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

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.