The Calendar and the Karaite Community of Cairo: New Evidence from the Early Fifteenth Century

One of the most salient medieval Qaraite practices was fixing the calendar by observation of natural phenomena. Qaraites set months by sighting the new moon and intercalated years on the basis of the state of ripeness of barley crops in Palestine. This system was in place by the 9th century at the latest and continued to be used by the Qaraites of Palestine, Egypt and Syria throughout the Mamluk and into the Ottoman period.

Multiple Qaraite treatises on the calendar establish the biblical foundations of the empirical calendar and discuss contradictory opinions on how to regulate it. In contrast, documentary evidence of empirical calendation is scarce making it difficult to learn how it was performed in practice. Particularly poorly documented are processes in the community by which calendar decisions were made on the basis of observations. A unique document that throws some light on such processes is a Qaraite calendar report for 1421/22 CE fragmentarily preserved in the Firkovitch Collection, Russian National Library. A controversy broke out in Cairo about how to interpret the results of a barley investigation. When reporting on this controversy, the anonymous author described in an unusual detail communal procedures involved in sending messengers to Palestine, receiving and reading their reports, and making calendrical decisions on the reports’ basis. He also provided information on the fixing of Nisan by lunar observation and on some historical events that took place in Cairo in the spring of 1421 CE.

In this talk I will present the Qaraite calendar report for 1421/22 CE, which was never previously discussed in the scholarly literature, and will contextualise the findings by comparing the report with earlier and contemporary calendar documents as well as with Qaraite theoretical works on the subject.