Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe
By Elisheva Carlebach
304 pages, $35, Harvard University Press, April 2011
Although jokes abound about how punctual German Jews (Yekes) are, the concept of “Jewish Standard Time,” presumably mocking the non-Germanic segments of the Jewish population, has earned an entry in Urban Dictionary for “15 minutes late to everything” or “being late to an important event.”
Whether or not the jokes have a foundation, Elisheva Carlebach’s new book, Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe, shows that Jews developed some of the most important theories and discovered some of the most fundamental mathematical underpinnings of early calendar setting. They did this often to the chagrin of Christian leaders, who sought to liberate their calendar from its ties to Judaism, primarily the Passover meal that was their Last Supper.
Angel giving calendar secrets to Issachar. Sefer Evronot, 1716.
National Library of Israel. Ms Heb 8 2380, fol. 104.
The story that Carlebach, Salo Wittmayer Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture and Society at Columbia University, tells focuses on the calendar as a “living” document rather than a static one. Instead of simply documenting the march of time at a set rate, calendars were often created in the image of their makers, who often embedded propaganda inside them, Carlebach explains.
Surely, most calendar users today take the medium for granted because it is so pervasive. In the age of Google, calendars can be embedded into websites, layered on top of one another and shared among users. If you position your mouse appropriately, your computer’s calendar will pop up, and many readers probably have calendars attached to their work email clients, or Outlook programs. If you’ve got a smart phone or a tablet computer, chances are you program your appointments right into that device.
The most low-tech calendars we might encounter are giveaways from supermarkets or from charities we donate to. When I interviewed Marc Winkelman, president of the Austin, Texes-based company Calendar Holdings, in August 2010, he differentiated between calendars that feature images specifically created for the calendars, and others which have artworks that “perhaps better satisfy the sensibilities of art historians.” Both fulfill needs, he said, though “There will always be art snobs.”
Rabbi (Simon ben) Gamliel receives Jewish calendar formulae. Sefer Evronot, 1552.
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Ms 9487, fol. 3r.
The calendars Winkelman’s company sells are a far cry from the manuscripts and early printed calendars Carlebach explores, so it’s not surprising that medieval and early renaissance calendar users and makers were more passionate about all things calendar-related. The religious and political elite ensured that calendars were as much tools for controlling the masses, as they were an effort to organize an individual’s life.
One particularly fierce debate played out in the 17th century, when the calendar was “at the center of the struggle for the soul of England,” Carlebach writes. After the Reformation, England grew isolated from Denmark, Protestant German states and the Netherlands when it clung to the Julian calendar, while the latter states used the Gregorian calendar. An 11-day gap existed between the two calendars.
As early as the 12th century, calendars had a way of teasing out insolence. Abraham bar Hiyya Savasorda (1065-1136), who lived in Christian Spain, argued that only Muslims and Jews had a lunar calendar that wasn’t impacted by solar measurements. “We say that in the kingdom of the Ishmaelites they began this computing from the beginning of the sin of the mad evildoer who misled them,” he wrote.