Gelt

The earliest mention Stuart Halpern of Yeshiva University has found is in a responsum by Shlomo ben Avraham ibn Aderet, the 14th-century sage from Barcelona, about a charitable man who gave money to widows and orphans at Hanukkah. In the 16th century, Halpern writes, Italian and Sephardi communities collected money at Hanukkah for teachers and poor children, and in Ashkenazi lands rabbis, ritual slaughterers and other communal workers went from door to door during the eight days, collecting part of their yearly pay. Eliezer Segal, in Holidays, History and Halakhah, finds that the earliest sources are about students giving gelt to their teachers, and suggests that the students later asked for a share of their own. Some historians, Joanna O’Leary writes for My Jewish Learning, date the custom to 17th-century Poland. The Hasidic movement spread it further, and by the 1940s, Jenna Weissman Joselit found, it was an essential part of American Jews’ Hanukkah.

Chocolate gelt is younger. Rabbi Deborah Prinz writes in On the Chocolate Trail that “opinions differ” about where it began: some credit America’s Loft candy company, in the 1920s, and others earlier European versions that inspired Israel’s Elite company. Loft’s sold its coins in gold and silver foil, in pouches made to look like bank bags. Prinz also notes the likeness to a European Christmas custom, gold-covered chocolate coins given in memory of the miracles of St Nicholas.