provided for resumed local autonomy as Seleucid troops withdrew. But the Jews did not thereby achieve sovereignty: Judea was a still a vassal province of the Seleucid Empire, and Jewish High Priests were still appointed from Antioch. This was nothing new. Judea had been a vassal province of Alexander’s empire before that and a vassal province of the Persian Empire for about four centuries before that. Ancient Israel had not been a fully independent nation since the Babylonian conquest, and with it the destruction of Solomon’s Temple, in 586 BCE.
Anyway, before long, fighting resumed between the Maccabees and the Seleucids and lasted for many years. More fighting occurred after 164 BCE than before it. After around twenty years of intermittent warfare the Maccabees and their allies managed to achieve two things: They wore down the Seleucids and, more importantly, they at least temporarily won the culture war among the Jews against Hellenism, whose fundamental values were at odds with traditional Jewish ones.
The standard storyline notwithstanding, the Jews never defeated the Seleucids militarily once and for all, and they did not achieve formal independence either, only de facto sovereignty, until the Seleucid Empire itself crumbled around them more than half a century later. Judea was much too small, poor, and weak and the Seleucid Empire much too vast, wealthy, and powerful for that ever to have happened. The achievement of independence really turned on the fact that the Seleucid regime remained internally unstable and beset by other more formidable military challenges. Seleucid rulers, forever looking over their own shoulders, simply lacked the bandwidth for yet more conflict with the pesky Jews.
In a way, the Seleucid decision to throw in the towel in Judea ran parallel with the Nixon Administration’s decision to get out of Vietnam, with or without honor, in the early 1970s. There are times in geopolitical life when small-fry pain-in-the ass provinces off the beaten path of global wealth and power become more trouble than they’re worth in the face of more pressing concerns or opportunities. It also illustrates the truth that the balance of interests often outweighs the balance of power. Jews cared a lot more about their own hearths than the more powerful Seleucids did, just as Vietnamese cared more about theirs than more powerful American did--and, it seems, as Ukrainians today care more about theirs than more powerful Russians do.
LO: Those analogies to our times really help to illuminate the history. It seems history can repeat itself.
AG: Some clever fellow said no, history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes—and that’s because human social and political nature reflects some sticky continuities.
LO: But we still haven’t made it to the creation of Hanukah as we know it today. We haven’t even made it to the Common Era yet!
AG: Well, as you noted, a lot happens in four to five hundred years. Look how much has happened since George Washington’s First Inaugural, or since Stamford Raffles showed up in Singapore in 1819. That was only a little more than two hundred years ago.
LO: That’s useful perspective.
AG: We’ll get there soon, I promise.
Renewed Jewish independence did not produce a “happily ever after” Hollywood-style finale. There are no such Hollywood-style finales in real history. Instead it gave birth to the Hasmonean dynasty, founded in 141 BCE, which, by all accounts, was pretty much a disaster. Sandwiched between short interludes of peace and prosperity were revolts, rivalries, assassinations, great thefts, small wars, and even a princely son letting his own mother starve to death in a dungeon. There was also the return of intra-Jewish culture wars over Hellenization, and other divisive cultural currents of the day.
Between 141 and 111 BCE the Hasmonean kings remained formally subservient to the Seleucids while in practice they were independent actors, even maintaining diplomatic contacts with other regional powers as insurance against renewed Seleucid pressures. When the Seleucid dynasty imploded around 111 BCE, the now less restrained Hasmoneans entered into regional competition with stronger powers to pocket post-Seleucid territorial and other loot. They succeeded for a time in expanding their power, but internal rivalries and imperial intrigues soon doomed the dynasty. One Hasmonean noble connived with the rising Romans to best his own brother in order to seize power, with the result that Rome soon invaded and conquered Judea in 37 BCE. The Hasmonean dynasty died in ignominy after only 103 years. (Jewish independence in the Jews’ ancestral home was not restored until May 1948—nearly two thousand years later.)
Then things got worse! Some Jews, with the model of the successful Maccabean wars dancing in their heads, resisted Roman authority. They started what became known as the Great Revolt in the year 66 CE. The Romans, not as weak, administratively fragile, or as distracted by other challenges as were the Seleucids, cracked down hard. When the resistance did not abate, but instead succeeded in killing many Roman soldiers, the Romans responded by destroying the Second Temple in the year 70 CE and putting an end to Jewish religious rites centered around it. The Jews kept fighting until utter defeat in the year 73.
See, we’ve made it to the Common Era!
LO: Yes, good. But Hanukah still doesn’t exist as it is today, right?
AG: True: For that to happen several more catastrophes were required.
One might think that the Jews would have learned their lesson after the Second Temple was destroyed and backed off to wait, maybe, for a chance to rebuild, just as occurred after the first Temple was destroyed. Nope.
Next came the Kitos War: Jews in Cyprus, Egypt, and Cyrenaica rose up against Rome in 115 while Roman armies were off battling the Parthians. The kept it up for about two and half years before the uprising was quelled.
Then some zealots in Judea, still fired up by hopes for a repeat of Maccabean history, mounted another revolt against Roman occupation in 132 CE—62 years after the destruction of the Temple. This revolt, led by a charismatic firebrand re-named Shimon Bar-Kokhba (“son of a star”) by the revolt’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Akiva, scored some spectacular successes at first. Rabbi Akiva identified Bar-Kokhba as the long awaited messiah, so a millenarian fever fanned by the severity of Roman rule added an otherworldly dimension to the revolt.
Early Jewish military successes embarrassed Roman generals and leaders, caused the re-shuffling of political power in Rome itself, and thereby created new political incentives to win what became known as “the Jewish War”. By 135 CE Bar-Kokhba’s army had been crushed, the final stand taking place atop the southern citadel of Masada. Roman troops then roamed the land burning villages, raping women, selling untold numbers into slavery, creating massive refugee flows into adjoining lands, and massacring an estimated 600,000 people out of a prewar total Jewish population of about 4.5 million. They turned the destroyed Temple Mount into a garbage dump, promulgated a series of harsh edicts against remnant Jewish communities, and then soon began a forced exile of the remaining 700,000 Jews from their land.
LO: Talk about history rhyming: Isn’t the delay between Roman occupation in 37 BCE and the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE a replay of sorts of what had happened earlier with the Babylonians and the destruction of the First Temple?
AG: You know your history! Yes indeed, there is a parallel, although in the Babylonian case the interregnum was much briefer. In both cases, too, the experience of exile transformed Judaism.
Had it not been for the first exile, a successful response to the second exile could not have occurred. In Babylonia exiled Jewish elites, without sovereignty or a religious center or a firm presence in Jerusalem, began the process of turning Judaism into a trans-territorial and portable religious system. They did so with books at a time when a critical mass of deep literacy was just beginning to set roots. They set out to refashion a more or less typical ancient sacrificial ritual practice conducted by a small priestly elite into a normative, law-based religion binding on every Jew. When the even greater disaster of the Roman conquest and occupation befell the Jewish people, the rabbis of that time—again without sovereignty, a religious center, or a significant presence in the land—took the process even further: That is where Hanukah as we know it today comes from.
LO: So the transformation of the Hanukah story from that of a military victory to something very different was a response to a calamity?
AG: Yes, more precisely to a series of crises and worsening calamities. While the rebels against Rome had in mind the model of the successful Maccabean wars, and the lure of redemption by force of arms, the rabbis of the mid-2nd-century CE had a very different model in their heads. They knew how conflict among Jews had led to the destruction of the First Temple—this is where a minor religious holiday marked just after Rosh Hashanah, the Fast of Gedalia, comes from. And even more vivid for them was how the internal intrigues, betrayals, and hatreds of Hasmonean times led to the Roman conquest.
Even more important, given the disaster of the Bar-Kokhba war and the exile, they saw how the messianic temptation joined to force of arms had driven the Jewish people to the edge of total destruction. So in a little village a distance from Jerusalem in what is today north-central Israel, a group of rabbis led by a man named Yohanan ben-Zakkai transformed Judaism a second time. In a place called Yavne, ben-Zakkai and his associates transformed the mindset that had shattered Jewish existence into a new one they hoped would prevent permanent oblivion and, ultimately, bring about the restoration of the nation in its promised land.
They created what we today call Rabbinic Judaism. In Yavne the rabbis began the writing of Jewish liturgy from the sparseness of a sacrificial rite into texts embodying a redesigned theology. The original theology of Judaism tied the one God and His chosen People and His Promised Land into a bonded triangle; without the land and the Temple set upon it a different formula had to be devised. That was the theology of sin, exile, and redemption. From that framework Hanukah emerged.
LO: Necessity is the mother of invention, huh?
AG: Yes. Again to put it briefly, the rabbis were determined to erase attitudes that in their view had caused such suffering and loss, and to substitute new ones that would sustain the people for the long haul under the parlous conditions of exile. These rabbis were not fantasists or mystics. They knew what they were doing; they knew the basic truths about the past for what they were and found them well worth transcending, even if the process required some bending of historical facts. Their transformation consisted of three main aspects.
First, foreigners hadn’t caused the suffering and defeat of the Jewish people; the Jews themselves were responsible because they had failed to be respectful of one another’s dignity, to be compassionate, forgiving, and pious. Into the liturgy the rabbis placed the message that “in the face of our sins were we exiled from our land”, and they raised the sin of “gratuitous hatred” to the very top of their list of moral abominations.
Second, it was not military power, wealth, or grandeur that secured the people’s independence and freedom from the Seleucids, but faith in God to keep His promises to Israel. That is why the rabbis excluded Maccabees I and II from the canon of the Hebrew Bible—they were much too martial—and why they chose a text from Zachariah to be read on the Sabbath of Hanukah, the key verse of which is perhaps the most anti-conventional, revolutionary statement ever uttered about international relations: “Not by power and not by might, but by My spirit, says the Lord of Hosts.” (Zachariah 4:6) Not glorious battles, but divine intervention and a few miracles tossed in here and there—like the miracle of the oil lasting eight days to light the Menorah that should have sufficed only for one—are what turned the trick.
LO: Wait, wait! If I understand you correctly, you’re saying that the miracle of the oil story dates from at least 300 years after it supposedly happened?
AG: That’s right: There is no mention of it in any earlier source. We also know where the tradition of Hanukah being an eight-day holiday really comes from.
LO: We do?! Oh, boy.
AG: We do, yes. Here’s what happened back in 164 BCE. A few months before the 25th day of the month of Kislev, the date in the Jewish lunar calendar when Hanukah begins at sunset the previous evening, was the major festival of Succot (Tabernacles). Succot is an eight-day holiday but it could not be celebrated in wartime Jerusalem as usual. The parades of people waving lulavim (palm branches) and ethrogim (citrons), and the water festival—the highlight of the year on the Temple Mount with its fountains illuminated by torches—could not be performed. So one of the first thing the Maccabees did after regaining control of the Temple was to celebrate Succot a little late. That’s why eight days and that’s why the torches, the lights, that also happened to dovetail with the old solstice celebrations. Evidence that this is what happened? The custom of waving a lulav on the Festival of Lights persisted for some 200 years, according to some sources.
Now back to the transformation. Third, the rabbis focused on instilling humility, patience, and virtue in Jews in place of quick-fix hopes for messianic redemption. They warned against “hastening the end.” God would redeem the Jewish people from exile yet again, but God would not issue insurance policies against future sins and their consequences. Each Jew had to do his or her part to bring the redemption about by being true to the Torah and observing the commandments. In this manner the rabbis restated the essence of the covenantal story at the heart of Judaism in terms that made sense for the new situation.
The transformation of the Hanukah story was thus part and parcel of the transformation of the entire framework of Jewish religion after the year 135. The basics of a unitary creator-God didn’t change, nor did the belief that God had chosen the Jewish people to be the agent of spreading ethical monotheism in the world. But the narrative shifted from the common ancient Near Eastern God/People/Land formula to the Sin/Exile/Redemption formula. In that transformation the idea of Israel as a “light unto the nations” and a “kingdom of priests”, as the Torah phrases go, took on a new and accentuated importance, for by redeeming themselves so that God would one day ingather them to their land they would, while roaming in exile, help redeem humanity itself.
How could a stateless, weak, and defenseless exiled people help to redeem humanity? Remember: “Not by power, and not by might…….” In this belief system, it is the spirit that matters, not power as conventionally understood. A little light and a still-small voice can make a big difference; that’s what the rabbis taught, and mostly still teach, Jews to believe.
LO: Are there broader lessons in this history, do you think, for our own times?
Perhaps a few. Clearly, the religious idealism I’ve just outlined is a challenging proposition for coldblooded realists to put much stock in. Indeed, some observers not fond of Judaism’s self-interpretation have tried to throw a wet mop over Hanukah altogether. One example, the since-deceased author not to be named to protect the memory of the guilty, depicts the Maccabees as a bunch of hidebound rural rubes opposed to the more sophisticated, cultured, and cosmopolitan Hellenism of their time. In this uncharitable formulation the anti-Hellenistic Jews of the 2nd-century BCE resemble MAGA-brained populists today.
What this critique fails to mention is that the much wealthier and more cosmopolitan Hellenistic culture the Maccabees rejected sanctioned and even promoted slavery among kindred people, pederasty, forced prostitution (what is called today trafficking in persons), patricide and, in some corners of the realm, ritual female infanticide—all practices abhorrent to the Jews. The lesson for today is that a culture which seems more advanced, and certainly is richer in a material sense, is not necessarily richer in a moral sense.
LO: Any other lessons come to mind?
AG: Just one more observation on this point and then, if I may, a closing irony.
In advance of 164 BCE a majority of urban Jews, at least, were likely pro-Hellenist. That could well have been the case again during much of Hasmonean times, when as the memory of the wars faded Jewish monarchs took Greek names for themselves and called themselves bacileus, which means king or emperor in Greek. Hellenism’s appeal was so great that to reject the hideous practices associated with it took courage and a willingness to suffer the status of a cultural dissenter.
But that’s the small light still shining and the still-small voice calling out: Jews have been encouraged for a very long time to believe that it’s better to be part of a heroic, beleaguered, and sometimes despised minority standing up for truth and decency than it is to lower one’s chin and go along to get along within a morally wayward majority. This is where the phrase “speak truth to power” comes from. It’s what Moses does to Pharaoh in the story of the Exodus, and it’s what the Maccabees did to the Seleucids and their knees-bent, crony Jewish Temple priests. When the Hanukah liturgy says that “God delivered the many into the hands of the few”, that’s a theme with a very old pedigree—but it’s a theme understood to be still active in the present tense, and to have a noble future.
I do think there’s a lesson here. It’s saddening when assimilated Jews in America treat Hanukah as just their particular minority part of the feel-good ecumenical year-end holiday season. As we have seen, that’s 180 degrees out from what Hanukah was actually about, and about that far off from its normative message still today. There’s nothing wrong with the ecumenical spirit and much right with it if it encourages live-and-let-live tolerance, and especially if it promotes the dignity of difference. (Singaporeans have a lot to teach others about that, as you know better than me.) But not to the point of occluding what makes people particularly who they are, and certainly not to the point of abandoning one’s principles for the sake of lowest-common-denominator conformity. Particularism and universalism are not opposites, as many think. They’re complements: Neither is worth much or can even mean anything coherent without the other.
LO: And your closing irony?
AG: As most know, Hanukah is a minor Jewish holiday. There are no prohibitions on working and the books most relevant to the holiday are, as already noted, not included in the Hebrew Bible. In that sense Hanukah is even less important than Purim, whose source book—the Scroll of Esther—is inside biblical canon.
But think about it: Had the Maccabees not won that war in the mid-2nd century BCE, there likely would be no Jews or Judaism today. Both would likely have melted into the Hellenistic pot, Jewish corporate identity lost well before the Romans showed up a century and a half later. Now mark carefully: Had there been no Jews or Judaism there couldn’t have been a Christianity, at least not in anything like the form we know it. Why? Because there wouldn’t have been epic Jewish revolts against Rome, and it’s only out of the cauldron of the Roman-Jewish struggle, and the sparks of messianic hope it touched off both before and after 135 CE, that the Jesus story (and its subsequent marketing to gentiles) makes sense. Indeed, as to subsequent marketing, no contemporary account of the Jewish War, not even Flavius Josephus’ famous account, mentions Jesus. It may be that Paul, in particular, later invented that persona, maybe on the road to Damascus as he traveled into exile, from an ensemble of the itinerant end-of-the-world preachers and rebels of that roiled epoch, one of them perhaps Bar-Kochba himself transformed from holy warrior into otherworldly avatar.
So the irony: Jews celebrate Hanukah and Christians don’t, but the events of the original Hanukah are far more central as an historical source of Christianity than Hanukah, as re-invented in the mid-2nd century CE, is central to Judaism. As some say: Go figure.
LO: One last question, please. Many customs are associated with how Hanukah is celebrated today. There’s the spinning dreidel gambling game kids play for chocolate coins wrapped in foil. Chinese know a lot about kids gambling at festival times, you know? There’s the song always sung after candles are lit, called “Rock of Ages” in English—I’ve heard it at friends’ houses. There’s the tradition of making fried potato pancakes, latkes, which I love. Those fat, delicious jelly doughnuts, too—wow, can't forget about them. Where does all that come from?
AG: It’s the nature of religious traditions that their origins eventually disappear into the ever-evolving celebratory whole. These customs you mention are sweeteners for children, so they have an important purpose. But knowing their sources matters about as much as how to spell Hanukah in the Roman alphabet. Still, since you asked…..
The dreidel with the four Hebrew letters on the side? It’s a old German children’s game made from one of the oldest toys in the archeological record: the spinning top. It’s a spinoff, pardon the pun, of early textile technology: a spindle . . . of course. The inscribed Hebrew letters did not originally stand for “A Great Miracle Happened There” (“nes gadol hayah sham”), as Jewish kids are taught in Hebrew school. Rather the nun, gimel, hey, and shin stood for nein, ganz, halbe and schtil ein--“nothing”, “all”, “half” and “put one”—in the Hebrew script Jews used to write those Germanic words. The custom attached to Hanukah dates only from the 13th century, so is recent by Jewish standards.
You mentioned Maoz Tzur, the song sung after candle lighting. Also late 12th or early 13th century, the lyrics written by a poet named Mordecai. We know his name because the full poem is an acrostic with its verses’ first letters spelling out his name. But this song, whose opening stanza is better translated as “My refuge rock of salvation”—the word “ages” is nowhere in the Hebrew—is more than meets the eye.
Again, few Jews know this, but the melody is that of an old German folk song much later incorporated into a Protestant choral by none other than J.S. Bach. The Jews took the melody and, during the horrifying persecutions of the Crusades, added lyrics that beseeched God for protection against violent Christian anti-Semites. That’s what the phrase “loud-mouthed foe” refers to in the first stanza. The poetry subtlety employs double meanings for other key words; the message is unmistakable to those with some knowledge of Hebrew.
Latkes? The myth here is that Maccabean soldiers cooked and ate them while camped out in their guerrilla war redoubts back in mid-2nd century BCE. This is absurd, since the potato is a New World vegetable and the word latke is of Slavic origin taken into Yiddish more than 1,500 years later. That would have been a miracle too wild even for Yohanan ben-Zakkai to imagine. Maybe those soldiers were eating mashed fried chickpeas cooked in olive oil—falafel—but not latkes. Who cares anyway when and how latkes became a Hanukah food?: They’re scrumptious with apple sauce, fruit jam, or sour cream—even plain. Same with the jelly doughnuts—sufganiyot—a very modern Israeli contribution to the Hanukah dessert table that American Jews have recently taken up with enthusiasm.
LO: Wow: We’ve gone from 164 BCE to the 21st century! I’m glad I’m sitting down. Thank you so much for a fascinating, and I must say somewhat surprising, conversation.
AG: We scratched the surface, Lily; but you are most welcome.
[1] A small fraction of this text appeared as “Getting to Know the True History of Hanukah,” Living in Singapore: The Magazine of the American Association (February/March 2023). The full text was created via an interview by Lily Ong on January 17, 2023. British-English punctuation and spelling forms have been preserved.