A quick confession: I steal my children’s chocolate. Not just any chocolate, but their treasured Chanukah gelt. Every year my two sons will inevitably be given net pouches of foil-covered coins. When they’re looking the other way, I’ll liberate a few coins (pinched evenly from both their stashes).
The chocolate never really tastes as good as the stuff you can buy in bars, but there is something irresistible about prising open the glinting gold-wrapping and pulling out the perfect chocolate discs. It is part of Chanukah, as much as chocolate eggs are part of Easter, or mince pies part of Christmas. For me the rite of devouring gelt — Yiddish for money — is as important as the rite of lighting the menorah.
This year, chocolate gelt celebrates its 100th anniversary — production started in the USA in the 1920s — but the tradition goes back further.
Today’s chocolate coins are an unexpected development from the Hasmoneans’ idea of minting coins to celebrate the Maccabees’ military victory over the Greek Syrians.
Later, in the 18th century, it became customary for parents in Europe to give their children coins to pass to teachers as an extra payment around Chanukah. The gift was intended to show appreciation for their education — inspired, perhaps, because the word Chanukah means “dedication” and is linked to hinnukh, which means “education”. Some teachers would not accept money for teaching Torah — but at Chanukah they could make an exception. As well as money, teachers also accepted honey, whisky and food. Gelt was given to the poor so they would be able to afford to buy Chanukah candles.
Parents also started giving money to their children at Chanukah as a sweetener for learning sessions. In Holidays, History and Halakhah, Eliezer Segal suggests students whose parents gave them money to give to their teachers may have eventually started asking for their own share of gelt. Maimonides described gelt as “an incentive for you [children] to study Torah properly”.
The leap from a tip-for-teaching to gifting a mesh bag packed with chocolate coins is harder to explain. One theory is that at the turn of the 20th century American Jews used gelt as a way to assert their Jewish identity, while integrating into American society. Until then it had been traditional for Jewish families to exchange gifts only on Purim, while Chanukah had been considered by most American Jews as a minor festival.
Towards the end of the 19th century the community shifted to gift-giving at Chanukah, deliberately rivalling gift-giving at Christmas (which became a national holiday only in 1870). Creating a Jewish tradition of gelt was something to rival Christmas presents. Jewish entrepreneurs had been involved in the chocolate trade for centuries.
In the 1920s, the New York company Loft’s (and afterwards Barton’s Candy)were the first to manufacture wrapped chocolate. It must have sold well — in 1931 Loft’s bought out Pepsi, creating PepsiCo. Rabbi Debbie Prinz, author of On The Chocolate Trail, suggests Loft’s and Barton’s Candy were inspired by a similar tradition of giving children in Belgium and the Netherlands chocolate coins as part of their December St Nicholas holiday.
Jump forward 100 years and the range of chocolate gelt is still relatively limited, even in America. Joan Nathan tells me: “I buy it each year for Chanukah, mostly to sprinkle on the table. Some enterprising but mostly not-very-flavourful chocolate-makers are making dreidels. They are using so-called better chocolate but I haven’t tasted them yet!”
Since the late 1950s, the state of Israel has also minted commemorative Chanukah medals, but Gil Hovav says, “I don’t think chocolate gelt is big here.”
Michael Leventhal’s book, Babka Boulou and Blintzes, Chocolate Recipes from Around the World (in conjunction with Chai Cancer Care) and his children’s book, The Chocolate King, are both out now from Green Bean Books. To win a crown of solid chocolate, check Green Bean Books on Facebook, Instagram or www.greenbeanbooks.com
