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Gemara-kop ladies: settle this disagreement
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imasoftov




 
 
    
 

Post Mon, Dec 26 2016, 5:45 am
penguin wrote:
We suspect that dreidel playing may be in a Medrash, if at all. There are very few Gemaras about Chanukah. Now the bows & arrows, used on Lag b'Omer in memory of the time of Rabi Shimon Bar Yochai & the Romans, in order to hide the fact that they were learning Torah, may be in a Gemara.

I found this from Dan Rabinowitz in 2005

Quote:
The story connecting dreidel to the ruse of the Maccabis was first published in the book Minhagi Yeshurun, which was first published in 1890 (the name was changed to Otzar Kol Minhagi Yeshurin in the third edition, which is available online here from Hebrewbooks.org . The author included a nice picture of himself at the beginning, although he was a Rabbi in Pittsburgh at the turn of the twentieth century, he is holding a quill pen.) His source is a contemporary of his.


The link he posted to the book has moved, it's now here, here's the right page

There's a Hebrew word for dreidel there, galgelan, which is also the name of a family of spiders, Araneidae, but perhaps wasn't used for that in 1890.

Josh Waxman translated the relevant excerpt from Otzar Kol Minhagi Yeshurin in 2008

Quote:
4: The children play on Chanukkah with a game of tops (dreidel).
The reason is that they decreed that they should not learn Torah, just as we say in Al HaNisim, 'to cause Your Torah to be forgotten,' and at that time, they all learned orally, and in one band, in order that each person should remind his brother, lest he forget a matter. And the decree was that they should not gather in a single place in bands. The Sages found, at the time of the decree, a wondrous suggestion, in this that they made the game of dreidel to show their enemies if they were discovered, that they were playing with the game of tops, and that they were not learning. And with this development like this they were able to learn and teach. Therefore, it remains for us this game, as a remembrance of the miracle, that because of it the Torah of Hashem was not forgotten, that it stood for our fathers and us. (In the name of the rav, the author (?) of sefer Avodat Eved and the sefer Tiferet Tzvi, and the Rav Ziw (?) brings it down.)

I would guess, if the author of Avodat Eved is his contemporary, that this is the sefer being referenced, printed in 1877.


Avodat Eved is about Megillat Rut and doesn't discuss Chanukah. Hebrewbooks has 22 entries for "Tiferet Tzvi" but none of them have the same author as Avodat Eved.

It seems likely to me that if there was a midrash, the quote would have referred to that rather than later books. Also Rabinowitz and Waxman seem pretty knowledgeable, if there was a midrash I think they, or a commenter, would have found it.


Last edited by imasoftov on Mon, Dec 26 2016, 6:24 am; edited 3 times in total
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imasoftov




 
 
    
 

Post Mon, Dec 26 2016, 6:04 am
5mom wrote:
Anyhow, there's no gemara about pretending to use bows and arrows to hide from the Romans either. There is a gemara that says that no rainbow appeared in the lifetime of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. The bows and arrows might be a reminder of that. But of course, widespread celebration of lag b'omer (more than not saying tachanun) is fairly recent.

And here are two articles that discuss the bow and arrow custom.
https://www.ou.org/torah/mitzv.....omer/
http://www.torahmusings.com/20.....rows/

This takes us back a bit more than the late 19th century sources about the dreidel, with R Menachem Mendel of Rimanov (1745-1815), but still nowhere near the latest midrashim, and again, if there was a Midrash or Gemara it would be in the sources these articles cite, and they'd mention it, or the authors of the articles would have found it.
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