A birthday with uncertainty: RNL Evr Arab I 4816
Russian National Library (RNL) Evr Arab I 4816 is a copy of Kitāb al-Tawriyyah, the Book of Covert Ambiguity, by the 11th-century Qaraite scholar Jeshuʿah b. Judah. On its final page (fol. 205r) a secondary hand recorded the birth of a child in the year 1188 CE.
RNL Evr Arab I 4816 fol. 205 recto from the Collections of the National Library of Russia
בשם אל[ ]עת רצון מיי֗י
נולד בן לאלע[זר] הלוי בן חלפון
הלוי בן נחמאל הלוי נ֗נ֗ ושמו דוד
הלוי ישימהו אלהינו לברכה בקרב
הארץ אמן. ביום ראשון לשב[ת]
בחדש מ בארבעה עשר לחדש
מרחשון על דרך פוגה שנת אלף
וחמש מאות לשטרות ישועה
[קרוב]ה אמן. ו[סימ]ן א֗ך֗
In the name of God [ ] at a moment favoured by God
a son was born to Elʿazar ha-Levi b. Ḥalfon
ha-Levi b. Neḥamʾel ha-Levi, may his soul rest, whose name is David
ha-Levi. May our God make him a blessing
on earth (cf. Isa 19:24). Amen. On Sunday,
<of the month M>1 the 14th of the month
Marḥeshvan, with uncertainty, of the year one thousand
and five hundred of the Era of the Documents.2 Salvation
shall come (cf. Isa 56:1). Amen. And the sign is 1500.
This birth record is unusual in that the date of birth is given 'with uncertainty', in Hebrew על דרך פוגה. In Biblical Hebrew the root p.w.g means 'grow numb', 'be helpless' and in rabbinic Hebrew 'escape', 'faint', 'evaporate'. But the noun pugah is very commonly used in Qaraite works with the meaning 'doubt', based on an interpretation of וַיָּפָג לִבּוֹ in Gen. 45:26 as 'have doubts'.3
The date of birth of a medieval child could be doubtful, for example, when they were born close to sunset on a cloudy day. In this case it was difficult to determine if the birth was before sunset, at the end of an outgoing day, or after sunset, at the beginning of a new one. If the newborn child was male, this uncertainty had implications for when he was circumcised.4 This affected both Rabbanites and Qaraites.
If the baby was born into a Qaraite family, additional uncertainties applied, caused by the nature of the medieval Qaraite calendar. Unlike the Rabbanites whose calendar was based on a fixed calculation that is still in use today, Qaraites maintained that the Jewish calendar must be observational. In the empirical Qaraite calendar months were fixed by observing the first appearance of the lunar crescent. The crescent was sought at the end of the 29th day of the outgoing month, at or just after sunset.5 If the crescent was sighted, that night was the beginning of a new month. If the crescent was not sighted under good observation conditions, the month was made 30 days. What happened when sighting the crescent was impossible due to clouds differed from one period to another. In the 10th century, the outgoing month was made 30 days, and the next day was fixed as the beginning of a new month without seeking the crescent again. In later centuries, it was believed that days 30 and 31 of the outgoing month should both be observed as an equally possible (and equally doubtful) first day of the new month in case of clouds. As a consequence, all dates were considered uncertain until doubts about the correct beginning of the month were resolved, either via news from a place where the sky was clear or by assessing the shape, position and brightness of the moon when the crescent was eventually sighted.
In the described two cases, the ambiguity concerns the day of the month. In other situations, the month of the year was uncertain. In the Qaraite calendar, years were intercalated, i.e. extended with the insertion of a thirteenth month in order to ensure that Passover was celebrated in the correct season, based on the state of ripeness of the barley crops (aviv) in Palestine. The fact that the calendar could be correctly regulated only by the state of barley in Palestine created obvious problems for Qaraite communities outside of the Land of Israel.6 Diasporic Qaraite communities existed during the Middle Ages in Babylonia, Egypt, Syria, Maghreb, Byzantium and Spain.7 Many of these communities found it hard and often impossible to receive information about the state of barley crops in Palestine in time to prepare for and celebrate Passover.
The most natural way to obtain this information was by letter or oral testimony of visitors to Palestine.8 Because intercalation was not centralised, Qaraites in the Diaspora could also legitimately organise their own expeditions to Palestine, inspect the crops and make a decision for themselves. There is evidence that Qaraites from Babylonia, Egypt and Syria sent aviv-seeking parties to Palestine.9 However, both these ways were ultimately unreliable and impractical for Qaraite communities further afield. By the second half of the 13th century at the latest Egypt and Syria remained the only Qaraite Diasporas that were still following an aviv-based calendar.10 The rest of the Diasporas turned to methods based on calculation, with Babylonian Qaraites probably using such methods as early as the second half of the 10th century. One method, associated mainly with Babylonia, was to make a decision to intercalate depending on the day of the month of the true vernal equinox.11 The calculated method most widely used by Qaraites in the Diaspora was the 19-year cycle, known as the maḥzor or 'the Rabbanite calculation'.12 The 19-year cycle was used by Qaraites in Byzantium, Spain and Babylonia, as well as in Egypt in case information on the aviv was unavailable.13
In the 10th–11th centuries, Qaraite authorities fought vigorously to defend the principle of the empirical aviv-based intercalation and against the Rabbanite view that a calculated scheme could be the true Jewish calendar. Despite this, they admitted that Diaspora Qaraites might need to predict by a calculation which years would be intercalated in the aviv method and spoke approvingly of the use of the 19-year cycle as a relatively accurate way of making such predictions.14 More strikingly, they permitted the occasional use of calculations in Palestine itself, in case of atypical weather patterns.15 In regular years, the ripening of barley crops determined whether a year should be 12 or 13 months long. However, if a year was persistently cold and wet, barley took longer than usual to develop, and in unusually hot weather, barley ripened a month too early. Relying on the aviv in such conditions could lead to years of 14 or 11 months respectively, which are not allowed in Jewish calendars of any type. In these rare cases it was considered permissible to determine the length of the outgoing year (from Nisan to the next Nisan) by a calculation. This leniency did not mean, however, that calculated dates could be regarded as more than predictions and approximations. Unless confirmation could be obtained from the state of barley crops in Palestine in the spring, it remained doubtful throughout the year what the correct month actually was. This was especially true for Qaraite communities in Egypt, Syria and the Land of Israel who, under normal conditions, had regular access to barley fields in Palestine.
But let’s return to baby David. Considering that his birth record is found in a copy of a Qaraite work and uses the predominantly Qaraite פוגה for 'doubt', it is most probable that David ha-Levi was born to a Qaraite family and that his birth was dated according to the calendar of his Qaraite community. What kind of uncertainty does it refer to? Was the day of his birth doubtful or was it the month? While it is difficult to be sure, there are reasons to prefer the latter. Firstly, the phrase על דרך פוגה appears in the record after the month name Marḥeshvan and not after the day. More importantly, David was born on the 14th of the month. Even if the sky was clouded at the beginning of the month when Qaraites attempted to sight the crescent, by the middle of the month this uncertainty would have been resolved, either by a report of a sighting elsewhere or by the shape and position of the moon when it could finally be sighted in David’s place of birth. It is more likely that in the spring preceding David’s birth Qaraites in his community were unable to obtain information on the state of barley in Palestine. They then used the 'uncertain' Rabbanite calculation to determine when Nisan should begin and spent the rest of the year wondering what month it really was.
Research for this FOTM was conducted as part of the project ‘Qaraite and Rabbanite calendars: origins, interaction, and polemic’, funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.
Footnotes
1 The scribe erroneously started writing the name of the month before the date. The mistake is not marked in the original, but the name of the month is unfinished, showing that the scribe realised his mistake.
2 In the Rabbanite calculated calendar this corresponds to Sunday, 6 November 1188 CE.
3 Aharon Maman, 'Karaite Hebrew', in M. Polliack, Karaite Judaism. A Guide to its History and Literary Sources, Brill, 2003, pp. 485–503, esp. p. 487–488. This meaning is rare in Rabbanite works (ibid).
4 This problem is mentioned, e.g., in a responsum by Hayye Gaon in B.M Lewin, Otzar ha-Geonim, vol. 4, Jerusalem, 1931, p. 9 and in the Book of Commandments by the Qaraite Yefet b. Eli, RNL Evr Arab I 829, fol. 31r.
5 This section draws on Nadia Vidro, 'Qaraite new moon observation in the tenth and eleventh centuries and its ritual and calendrical implications', Jewish Studies Quarterly 30/3 (2023), 259–280, especially pp. 263, 271–274. See there for references to primary sources.
6 The following discussion draws heavily on N. Vidro, ‘The medieval Qaraite calendar in the Diaspora’, Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism 22/1–2 (2022), 125–156.
7 Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, Karaite Marriage Documents from the Cairo Genizah (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 46–47, Elinoar Bareket, 'Karaite communities in the Middle East during the tenth to fifteenth centuries', A Guide to Karaite Studies: The History and Literary Sources of Medieval and Modern Karaite Judaism, ed. Meira Polliack (Boston: Brill, 2003), pp. 237–252, Zvi Ankori, Karaites in Byzantium: the formative years, 970-1100, New York: Columbia University Press, 1959, pp. 119–152.
8 See, for example, T-S 20.45, an 11th-century letter of a Byzantine Rabbanite to his brother in Egypt telling that Byzantine Qaraites received letters from Palestine that ʾaviv was not found in Nisan, so that the Qaraites intercalated the year and celebrated Passover a month later than the Rabbanites (Ankori, Karaites in Byzantium, pp. 328–336). Oxford, Bodleian Heb. b. 11.10 is a letter about the aviv sent from Jerusalem to a Qaraite leader in Fusṭāṭ, probably in 1044 (Moshe Gil, A History of Palestine, 634–1099 (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1983), vol. 2, pp. 540–543 (doc. 301).
9 Vidro, 'The medieval Qaraite calendar in the Diaspora', pp. 131–135.
10 Ankori, Karaites in Byzantium, pp. 339–344.
11 For details and primary sources, see Vidro, 'The medieval Qaraite calendar in the Diaspora', pp. 135–147.
12 For details and primary sources, Vidro, 'The medieval Qaraite calendar in the Diaspora', 147–154.
13 For Byzantium, see Ankori, Karaites in Byzantium, pp. 339–344, with examples from the second half of the 13th century onwards. For Spain, see Judah Halevi (12th c.) in Sefer ha-Kuzari III:38 (quoted in Ankori, Karaites in Byzantium, p. 345). For Babylonia, see Levi b. Yefet, Book of Commandments, RNL Evr Arab I 3920, fol. 87r. Byzantine Qaraites in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries wrote that Babylonians who had previously supported the equinox now shifted to the Rabbanite calculation (Aharon b. Elijah, Gan Eden, discourse 'On the sign by which years are divided,' chapter 2, ed. Gozlov 1864, fol. 14v, later repeated by Elijah Bashyachi (quoted in Ankori, Karaites in Byzantium, p. 304 footnote 32)). For Egypt, see, e.g. ENA NS 63.2r (after 1314 CE).
14 Vidro, 'The medieval Qaraite calendar in the Diaspora', pp. 128, 148–150.
15 Vidro, 'The medieval Qaraite calendar in the Diaspora', pp. 140–141.
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