We Shouldn't Take New Year for Granted
An Ancient Calendar Controversy
Most of us take our new years for granted, and the calendars on which they are based. We don’t always realise that many of them have a history of controversy and dispute behind them. For example, in 1752 Britain caught up with continental Europe by replacing the Julian calendar with the Gregorian. The change involved switching the new year from March 25th to January 1st, and moving the date forward by 11 days. Overnight, September 3rd became September 14th. People protested. The artist William Hogarth painted a scene showing rioters causing a fracas outside a political dinner, with a banner proclaiming the slogan “give us back our eleven days”.
Since the 18th century, the small Zoroastrian community in Persia and India has been divided in two over a dispute about their calendar. And two years ago, the Ukrainian Church revived a dispute in Eastern Christianity by switching from the Orthodox calendar to the Gregorian calculation used in the West. They did this to distance themselves from the Russian Orthodox Church, with whom they had formerly shared a calendar.
Jewish history is no stranger to calendar controversies. I wrote a couple of years ago about the split between those in ancient times who adhered to the lunar calendar still used today and those who favoured calculating the date by the sun. In that article I mentioned another serious and divisive calendar dispute that broke out in the year 992, between the religious authorities in Israel and Saadia Gaon, the greatest scholar of the age. I also wrote about it in my 2014 book, The Talmud: A Biography so my apologies if you are tired of reading about it but, but given the time of year, I thought it worth repeating here.
Saadia Gaon was born in Fiyum, in Egypt. He wrote prolifically on philosophy, biblical interpretation and grammar. People still read his works today. Saadia’s lifelong mission was to refute the teachings of the Karaites, in those days a large and influential Jewish sect who rejected the Judaism of the rabbis and the Talmud. They adhered as much as possible to the literal biblical text. Saadia was convinced they were wrong and constituted a threat to mainstream Jewish tradition. Argumentative and quarrelsome in nature, he took every opportunity he could to condemn them and attack their teachings.
Saadia’s quarrelsome reputation wasn’t confined to his war against the Karaites. He lived at a time when two Jewish Talmudic academies were competing for dominance. The academy in Israel adhered to the work we now know as the Jerusalem Talmud. Their counterparts in Baghdad followed the Babylonian Talmud. The two Talmuds are not hugely different in their approach but sometimes their respective followers disagreed profoundly. Saadia was responsible for instigating the fiercest of all disputes between the two schools, a dispute which eventually sidelined the Jerusalem Talmud and established the Babylonian school as the dominant religious authority. The quarrel, about the calendar, was a squabble over a couple of missing days.
The Talmudic calendar is a unique and complex combination of both the lunar and solar cycles. The months change every new moon, the years change when the earth has completed a full revolution of the sun. These two criteria do not line up neatly; there are twelve months in the Talmudic year, but a lunar month is less than thirty days. Twelve lunar months therefore do not add up to a solar year of three hundred and sixty five days, they fall short by about 11 days.
To bring the lunar and solar cycles into line, a rigorous calculation was implemented, in which leap years were created by adding an extra month into the year, and two months were made flexible, in some years containing 29 days, in other years 30. Tradition has it that the method of calculation was introduced in the year 358 CE by the rabbinic leader Hillel IV, but studies have shown that the development of this hybrid calendar took place over a period of time.
Until Saadia Gaon came on the scene, responsibility for performing the calculation and announcing the leap years had rested with the religious authorities in Israel. This was a relic from ancient times, before the calculation was introduced, when the rabbis in Jerusalem would call for witnesses to come forward to testify they had seen the new moon. When a pair of reliable informants arrived, the rabbis would proclaim the new month. This process took place in the Temple in Jerusalem and responsibility for fixing the calendar had remained in Israel ever since.
In the year 922 CE a dispute broke out, for highly technical reasons, over whether the two flexible months should have twenty nine or thirty days. The head of the academy in Israel, a man named ben Meir, held that the two months should each have twenty nine days. The Babylonians disagreed; they argued for thirty days. The details of the disagreement may have appeared trivial, they were arguing over a matter of a few minutes here or there, but the consequences were that, unless the two academies agreed, the communities over which they each held sway would celebrate their festivals on different days. Each school refused to follow the opinion of the other. Had they done so, they argued, they would be eating forbidden bread on the day they had calculated to be the Passover.
Saadia led the attack on ben Meir’s calculation. He wrote dozens of letters, to ben Meir, to his former pupils in Egypt and to ‘most of the great cities’ warning that if the view of the Israel academy were to be followed this would lead to a profanation of Passover, the New Year festival and the Day of Atonement. They would all be celebrated two days earlier than they should have been. Letters and responses flew backwards and forwards between Babylon and Israel. Ben Meir seems to have been the more short-tempered of the two protagonists, Saadia managed to keep his cool while protesting ben Meir’s attempts to implement what he, Saadia, saw as a change to the calendrical rules.
The fury with which the dispute was conducted masked a fear which was uppermost in the minds of all Talmudic scholars. Were a schism to develop in which Israel and Babylon permanently observed different calendars, with their festivals falling on different days, the authority of the Talmud would be seriously compromised. There would in effect be two Talmudic sects. It was one thing for the academies in Israel and Babylon to differ over minor points of law, such as whether it was permissible to heat water on the Sabbath. It was a wholly different matter for them to create an ongoing situation in which one group regarded a certain day as holy, while their co-religionists profaned it, leading to the possibility that the entire nation would never celebrate their festivals in unison. Such an occurrence would destroy the integrity of the Talmud and, from Saadia’s point of view, would completely defeat him in his ongoing battle with the Karaites. If the rabbis of the Talmud could not agree among themselves, there was no way he could condemn the Karaites for their refusal to accept Talmudic law.
Despite this fear, the two communities did observe separate festivals in 922 CE. We don’t know how long this situation went on for, or how it was resolved, but, when all was over, Saadia emerged as the victor, He was not a man given to losing battles. His philosophic training, his skill in presenting his case and his literary skills proved more than a match for his opponents. Saadia triumphed and ben Meir was deposed as the head of the Israel academy. The ancient privilege of the rabbis in Israel to fix the calendar was taken from them, and the way in which the various dates of the holidays are calculated has continued undisturbed ever since.
The irony is that in Israel they will be eating bread on Pesach when the 7 Jews in Babylon cannot. Great piece, thx.
P.S. There's a place in the UK that still observes the Julian calendar, Foula in the Shetlands