URI BEN SIMON. Calendarium Palaestinorum et Universorum Judaeorum, ad annos quadraginta [“40-Year Palestinian and Universal Jewish Calendar.”]

(CALENDAR)

Peter Kopff

Frankfurt

1594

Latin text. Title vignette. Numerous calendric charts and tables

Freimann, p. 191

Polish-born Uri ben Simon’s Hebrew calendar for the Jews of Eretz Israel was published in Venice in 1575. This is a Latin translation executed by Jacob Christmann (1554-1613), Professor 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. It seems Christmann sustained an interest in the Jewish calendric system, a year earlier he published a polemic work Epistola Chronologica (Frankfurt, 1593). See EJ, Vol. VIII, col. 29