Jewish calendars (Heb., luḥot; Yid., kalendarn) use rabbinic chronology for determining the year “to the Creation of the World,” and have presented the months and Jewish holidays in remarkably stable form over the centuries. At least through the eighteenth century, knowledgeable Jews learned how to calculate the Jewish calendar, and luḥot were among the earliest printed Jewish works, both broadsides and pocket calendars. Calendars usually contained brief chronographs, time lines that counted the important events from creation, through the biblical period, until contemporary times. Some Jewish calendars served as full almanacs by including astronomical, medical, weather, market, and other information.
Jüdischer Almanach, Prague, 1930–1931 [5691 in the Hebrew calendar], coedited by Friedrich Thieberger and Felix Weltsch. (Leo Baeck Institute, New York)
Calendars served not only to synchronize Jewish society in time, but as mirrors of the Jewish experience. Second “Purims” such as the Purim Vints (or Purim Frankfurt) appeared in many calendars for centuries after events of 1614 in which the community was spared destruction, and 20 Sivan was noted in Poland–Lithuania as a fast day commemorating the depredations of gzeyres takh vetat—the Khmel’nyts’kyi massacres of 1648–1649. Calendar pages graphically symbolize the fundamental duality of Jewish life in the Diaspora: Hebrew months were arrayed alongside the Christian, and Jewish holidays faced Christian saints’ days. Local markets and regional fairs provided economic livelihood for many Jewish merchants, and calendars noted their dates carefully. A calendar published in Vilna and Grodno for 1826/27 thus advertised: “Also contains the months and holidays according to the Greek church [the Orthodox calendar] and the Roman church [Gregorian calendar] . . . and the market days related to them.”
Far from disappearing in modern times, calendars evolved into instruments of Jewish modernity as agents of change and indexes of acculturation. The Galician maskil Yosef Perl (1773–1839) was the first to exploit luḥot in the service of a modernizing agenda. His calendar titled Tsir ne’eman (1813–1815) contained compendia of maskilic moralizing, “Luaḥ ha-lev” (Moral Tables).
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, kalendarn came to include far more than monthly tables. They had grown to book-sized publications, many with hundreds of pages in vernacular languages. These yearbooks contained traditional Jewish calendars, still necessary for most Jews even if their observance of Jewish holidays had declined, to mark yortsayten (anniversaries of dates of death), for example, but they went far beyond that. Their contents included materials ranging from Jewish, Gregorian, Julian, and Orthodox calendars, to train schedules, times and places of trade fairs, currency exchange rates, postal and telegraph rates, lists of all mineral baths in Europe, and advertisements. In time, some included sections that functioned as Jewish telephone books for certain localities. Advertisements containing detailed information about the goods and services of Jewish-owned businesses allowed the calendars to continue their function of maintaining commercial networks among geographically dispersed Jews.
Page from a pocket calendar printed in the Łódź ghetto, 1944. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
These annual calendars functioned second only to Jewish newspapers as disseminators of Jewish culture along with news and information about the Jewish past and present. They became staples of Jewish printing houses, providing reliable sources of income year after year. Moreover, calendars were published by well-known Yiddish literary figures, among them Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh (Der nitslekher kalendar; 1877–1884), Yitskhok Yoyel Linetski, and Mordkhe Spektor (Varshever yidisher familyen kalendar; 1933). These writers published calendars not only for monetary gain, but also in order to have a forum for their writing. While some calendars catered to literary interests, others were primary political. Yiddishists and Hebraists, Zionists and Communists—each ideology produced its own didactic calendars, highlighting important dates and personalities in that particular movement.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, with limited space in a weak press that was severely restricted by the Russian government, kalendarn became a primary forum for Yiddish literary and historical writings. They were also one of the first Yiddish periodicals in which graphic art and photographs were published. Even during the Holocaust, Jews in ghettos with access to printing presses continued to produce calendars. Jewish calendars continue to appear to the present day in abundant variety. They still contain in their core columns the days and dates of the Jewish and Western calendar, along with illustrations, advertisements, and didactic epigrams reflecting multiple uses.
Raphael Mahler, “Joseph Perl’s Hebrew Almanacs,” in Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment, pp. 149–168 (Philadelphia, 1985); Moses Shalit, “S. Y. Abramovitsh un Y. Y. Linetski un zeyere kalendarn,” in Di yidishe velt (Vilna) 9 (December 1928): 441–460; Moses Shalit, Lukhes in undzer literatur: Fun Mendele Moykher Sforim biz der hayntiker tsayt (Vilna, 1929).