Recently Published Books

Editor’s note

Aleph does not publish book reviews in the usual sense, but in most cases only notices that are merely informative and non-evaluative. For books published in Hebrew, the English title is given in parentheses as found in the book itself, or (if none is given) in our translation. Authors’ names are given according to their common English spelling, usually as indicated by the publisher. All notes are by the Editor, unless otherwise indicated.

Longue durée

Sacha Stern and Charles Burnett, eds., Time, Astronomy, and Calendars in the Jewish Tradition. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014. 365 pp.

For obvious reasons related to the constancy and regularity of the heavenly motions, “time, astronomy and calendars have become inextricably implicated,” as the editors write in their Preface. The association of time reckoning (notably calendars) and astronomy exists in many cultures. This book explores it in Jewish contexts, both ancient and medieval. This is obviously a subject whose study requires a high degree of technical expertise, but also has many implications for broader cultural history. The volume’s twelve studies all issued from research projects carried out in London, which thus emerges as the leading center for the study of this aspect of Jewish culture. The initiators of the various projects (listed on p. xxi) are to be commended for their scientific vision and leadership, and their (British) funders are to be thanked for their judicious decisions to support them.

The Preface expertly describes the contribution of each study and weaves them together into a whole that is more than its parts and gives the volume a diachronic unity. The wealth of topics makes it impossible to summarize the studies here, so I have to content myself with listing the papers: Jonathan Ben-Dov, “A Jewish Parapegma?

Reading 1 Enoch 82 in Roman Egypt”; Reimund Leicht, “Observing the Moon: Astronomical and Cosmological Aspects in the Rabbinic New Moon Procedure”; Katharina Keim, “Cosmology as Science or Cosmology as Theology? Reflections on the Astronomical Chapters of Pirke DeRabbi Eliezer”; François de Blois, “Some Early Islamic and Christian Sources Regarding the Jewish Calendar (9th–11th centuries)”; Marina Rustow and Sacha Stern, “The Jewish Calendar Controversy of 921–22: Reconstructing the Manuscripts and their Transmission History”; Ilana Wartenberg, “The Hebrew Calendrical Bookshelf of the Early Twelfth Century: The Cases of Abraham bar Ḥiyya and Jacob bar Samson”; Israel M. Sandman, “Scribal Prerogative in Modifying Calendrical Tables”; Raymond Mercier, “Astronomical Tables of Abraham bar Ḥiyya”; Anne C. Kinneret Sittig, “The Sabbath Epistle by Abraham Ibn Ezra: Its Purpose and Novelty”; Josefina Rodríguez Arribas, “Medieval Jews and Medieval Astrolabes: Where, Why, How, and What For?”; Justine Isserles, “Some Hygiene and Dietary Calendars in Hebrew Manuscripts from Medieval Ashkenaz”; and C. Philipp E. Nothaft, “Me pudet audire Iudeum talia scire: A Late Medieval Latin School Text on the Jewish Calendar.”

Late Antiquity

Meir Bar-Ilan, (Astrology and Other Sciences among the Jews of Israel, in the Roman-Hellenistic and Byzantine Periods). Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 2011. 356 pp. Index.

To put it in a nutshell: Bar-Ilan is very erudite in various domains. At the same time, his book is characterized by a glaring absence of sound scientific methods. He tells us that initially he wrote his book in a “personal style” (p. xiv) but then, as a result of referees’ comments, was obliged to rewrite the book in “scientific language” (ibid.). But I find that it is still very far from scientific. Bar-Ilan “apologizes” (p. xii) for not having drawn on Reimund Leicht’s Astrologica Judaica. Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der astrologischen Literatur der Juden (Tübingen, 2006). He says that he heard of it “too late” and that it was not in the library of his university (!). Is this “excuse” acceptable in the Age of Amazon? Bar-Ilan signed off on his preface at least three years after the publication of the most fundamental study of Jewish astrology, the topic that is at the very heart of Bar-Ilan’s book. This is not simply a matter of laziness. Rather, Bar-Ilan repeatedly emphasizes that he took little note of earlier research literature; he...