Calendar and Community: A History of the Jewish Calendar, 2nd Century BCE to 10th Century CE
By Sacha Stern
Publisher: Clarendon Press 2001 312 Pages
ISBN: 0198270348
PDF 2 MB

Calendar and Community traces the development of the Jewish calendar from its origins until it reached, in the tenth century CE, its present form. Drawing on a wide range of often neglected sources - literary, documentary, epigraphic, Jewish, Graeco-Roman and Christian - it is the first comprehensive work to have been written on the subject. It will be useful not only to historians and epigraphists for the interpretation of early Jewish datings, but also as a historical study of early Judaism in its own right. Its main theme is that the Jewish calendar evolved in the course of this period from considerable diversity (with a variety of solar and lunar calendars) to unity (with the normative rabbinic calendar). The unification of the calendar was one element in the unification of Jewish identity in later antiquity and the early medieval world.

About the Author
Research Fellow, Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer at Jews' College (now the London School of Jewish Studies), University of London, since 1990.