The Illuminating History of Hanukkah

Hanukkah is probably the best-known Jewish holiday in America. Even non-Jewish people can list a few salient facts: like Christmas, it takes place in December, and, like Christmas, people exchange presents. They know these things because, of all the Jewish holidays, Hanukkah is the only one that has gotten the full Hallmark treatment – the cards, the lights, the food, the parties, the TV specials, the decorations at big-box stores, and even the ugly sweaters.
Technically a minor holiday in Jewish liturgy, the beauty of Hanukkah is that it’s easy to celebrate. It can be done at home; it doesn’t require a trip to synagogue or the blessing of a rabbi. Kids love it. Its rituals are easy to follow, and they’re fun. Many Jewish families, regardless of how observant they are, celebrate Hanukkah in exactly the same way: they eat fried food, they exchange gifts, they (perhaps reluctantly) play dreidel, and, most importantly, they light the menorah – one candle for each of the eight nights.
Most people who observe the holiday agree that they celebrate Hanukkah to commemorate a great miracle that happened in what is now Israel sometime in the second century BCE. But what was that miracle, exactly?
That’s when it gets complicated. It’s not just the nature of the miracle. It’s also the name of the holiday and when it’s celebrated. Hanukkah has always been a joyous holiday. But it’s hard to pin down because, even from the start, it has been constantly evolving.
What is Hanukkah, Exactly?

Let’s start with the easiest problem first: the name. In Hebrew, the word “Hanukkah” starts with the letter chet, which is pronounced as if you’re clearing your throat, or like a German or Scottish ch: Chanukkah.
Because there is no letter that directly corresponds to this sound in English, many Americans find it hard to say and default to a simple h. When Jewish people started writing out the name of the holiday in English language publications sometime in the nineteenth century, they had a difficult time deciding how to spell it. Should it be Chanukah or Khanike or Xanuqa? In 1889, the New York Times started using “Hanukkah,” and that’s been the semi-official spelling in America ever since.
And what does it mean? That’s also subject to debate. The most straightforward definition is “dedication.” But Jewish scholars have also pointed out that “Hanukkah” shares a root with the Hebrew word chinuch (those are chets, so again with the throat clearing), which means “education.”
In addition, because Hebrew uses letters to stand in for numbers, it can also mean “rest on the 25th.” The 25th refers to the 25th day of the Jewish month of Kislev. That’s when Hanukkah starts. And when is that, exactly? Well, it depends on the year.
A lunar calendar with a complicated system of leap years keeps Jewish holidays at approximately the same season. But they’re never on the same date on the Gregorian calendar used throughout most of the world, including America. Most years, Hanukkah is in December, but in some years it starts in November and in others it ends in January. But whenever it happens, Hanukkah always lasts eight nights. That’s because of the miracle.
The Miracle
The story of the miracle follows the standard Jewish holiday format, as outlined by Jewish comedian Alan King: “They tried to kill us. We won. Let’s eat!”
The basic story, taught to Jewish kids in Hebrew school, goes like this: The villainous King Antiochus conquered Israel when it was still called Judea and made it illegal to practice Judaism. He also destroyed the holy temple in Jerusalem. But a group of Jews led by Judah Maccabee, the original “Hebrew Hammer,” and his brothers fought back. They defeated Antiochus and his army and drove them out of Judea. They were free! But their temple was still destroyed and the eternal light that was supposed to show their devotion to God had gone out. The Maccabees began to clean up the temple, and they found one small vial of oil, just enough to last one night. It would take at least a week to make more oil. But they lighted the lamp anyway. And miraculously, the oil lasted eight days. This is why, on Hanukkah, Jewish families light the menorah for eight nights and eat food that has been cooked in oil.
But which part was actually the miracle – the light or the military victory?
The Military Victory

The full story of Hanukkah is just as complicated as its spelling. “From a historical perspective, I think we’d want to say not ‘What is the story of Hanukkah?’ but ‘What are the stories of Hanukkah?’” David Shyovitz, a professor of history and Jewish studies at Northwestern University, told Geoffrey Baer in A Celebration of Hanukkah.
The first story comes from a series of Hebrew documents that were first written in the second century BCE about a Jewish revolt against the Greek Seleucid empire in the year 164 BCE. The Seleucid ruler at the time was indeed Antiochus IV. He did indeed have an official policy to make the Jewish people less Jewish and more Greek. And he did indeed take over the temple in Jerusalem. But not all Jewish people were against it. Some of them were willing to assimilate into Greek culture.
The Maccabees most adamantly were not. Judah Maccabee, said Shyovitz, got his nickname not for hammering the Seleucids but for hammering other Jewish people who failed to meet his standards of Jewishness, to the point of forcibly circumcising reluctant Jewish men. And when the Maccabees had their uprising, some of their opponents were fellow Jews.
In this version of the story, the Maccabees, still outnumbered by the Seleucid army, still won and still rededicated the temple. Afterward, they ruled Judea for several centuries as the Hasmoneans before they were conquered by the Romans, who destroyed the temple for good.
By the second century CE, according to the Jewish Roman historian Josephus, Jewish people were celebrating an eight-day-long midwinter holiday called Hanukkah, also called the Festival of Lights. But it had nothing to do with oil. The only miracle they were celebrating was the unlikely military victory. It lasted eight days because when the Maccabees finally cleaned up the temple, they belatedly celebrated Sukkot, an autumn harvest holiday that’s also eight days.
Where Did the Oil Come From?

The story of Hanukkah was first written down as a series of Hebrew texts about 50 years after the Maccabees’ victory. But when the rabbis were compiling what would become the Jewish Bible at the end of the first century CE, they considered those texts apocryphal, or not sufficiently authentic, instead of divinely inspired and didn’t include them. (They do, however, appear in some versions of the New Testament as 1 and 2 Maccabees.) Hanukkah didn’t appear in any official Jewish scripture until the Talmud – a collection of legal opinions and debates compiled by the rabbis over 300 years – starting around 200 CE. And even then, it only appears in a discussion about the observation of Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath.
Many rabbis and historians have theories as to why the rabbis decided to include – or invent – yet another Hanukkah miracle. Some say it was to discourage any more Maccabee-style rebellions against the Romans. There were a few in the centuries of Roman occupation of Judea, and they did not go well. Instead, the rabbis decided to adopt as a guiding principle the Biblical verse “‘Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit,’ says the LORD of hosts.” In other words: Don’t try any more uprisings that will get us all killed. Be patient, have faith, and God will save us.
Then there’s the symbolism of the light in the darkness.
“There are lots of really interesting commentaries,” Rabbi Ari Hart of Skokie Valley Agudath Jacob Synagogue told Geoffrey Baer. “But my favorite is that the miracle of Hanukkah, that miracle, that first day, is that they lit [the oil] at all. Because they could have just given up. They could have said, ‘We don’t have enough oil. This temple’s defiled. Forget about it.’ But they said, ‘We’re going to light [the oil]. We don’t know what's going to happen. We don’t know if this oil’s going to make it. We don’t know the future, but we’re going to choose to put light into this world at that very moment.’”
Over the generations, different people at different times and places have chosen to emphasize one miracle or the other. The military miracle, said Rabbi Debra Newman Kamin of Am Yisrael Conservative Congregation in Northfield, appeals to those who feel that they – like the Jewish people in the Roman era – have lost their autonomy and self-determination and use the Maccabees as inspiration to fight back.
Jewish families in modern America often prefer to emphasize the light. “It’s about identity and the right to have our own identity, even in a bigger culture that doesn’t celebrate what we celebrate,” Kamin explained. “That dovetails very beautifully with the American experience of what it means to be a small minority in this country, in the first country in the world that was founded with the idea of freedom of religion.”
There is something universally comforting about a blaze of light on a dark winter night, too. Almost every culture has some sort of midwinter or solstice ritual. Even the Romans had Saturnalia. And the Christians had Christmas.
Presents!
Before the twentieth century, Hanukkah was a minor holiday, both in theory – unlike Passover or Yom Kippur, it wasn’t mentioned in the Bible, and there were no explicit commandments to celebrate it – and in practice. Celebrations happened at home. People said the appropriate blessings, lighted the menorah, and maybe gave their children small gifts of a few coins, or gelt in Yiddish.
Latkes joined the party sometime in the Middle Ages. Originally they were made from flour and water in homage to the pancakes the Maccabees ate before they went into battle. But then Italian Jews mixed up Hanukkah with another apocryphal story from ancient Judea with a similarly named character.
In this tale, a Jewish widow named Judith saved the people of her city, Bethulia, from a siege by the Assyrians by killing the general Holofernes. She did this by showing up at his tent with a basket of food. She fed him cheese until he was thirsty and then she gave him wine until he passed out. And then she chopped off his head. In her honor, the Italian Jews began making their pancakes with sweet cheese. As time went on, potatoes arrived in Europe, and Eastern European Jews began making pancakes from those. They didn’t have access to olive oil, so they fried them in goose or chicken fat, known in Yiddish as schmaltz. (Hanukkah is nothing if not flexible!)
In the nineteenth century, Jewish people in Europe and America began to notice how Christians celebrated Christmas. They saw the lights and the trees, and the children saw the presents, and they wanted to experience it for themselves. The rabbis began to worry. After all, the biggest threat in the Hanukkah story was not death but assimilation. Their solution, said Kamin, was to make Hanukkah bigger and brighter, to take the practice of pirsumei nisa, or publicizing the miracle, even more literally. Synagogues began hosting Hanukkah parties. And yes, there were presents.
As Christmas grew more commercialized throughout the twentieth century, Hanukkah did, too – perhaps not to the same level, but enough so that Jewish people were able to enjoy all the merriment and good cheer (and presents!) of December without feeling as though they were abandoning their own heritage.
That tension between the celebration of Jewishness and assimilation into the wider culture is what keeps the Hanukkah story interesting. But behind the evolving traditions, the varying spellings, and the innovations in latke toppings, one thing has remained the same for nearly 2000 years: on the 25th of Kislev (whenever that happens to be, early or late), Jewish families everywhere light their menorahs and send a bit of light out into the darkness. That in itself is something of a miracle.