Calendarium Palaestinorum et Universorum Judaeorum, ad annos quadraginta (40-Year Palestinian and Universal Jewish Calendar)

(Uri ben Simon)

Peter Kopff

Frankfurt

1594

On title, vignette of saint holding key. Numerous calendric charts and tables. In Latin. Contains many Latin marginalia.

Freimann, p. 191

Polish-born Uri ben Simon’s Hebrew calendar for the Jews of Eretz Israel was published in Venice in 1575. Ours is a Latin translation executed by Jacob Christmann, Professor of Aristotelian Logic at the Academy of Heidelberg. In the introduction to our work, Christmann demolishes a bizarre theory of Scaliger that the Jews of Palestine have a different calendric system than those of Europe. Christmann shows how Scaliger’s slavish dependence upon and piteous misreading of Uri ben Simon’s Palestinian calendar led him to this grotesquerie. It seems Christmann sustained an interest in the Jewish calendric system. A year earlier he published a polemic work Epistola Chronologica (Frankfurt, 1593). See Freimann, p. 191, s.v. Christmann, Jakob.