Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

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

A Sixteenth-Century Debate on the Jewish Calendar: Jacob Christmann and Joseph Justus Scaliger Abstract: 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. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Jewish Quarterly Review University of Pennsylvania Press

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

Jewish Quarterly Review , Volume 103 (1) – Feb 7, 2013

Loading next page...
 
/lp/university-of-pennsylvania-press/a-sixteenth-century-debate-on-the-jewish-calendar-jacob-christmann-and-WMZoZjhgvS

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
University of Pennsylvania Press
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania.
ISSN
1553-0604
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Abstract: 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.

Journal

Jewish Quarterly ReviewUniversity of Pennsylvania Press

Published: Feb 7, 2013

There are no references for this article.