Jacques J. Lyons and Abraham De Sola. A Jewish Calendar for Fifty Years.

In addition to calendars for 1853 to 1903, the volume contains: a detailed and scholarly thirty-one page introduction on the subject and a table of haphtarot (with Sephardic and Ashkenazic variants). The most important feature of this volume is that it contains the first Jewish communal directory published in America. It consists of a comprehensive detailed twenty-five page survey of synagogues, societies and other Jewish institutions across America, Canada and the Caribbean. This list is indispensable to the student of Jewish communal development in America. The entry for Shearith Israel of New York includes a time- table for Sabbath and holiday prayers and a schedule of “the time for commencing the Sabbath” each week (pp. 161-2). This schedule was originally prepared a century earlier by Hazzan Joseph Jeshurun, the minister of New York’s Cong. Shearith Israel. This schedule is markedly different from modern ones, which give a precise (and different) time for each week of the year and provide the variant times for each city. Jeshurun’s schedule, however, merely lists one approximate time per four-week period; furthermore, a note explains that while Jeshurun compiled the schedule “for the meridian of New-York … it may, with a small variation, answer well for all the Northern States.” The inclusion of a communal survey in the volume was likely the initiative of Jacques J. Lyons (1813-1877), a native of Surinam and the minister of New York’s Shearith Israel congregation. Lyons was the first to express a serious interest in American Jewish history, as well as the first collector of American Judaica. He collected communal data and amassed a huge collection of ephemera and other materials that continue to be referenced by historians. Abraham De Sola (1825-1882), a native of London, moved to Montreal to assume the pulpit of Shearith Israel. In 1868 he declined an invitation to succeed the late Isaac Leeser at Beth El of Philadelphia. De Sola wrote works on a wide array of Jewish subjects, from a biography of Shabbetai Zevi to biblical zoology, and he achieved a number of distinctions: He was the first Jew to be awarded a Doctor of Laws degree in the English-speaking world, he became a senior professor at McGill University and, despite being both a Jew and a British subject, he was invited by President Grant to deliver the convocation at the opening of a Congressional session. Both Lyons and De Sola were vigorous upholders of traditional Judaism.