Jewish Calendar Research Articles

A primitive rabbinic calendar text from the Cairo Genizah

A hitherto unnoticed fragment from the Cairo Genizah, T-S K2.27, describes two methods for calculating the calendar that ignore the molad and differ in further ways from the later, fixed rabbinic calendar. These ‘primitive’ rabbinic calendars, which I would date to the eighth century at the latest, are based on calendar rules attested in the Palestinian Talmud but also attempt, not very accurately, to turn the Jewish calendar into a fixed cycle. These calendars represent an early attempt to fix the Jewish calendar. They may be seen as a missing link between the empirical, new moon-based calendar of Mishnaic and Talmudic sources and the molad calendar that became standard in the later medieval period. They also suggest that the fixed rabbinic calendar was originally formed in the early Middle Ages by emulation of the Christian Easter cycles.

Latin Authors Discuss the Jewish Calendar

Why would Latin authors between twelfth and fifteenth century take an interest in Jewish calendar? Mainly for two reasons. Its times for mean conjunctions of Sun and Moon (molad s) were much more precise than could be had from Christian ecclesiastical computus, so they would contribute to a better determination of Easter. Also, Jewish calendar (known in its present form since tenth century) was believed to have been valid already in biblical times, so that it was proper one to use for determining biblical datings, rather than Roman calendar. In short, main fields of interest were calendar reform and biblical chronology, topics touched on very often in medieval literature (cf. luminaries like Roger Bacon). There are also several Latin texts especially dedicated to Jewish chronology for one purpose or other. The earliest of these (Reinher of Paderborn, Compotus emendatus , composed in 1171) saw its first printing as recently as 1951, and again in 2011.The present work edits five further special treatises, apparently only ones of their kind before sixteenth century. They are so varied in form and content that each requires special editing, which this editor has done very conscientiously. The diverse texts includeLiber erarum (1188/91), a 12-page anonymous tract known from six manuscripts (thirteenth to fifteenth century) and a print from 1549; there is no modern edition until now. It contains a list of traditional eras (Spanish, Seleucid, Persian, Christian, Arab) relative to date 23 March 1191. It also offers data for Cremona, suggesting a connection with Gerard translator. However, editor judges it to be reworked from an original in Hebrew by a Jewish author. The text is purely computational, describing Hebrew chronological system and giving rules for finding molad for beginning of each lunar year and for various other times.Robert of Leicester, De compoto Hebreorum aptato ad kalendarium (1294), 65 pages in edition, known from two manuscripts of early to mid-fourteenth century. Not previously printed. It is the lengthiest and most sophisticated Latin treatise on Jewish calendation to be extant from Middle Ages, according to editor (p. 13), and edition is elaborate, including extensive notes on sources. The author's stated intention is to obtain knowledge of bygone ages, i.e., Biblical chronology, with Jewish calendar as a tool. So first we get a technical account of Jewish time reckoning, rules for converting Jewish into Julian dates, and finally datings of Creation, Noah's flood, exodus from Egypt, destruction of First Temple, conception of John Baptist and incarnation and crucifixion of Jesus. Robert also discusses controversy about whether Last Supper was performed with leavened or unleavened bread, a factor in Great Schism of 1054.Nicholas Trevet O.P., Compotus Hebreorum (1310), 13 pages in edition, known from one, early fourteenth-century manuscript. Not previously printed. The text is appended to a commentary on Leviticus and is meant to put feasts mentioned there into a calendrical framework. In fact, it mainly gives rules for finding weekdays for these feasts in a particular year of Jewish era. …

A Possible Origin of the Eleventh Day of the Eighth Month as the Date of Rachel's Death

This article examines the possible origin of the traditional date of the matriarch Rachel's death, the eleventh day of eighth month. Noting that significant births are often associated with significant dates in the Jewish calendar, this article looks at the evidence provided in the book of Jubilees and the Temple Scroll from Qumran, Rachel's death is shown to be connected with a significant day, the day directly following the conclusion of the harvest period.

The Astrological and Calendar Section of the Earliest <em>Maḥzor Vitry</em> Manuscript (MS ex-Sassoon 535)

The earliest known Maḥzor Vitry manuscript, MS ex-Sassoon 535, includes a section with astrological and calendar texts that are the oldest found in any extant manuscript from Franco-Germany. An edition of the text of this section, whose main part constitutes an almost complete treatise on the Jewish calendar, is offered, along with an annotated translation. The introduction includes a description of the manuscript, a summary of the contents, and some general comments on the arithmetic content of the calendar treatise and on its talmudic and other rabbinic citations. The text of the treatise is full of errors, some of which indicate that it was a copy of a copy of the original. On the basis of the calendrical data and palaeographical and codicological criteria, the earliest date for the composition of the calendar treatise can be established as 1123/4, and the latest date for the present manuscript as 1154/5. This shows that the treatise was copied repeatedly in a relatively short period. Clearly distinct from the contemporary calendar treatises by Jacob b. Samson (1123/4) and Samuel b. Meir (Rashbam, 1129/30), it provides further evidence of the developing interest in Jewish calendar computation in northern France in the early twelfth century, especially within the school of Rashi.

The Calendar in Pre-Islamic Mecca

In pre-Islamic times, pilgrimages were made to sanctuaries in various regions of Arabia. Feasts connected with idolatry and annual fairs were held at convenient seasons of the year. To keep all these events in order, a lunisolar calendar was used, and the calendar adjuster of the Banū Kināna was charged with intercalation (nasīʾ). They inserted a leap month according to the same cycle as the Jewish calendar. Though it was exceptional, in emergency situations (e.g. the war of Fiǧār), they would postpone a sacred month, set to guarantee the safety of pilgrims. In the first decade of hiǧra calendar, in fact, three leap months were inserted immediately after ḏū l-ḥiǧǧa of 1/623, 3/625, and 6/628. On the occasion of the pilgrimage lead by Abū Bakr in 9/631, the leap month was not inserted, and in the following year at the Farewell Pilgrimage, Muḥammad formally abolished intercalation. The day that Muḥammad arrived in Medina was, if the account reported by Ibn Isḥāq is correct, 28th June 622, and the battle of Badr was 2 months earlier than in the standard correspondence.

A tool for many purposes: Hermann Zoest and the medieval Christian appropriation of the Jewish calendar

During the later Middle Ages, a surprising number of Latin Christian scholars wrote texts dealing with or specifically dedicated to the Jewish calendar, an interest already exhibited in the pioneering Computus emendatus of Reinher of Paderborn ( c. 1171). One late-medieval author influenced by Reinher in this regard was Hermann Zoest (d. 1445), a Cistercian monk from Westphalia who participated in the Council of Basel’s unsuccessful efforts to reform the ecclesiastical calendar. Drawing on unpublished and previously unknown material, this article explores medieval Christian attitudes towards the Jewish calendar by outlining the different ways in which this calendar was appropriated and employed by Hermann Zoest in his writings: as a guide in reforming the ecclesiastical calendar, as an aid for biblical exegesis, and as an instrument to determine the date of Creation.

New Chapters in the History of Early Modern Ashkenaz

Shlomo Berger. Producing Redemption in Amsterdam: Early Modern Yiddish Books in Paratextual Perspective. Studies in Jewish History and Culture 37. Boston and Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2013. Pp. xx + 234.Elisheva Carlebach. Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, Mass, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. Pp. xii + 304.Edward Fram. A Window on Their World: The Court Diaries of Rabbi Hayyim Gundersheim, Frankfurt am Main, 1773-1794. Cincinnati, Ohio: Hebrew Union College Press, 2012. Pp. 653.Debra Kaplan. Beyond Expub ion: Jews, Chrbtians, and Reformation Strasbourg. Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011. Pp. xviii + 254.Robert Liberies. Jews Webome Coffee: Tradition and Innovation in Early Modern Germany. The Tauber Institute Series for Study of European Jewiy. Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2012. Pp. xx + 169.Among cultural turns of second half of twentieth century, translational turn has shaped Jewish studies most profoundly. Analyses of cross-cultural translation and emerging concepts of cultural transfer and entangled histories have led to a new Jewish history, told in relationship to that of surrounding majority.1 While earlier studies that marked emerging historiographic trend in mid-1990s studied Jewish and Christian perceptions of each and JewishChristian interaction expressif verbis? in postmodern age, a notion of cultural embeddedness has become a presumed factor in telling of Jewish history; rather than being an end in itself, cultural entanglement between Jews and the other has become a key to opening yet broader questions. A similar shift now treats Jews as active participants of history, and not its passive objects: Jews were not merely influenced by events or cultural developments in Christian or Muslim worlds but were major historical actors in towns, villages, and lands where they lived, making active use of and forming conditions of life they encountered (Kaplan, p. 6). They were agents of cultural change, partners in cultural encounter (even if politically weak vis-a-vis a dominant other).2 3This review essay discusses a number of recent works on history of early modem Ashkenaz that exemplify this shift. Thrs is not meant to be an exhaustive survey but rather a selection of five works from scholars from United States, Israel, and Europe that I believe are exemplary for their holistic approach to Ashkenazi culture in sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Each honors a fundamental principal of new cultural history, namely, inclusion of voices of ordinary people and everyday culture. Based on understanding that history of Ashkenazrc Jewry is not limrted to extraordinary moments (Kaplan, p. 7) and texts written by for elite (Fram, p. 70), works under review draw on sources that have hitherto been overlooked: Jewish calendars, Yiddish paratexts, and coffee.The strategy of accessing nonelite through an unexpected source is vrsible in Shlomo Berger's Producing Redemption in Amsterdam: Early Modern Yiddish Books in Paratextual Perspective. Berger analyzes paratexts-texts subsidiary to a book's main text-of Yiddish books produced in Amsterdam, main center of Hebrew book production in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and distributed throughout Ashkenazi diaspora. Extending new field of paratextology, a subfield of book history, for first time to Jewish books, Berger treats paratexts as a key to understanding Yiddish book production, early modem Yiddish literary corpus, cultural meaning of these books, and their roles in Ashkenazi culture and society. He demonstrates that how books in Ashkenazi vernacular are presented for public consumption tells us something about world of their authors, producers, and readers. …

The Reception and Application of Arabic Science in Twelfth-Century Computistics: New Evidence from Bavaria

IntroductionFor most of the Middle Ages up to the Gregorian reform of the calendar of 1582, the feasts and calendrical rhythms of Western Europe were governed by a single unified system of ecclesiastical time reckoning, which took account of the courses of both the Sun and the Moon. This system was based on two elements: the Julian calendar, which was inherited from pagan Rome, and a 19-year lunar cycle, which was developed in the third/fourth century by the Church of Alexandria and later transmitted to the West in the form of the Easter table of Dionysius Exiguus, composed in c. 525 (hence the name Dionysiac cycle). During the early Middle Ages, the practical necessity of instructing Christian monks and clerics in the use of these reckoning tools led to the development of a specific genre of learned text, the computus, which incorporated modules of knowledge from a wide variety of fields, most importandy arithmetic and astronomy, but also theology, history, etymology, medicine, and natural philosophy.'Given the fact that its technical basis remained the same for nearly a millennium, one may be excused for thinking of the computus as a static discipline, which did not see any significant internal development during the course of its run. A striking counterexample, which highlights the innovative aspects of the computistical tradition, is the Compotus emendatus, composed in 1171 by the cathedral canon Reinher of Paderborn. As the title itself informs us, the Compotus emendatus was written with the intention of providing an 'improved' version of the old method of Easter reckoning, whose increasing inaccuracies threatened to expose the Christian Church to the ridicule of unbelievers. In order to generate a more reliable form of lunar calculation, Reinher adapted the molad-system of the present-day Jewish calendar, where each conjunction is separated from the preceding one by a constant interval of 29 days, 12 hours, and 793 halakim (1 helek corresponding to 1/1080 of an hour or 3j seconds).2 Another of Reinher's innovations was to base his conversion tables on Hindu-Arabic numeral forms instead of the more cumbersome Roman numerals that had hitherto been the norm in computistical writing. Previous to the twelfth century, the presence of Hindu-Arabic numerals in the Latin West had been largely restricted to their appearance on the numbered jetons (apices) used in conjunction with the abacus.3 Their infusion into arithmetic writing practice - this time with the symbol for zero included - only came with the spread of Latin translations of al-Khwarizmi's book on Indian calculation, which started to circulate in the second quarter of the twelfth century, although it would take another two to three hundred years for the present-day numerals to fully establish themselves as a part of mercantile and general culture.4 Reinher can in fact be counted among the pioneers in their application, in so far as he is among the first known Latin authors to use them in a work from his own pen for a specific scientific purpose. The introduction of such innovative elements into the computus continued in the thirteenth century, when John of Sacrobosco adapted a sexagesimal division of the hour, leading to the minutes and seconds that we are familiar with today.5The present paper will bring to light further examples for the reception of exotic numerals and foreign calendrical knowledge in Western computus texts, which even predate Reinher's treatise. These come from two mid-twelfth-century manuscripts written in southeastern Germany, where computists employed the Arabic lunar calendar with similar intentions to those manifest in the Compotus emendatus. Besides studying this calendrical material itself, I will also connect it to the early reception of the Toledan Tables in the Latin West and their circulation alongside the Liber ysagogarum Alchorismi, which is one of the earliest known Latin texts on reckoning with Hindu-Arabic numerals. …

Chronology and eschatology: a Jewish–Christian debate, France 1100

The text that is discussed here, written in France in 1100, contains the first debate between a Jew and a Christian on the date of the birth of Jesus. The Christian believed that Jesus was born in 2–3 CE, while the Jew (a pupil of Rashi) disagreed but did not propose an alternative year. The Jew also claimed that the Messiah may appear on 1102 – an eschatological computation which is solely in accordance with Christian records of the 1100th anniversary of the birth of Jesus. This debate, which actually is based on a misunderstanding of both sides, had a considerable impact on the chronological computations of Ashkenazi rabbinical authorities in subsequent centuries. They adopted the Christian calculation of Jesus’ lifetime and augmented it with a Jewish interpretation following the rules of the Jewish calendar, which led them to totally different conclusions than the original Christian view.

Elisheva Carlebach, Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe

Elisheva Carlebach, <i>Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe</i>

Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe by Elisheva Carlebach (review)

Reviewed by: Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe by Elisheva Carlebach Elisheva Baumgarten Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe Elisheva Carlebach. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. 292 pp. Modern media and self-help books are filled with discussions of time—how to maximize time, how scarce time is, how important it is to modern man. Reading modern resources one could get the impression that time troubles were not part of the past. Yet, time has always been important for groups and individuals. Whether calculated by minutes, days, weeks, or years, different ways of understanding time have been the basis of alliances and divisions between individuals, religions, and even civilizations. Despite the importance of time and calendar, time has rarely been studied by Jewish historians, with one exception: the polemics around calendars in Jewish historiography have been symbolic of ways parting, whether as part of religious debates between Jews and others, during late antiquity when the rabbis sought to consolidate Jewish identity, or when the Karaites and Rabbinites argued over ritual and rites. Yet seemingly “uncontested” time within a unified community has hardly received attention, certainly not after antiquity. Elisheva Carlebach’s new book is both a broad and specific study of time and calendar. The book focuses on calendars and books of calendric computations—all written by Jews in early modern Europe, capturing a new perspective on early modern Jewish history, indeed a new prism through which to understand Jews and their Jewishness. In her beautiful and riveting book Carlebach outlines how the system behind the calendar and the ideology that accompanied their making changed over the course of two and a half centuries. Most importantly, she demonstrates how these changes reflected and produced a new way of understanding Jewish time that was in constant dialogue with the ways time was conceived outside the world of the Jewish community. [End Page 105] The eight chapters of the book can each be read on its own or as part of the whole. The first chapter is an introduction describing the methods of calculating the Jewish calendar and their conceptualization dependent on the sun and the moon. As Carlebach emphasizes in this chapter and then illustrates in different ways throughout the book, time and its reckoning were connected to God, creation, existence, and thus to religious doctrine and belief. Continuing this line, the calendar was also connected to mysticism and esotericism. The introduction leads the reader from antiquity to the early modern period in German-speaking Europe, which is the heart of the study. Briefly tracing the ideas of medieval intellectuals, Carlebach arrives at the cusp of the early modern period. Chapter 2 situates the reader in early modern controversies of time. The Gregorian reform of 1582 reflected and stimulated new European Christian thinking about science, religion and the political order, and all these left their mark on the Jews who lived among the Christians. This reform was part and parcel of the printing revolution which made calendars household items. By the sixteenth century they had become almanacs, accompanied by popular sayings. Carlebach demonstrates how the Jewish calendars reflected the concerns of their Christian neighbors. For example, the Gregorian reform was not greeted uniformly, and these debates were evident in contemporary Jewish calendars as well. If the first two chapters of the book set the stage, chapters 3 and 4 explore how Jewish calendars changed in the age of print and how calendars became books, bringing previously privileged knowledge into every home. These new calendars featured the names of Jewish months and notations relevant to the ritual cycle alongside the days of the week corresponding to the Hebrew dates and the Christian months, indicating Christian holidays and saints’ days as well as important markets and seasonal matters. Folk medicine and remedies were also noted, as were the stars and seasons. Much of this information was taken from non-Jewish calendars. Alongside the calendars used by laymen, the scholarly elite studied books in which the calculation of the seasons was explained, often referred to as secret. These were usually copied by hand and flourished in manuscript into the eighteenth century...

Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern EuropeCarlebachElisheva Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe The Belknap Press of Harvard University PressCambridge, MA, 2011, xi, 292, £25.95ISBN 978-0-674-05254-3

Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern EuropeCarlebachElisheva <i>Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe</i> The Belknap Press of Harvard University PressCambridge, MA, 2011, xi, 292, £25.95ISBN 978-0-674-05254-3

:Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe

:<i>Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe</i>

A Sixteenth-Century Debate on the Jewish Calendar: Jacob Christmann and Joseph Justus Scaliger

This article explores the background and details of a forgotten debate on the history of the Jewish calendar, which took place between the chronologer and philologist Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609) and the Heidelberg Hebraist Jacob Christmann (1554-1613) at the end of the 16th century. Special attention is paid to Scaliger's erroneous and peculiar analysis of the contemporary Jewish calendar in the first edition of his famed Opus de emendatione temporum (1583), which is here reconstructed and explained for the first time. It is shown how Scaliger's views changed in between the first and second edition of his Opus and how these may have been influenced by Christmann's criticism. Furthermore, it will be argued that the strong interest in the Jewish calendar, as manifested in the Scaliger-Christmann controversy, goes back to a medieval Christian desire to improve understanding of the Gospel narratives pertaining to the Passion of Jesus and to fix the historical date of the crucifixion. The article also relates Scaliger's and Christmann's arguments regarding the history of the Jewish calendar to those made by the Italian Jewish scholar Azariah de' Rossi (1511/12-1577) and places these debates in the wider context of the Christian Hebraism of the Renaissance.

A Table of New Moons from 1501 to 1577 in a Hebrew Fragment Preserved in the John Rylands Library

A hitherto unknown set of two tables, preserved on a single sheet inscribed on both sides in Hebrew, which was originally in the Cairo Geniza, is presented and analyzed. The purpose of these anonymous tables is to convert dates from the Jewish calendar to the Julian calendar for a 76-year cycle, beginning in 1501; the underlying method seems to be unprecedented. The basic information for each year is the date in March in the Julian calendar that corresponds to 1 Nisan in the Jewish calendar. It is suggested that Abraham Zacut (d. 1515) is the author of these tables.

The Meaning of Judaeus and the Myth of Jewish Male Menses in a Late Medieval Astronomical School Text

Abstract The article introduces and explores a new source on Christian hostility towards Jews during the late Middle Ages. It comes in the shape of a commentary on a Computus Judaicus, which was used as a quadrivial school text in Central and Eastern Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Based on an examination of the rich manuscript tradition, it will be demonstrated how the text contributed to the evolution of the trope of Jewish male menstruation, which is here tied, in a unique manner, to an exposition of the Jewish calendar as a method of lunar reckoning.

Jewish Preaching in Times of War (review)

Reviewed by: Jewish Preaching in Times of War Jack Riemer (bio) Jewish Preaching in Times of War, by Marc Saperstein. Oxford, England and Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008. Marc Saperstein has virtually created a new field of Jewish studies: the scientific study of sermons. He has done major studies of medieval and modern sermons and now, in this—his latest volume—he studies what rabbis have said to their congregations during times of war in the last two hundred years. What should a rabbi say to his people when his country is at war? Should he follow the example of the kohen gadol in the book of Deuteronomy, who was told to rally the soldiers before they went off to war and tell them that God was on their side? Or should he follow the example of Jeremiah, who railed against entangling alliances and urged his people to stay neutral in the wars between their neighbors? Dr. Saperstein shows that the rabbis of the last two centuries have taken both approaches. In times of discouragement and confusion, some saw it as their task to appeal to their listeners to be patriotic, and some saw it as their task to warn their congregants against the moral sins that cause and that accompany wars. Some raised critical questions about government policies, and some inspired their listeners to sacrifice for a noble cause. Some articulated what their listeners already believed, and some challenged their listeners to see the war in a very different light. Some brought their communities a message of pride and confidence in their country; others brought to their audiences some harsh but valid truths that they believed needed to be heard. All spoke to specific congregations whose attitudes, affinities, values, and concerns were shaped by the community’s location and historical setting, as well as by the rabbi’s own background. Dr. Saperstein provides a close and careful introduction to these sermons, as well as explanatory footnotes. He explicates the texts, bringing forward allusions that the listeners of that time would have caught, but that may not be understood by a contemporary reader. He thus sets these sermons in their historical and cultural contexts. For example, he discusses a sermon by Sabato Morais, given during the Civil War. He notes, first of all, that it was given on July 4th in the American [End Page 75] calendar, corresponding to the 17th of Tammuz in the Jewish calendar. Which event had priority in the mind of the preacher: the anniversary of the sad day when the walls of Jerusalem were breached many centuries ago, or that of the joyous day when America was born? Morais referred to the Jewish date, and used it as a background for the discussion of the American date; he employed the grim mood evoked by that day in Jewish history to convey the sentiments that he felt when the fate of the Union hung in the balance. Saperstein points out that this sermon was given at the request of the Philadelphia Urban League, which tells us that non-Jews also cared about what a rabbi had to say on the issues of the day. We might not have expected this, given the small Jewish population in America at that time. Saperstein further points out something that we would otherwise not know: at the time the sermon was being delivered, the battle of Gettysburg was being waged just ninety miles away. It was only later that word reached Morais that the Union army had stood firm. In our age of instant communication, it is hard for us to imagine the uncertainty of the mood in the congregation to whom he spoke that day. And one more curious fact about this sermon: Morais said, “I am not indifferent to the fact, dear friends, to the event that four score and seven years ago brought to this new world light and joy.” Is it coincidence that Lincoln used the same elegant phrase—“four score and seven years ago”—to begin the Gettysburg Address, or is it possible that he may have read it in the Jewish Messenger? No one can say for sure, but it is...

Many Moons

Many Moons Poet Sirrah Guest Editor's Note: "Many Moons" is found in the U.Va. papers and was published previously in Meridian, Issue 24, a U.Va. magazine. The manuscript is handwritten and signed "Poet Sirrah 5731." Breece used the term "Poet Sirrah" as signature for several of his poems, perhaps signifying his perception of himself as the "different one," irreverent and angry at the state of the world. He also often dated his poems using the Hebrew calendar. This poem was composed in 1971. What Autumn moon dancing exoticallyOn the railroad tracks could be seen as cold steel?A train laden with coal lumbered by.Bound—not far from where I was so soon to be.The invitation of a rocking restFor stone-bruised feet slid into the night and I walked.I could have come quicker to findA harvest of grapes and blood and melancholy,But the moon lured me—she knewI had time—she knew we needed time, and time, and time. [End Page 40] Copyright © 2012 Berea College

Elisheva Carlebach. Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. xi, 292 pp. 53 illustrations.

Elisheva Carlebach. Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. xi, 292 pp. 53 illustrations.

CONFRONTATION WITH THE POLICE: THE ISRAELITES OF ENOCH MGIJIMA AND THE BULHOEK MASSACRE OF 24 MAY 1921

ORIGINS OF THE ISRAELITES MOVEMENT The Israelites movement in South Africa dates back to 1918, but it was originally founded by an American negro William Saunders Crowdy in 1896 at Kansas. Later in his life in a series of revelations he claimed to have discovered the stone of truth mentioned in the Bible in 1 Corinthian 1:1-2, which contained ancestral data concerning the origins of the negro race. Black men, he maintained were descended from the lost tribes of Israel and were Jews. Although the movement incorporated certain aspects of the New Testament theology, the Old Testament doctrine and rituals became central in the formulation of his dogma. For instance the church adopted a Jewish calendar. Furthermore it observed Jewish feast days, the Jewish sabbath, and the Jewish central religious festival namely the Passover. This event is celebrated by Jews as a reminder of how God brought them out of Egypt. An angel of death flew over Egypt, killing all the first born sons in each family. The families of the Jews (Israelites) were spared. They had previously been warned by God to mark the doors of their homes with blood to show who they were. At the time they were slaves in Egypt, and the killing of the first born sons was meant as a punishment for their captors, the Egyptians.