The calendar controversy of 921/2 CE, when the Jewish communities of Palestine and Babylonia ended up observing Passover, the New Year, and all the major festivals on different dates, was long forgotten but then re-discovered in the late nineteenth century, in the documents of the Cairo Genizah. Although very short-lived, this controversy generated a substantial body of polemical literature that was copied and preserved for at least two centuries. The calendar controversy of 921/2 was clearly major event, for the players at the time as well as for the later generations. It was critical to the history of the Jewish calendar and to the development of Jewish political relations in the medieval Near East.
Since its initial, late nineteenth-century discovery, when a scholarly consensus was quickly established, little has been done to re-visit the calendar controversy. Yet much has changed, after more than a hundred years, in the study of Cairo Genizah manuscripts, in time and calendar studies, and more generally, in the theory and practice of social history. A comprehensive re-assessment of the evidence, its interpretation, and its broader context, has long been overdue.
The idea of this book, and of the laborious research project that lies behind it, was formed in conversation with Marina Rustow at UCL, in the summer of 2008. We reflected then on the historical importance of this event, on the inadequacy of accepted views about it, and on just how little was known of the primary sources which had served to form the established scholarly consensus. We also raised new questions, which had never been considered before: when were the manuscripts copied, and how and why the texts of the controversy were preserved and transmitted in later centuries. Our initial approach, accordingly, was primarily codicological and focused on the manuscripts; but the project soon expanded to include the discovery of new sources, the reconstruction of the manuscripts, the re-edition, translation, and interpretation of all the texts, and ultimately, a radically new vision and understanding of the controversy, its aftermath, its history.
The book begins, in Part 1, with a series of introductory chapters. Chapter 1 offers a brief taster of the book and a way into it. Chapter 2 presents a historical narrative of the calendar controversy of 921/2, as I have reconstructed it on the basis of my fresh reading of the sources. In Chapter 3, I trace the history of the scholarship, from re-discovery in the late nineteenth century, mainly from Cairo Genizah documents, to the rapid establishment of a scholarly consensus mainly through the works of Bornstein (1904) and Malter (1921), which has never been questioned or re-visited since. Chapter 4 picks up from there with an archaeology of the present project: what were our research questions and methodology, how we approached the manuscripts, how we read, edited, and interpreted our texts. This chapter highlights the many new discoveries that our project has contributed to the understanding of the calendar controversy. In Chapter 5, I explain how the Jewish calendar works, and why Palestinians and Babylonians ended up disagreeing with the dates of the festivals during those years.
The rest of the book is dedicated to the text editions (an explanation our editorial policies, and a list of all the manuscripts and sigla, can be found after this Preface). Part 2 contains the most important literary work in our corpus, formerly known as The Book of the Festivals (Sefer ha-Moʾadim), and now renamed, for reasons that will be explained, The Book of the Calendar Controversy. This work was written at the time by the Babylonian leadership, and presents a full narrative of the controversy—albeit polemical and very biased—and a defence of the Babylonian calendar. This part includes an introduction, a critical edition based on five manuscripts, and separate diplomatic editions of each of the reconstructed manuscripts.
Part 3 contains letters and other polemical writings that were written and exchanged during the controversy of 921/2. Among them is the so-called First Letter of ben Meir (the leader of the Palestinians), attested in two manuscripts; a manuscript with letters of Saadya (who, as I will show, only played a marginal role in the controversy); a manuscript with letters on both sides, which I therefore call a ‘Miscellany’; and various other manuscripts containing single polemical texts, mostly epistolary, on either the Babylonian or Palestinian sides.
Part 4 turns to later sources, written in the two centuries following the controversy. These sources, completely neglected and unknown until now, shed important light on the long-term impact of the calendar controversy. I present, firstly, a number of short narratives of the calendar controversy, or short references to it, that are found in later literary sources and documents from the Cairo Genizah. The authors of the literary sources are Qaraite (Sahl ben Maṣliaḥ), Rabbanite (Hayye Gaon), and Christian (Elias of Nisibis), and offer very different, retrospective views of the controversy. Secondly, I present a set of Palestinian Calendar Manuals, which demonstrate that the Palestinian calendar calculation that precipitated the controversy of 921/2 was still promoted, in Palestinian circles in Cairo, as late as the early twelfth century. This is sufficient to demonstrate one of our main conclusions, namely that the calendar controversy of 921/2 did not end, as has always been believed, in a Babylonian victory.
In the Conclusion, I sum up the innovative contributions that this project and book have made, and I assess their historical significance. The Glossary includes the translation of foreign words, as well as the explanation of words, phrases, and concepts specific to Jewish calendar calculation. The Plates, at the end of this volume, are of images that are not available online (e.g. at the websites of the Friedberg Genizah Project or of the holding libraries), either because they were taken after conservation work was carried out on the fragments (at our request), or because special photograph was used (e.g. ultra-violet exposures), or because they represent joined fragments.
Of the named collaborators to this book, Marina Rustow deserves a special mention. Her expertise in Cairo Genizah studies, and more generally in medieval Near Eastern history—fields in which I was, and still consider myself, quite ignorant—was not only an essential contribution to the project, but indeed at its very core. In the first two years of the project (2011–2012), the collaboration was on an equal footing, and our original plan was to author this book jointly. However professional duties, competing demands on our research time, and transatlantic remoteness made it increasingly impossible to maintain this arrangement. We eventually decided that I would write the book on my own, including the text editions and translations; but I profited from Marina’s advice until the very final stages of the project. I have generally written this book in the first person singular, as the writing is mine and I must take responsibility for it; but when the first person plural is used, this always means Marina and me.
The other named collaborators to this book are Nadia Vidro and Ronny Vollandt. Ronny helped us in the first year of the project to source the Genizah fragments—no small feat—and to assemble a bibliography. Nadia was involved at a later stage; she discovered four new fragments, and contributed most of the edition and translation of the Judeo-Arabic sources (her contributions are indicated in the book; all transcriptions, editions, and translations are mine unless otherwise stated). I feel privileged to have worked with such eminent scholarly colleagues; this is my opportunity to thank them, although I look forward to further collaborations with them in years to come.
Critical to the project was also Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, who helped us, with her world-leading palaeographic expertise, to date the manuscripts and analyse, more generally, their features. Much of her own time was generously spent towards this, with memorable, extended meetings in Oxford (2 June 2011) and Paris (16 November 2017). Amir Ashur, a great expert in Cairo Genizah scribal hands, came especially to London on 14 November 2016, to advise me further on the dating and authorship of the manuscripts.
My appreciation extends to colleagues that worked at various times in the calendar research projects at UCL, funded by the AHRC, the Leverhulme Trust, and the ERC: besides Nadia Vidro (above mentioned), these colleagues include Justine Isserles, Philipp Nothaft, Israel Sandman, Ilana Wartenberg, and above all François de Blois who advised on all matters Arabic, Syriac, calendrical, and much more. Working in teams has been a uniquely enriching experience, from which this present work has demonstrably benefited.
Many colleagues have contributed academic advice over the years, and I fear not to remember them all. I extend my thanks in particular to Haggai Ben-Shammai, Piero Capelli, Talya Fishman, Arnold Franklin, Geoffrey Herman, Geoffrey Khan, Moshe Lavee, Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala, Ben Outhwaite, Devin Stewart, Gregor Schwarb, Roni Shweka, Zvi Stampfer, Marzena Zawanowska. The two anonymous peer reviewers made useful suggestions and saved me from many errors. Smaller contributions are acknowledged, where appropriate, in the body of the book.
The libraries were very helpful in providing us with digitized images of the Cairo Genizah fragments, and sometimes in restoring damaged fragments, without which our research would not have been possible. I wish to thank personally all staff members of the various libraries involved, including librarians, conservators, and imaging services staff, and in particular Ben Outhwaite (yes, again), Melonie Schmierer-Lee, and Maciej Pawlikowski of the Cambridge University Library; César Merchán-Hamann and Rahel Fronda of the Bodleian Library, Oxford; David Kraemer, Amy Gerbracht Armstrong, and Yevgeniya Dizenko of the Jewish Theological Seminar Library, New York; Arthur Kiron and Bruce Nielsen of the Library at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, Philadelphia; and Alex Khamray of the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, Kyiv. Special thanks are also due to the Friedberg Genizah Project, whose website has revolutionized Cairo Genizah research, and without which this project would have been virtually impossible—I will not be the first to have noted this.
While on the technical side, I am also greatly indebted to Zina Cohen and Ivan Shevchuk for their advice on specialist lighting and photography (mainly for the poorly legible fragment L2Bab); to Jay Birbeck for digitally reconstructing, joining, and creating images of fragments (mainly of LMisc); and to Nachum Dershowitz for writing at my request, together with Ed Reingold, a programme for calculating the date of any inputted molad (now in the public domain,
The project was initially triggered, in 2011, by the award of a Small Grant of the British Academy, which enabled us to visit libraries and purchase our initial images. From 2013, we benefited from a substantial grant of the European Research Council (Advanced Grant Project ‘Calendars’, at UCL), for which I am immensely grateful. Much of the Introduction was written while I was Fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, Philadelphia, in the autumn of 2017; I am grateful to director Steven Weitzman, associate director Natalie Dohrmann, and all the staff of the Center without exception for their hospitality and for offering such a congenial and unique environment for inspiring research.
Thanks are also due to my academic and administrative colleagues at the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at UCL, and particularly to Lily Kahn, who gracefully (and most competently) stood in as Head of Department during my year of research leave in 2017/18. Georgia Panteli, Casey Mackenzie Johnson, and more from a distance Vanessa Clarke, served as most able administrators of the ERC project—thanks to all of you.
Members of my family, especially my wife Evadne, were most supportive in relieving me from domestic duties and freeing me to pursue my research. Family and friends took a great interest in this project; my children (mainly Esther and Yehuda) helped with manuscript readings and obscure literary allusions. Thank you Evadne and all the children for your love, patience, and for all the good times that family life brings.
In complete contrast to my previous monograph, Calendars in Antiquity (2012), which was a broad macro-history of ancient calendars, this present work, in all its length, is confined to a single and minute calendar-related historical event. It lasted not much more than one or two years, and it only affected a minority community, that of Rabbanite Jews, in the medieval Near East. As I hope to show, in the tradition of latter-generation Annales historians, the micro-historical focus opens up perspectives on the past that are as important and as significant as the large, macro-historical sweeps.
My approach is strongly empiricist, with a focus on texts and on philology. It breaks, however, with traditional philologically-based history, in its recognition, in line with current thinking, that written sources cannot serve as historical evidence—on whatever level of reliability—except insofar as they are authentic expressions of (individual or collective) subjective perspectives, at the time, on the historical environment and events. It does not matter, therefore, that the sources are biased; quite on the contrary, it is precisely the personal bias, the rhetorical agenda, the literary devices that constitute our historical material. They were integral, indeed, to the controversy itself.
Calendar studies are inherently multi-disciplinary, as time reckoning, in medieval Jewish society, was not just a social and economic practice but a religious, liturgical, and halakhic (legal) concern, which also bordered with science, astronomy, and arithmetic. Some readers may appreciate the texts for their language, expression, and literary qualities. Different approaches and emphases could have been chosen for this work; my ultimate interest has been, as always, social history.
Sacha Stern
London, November 2018