Price Library of Judaica Calendar Collection

The majority of calendars in the collection are small-size pocket calendars (even if their title does not suggest so).They could be easily carried around and the user could even add notes (and at the designated space, telephone numbers). The yahrzeit calendars enable the user to calculate and record future anniversaries by indicating the corresponding Gregorian dates that each year would be different, given the asynchrony between the Hebrew and Gregorian calendar. The nineteenth-century German yearbooks, the Uruguayan Yiddish-Spanish almanacs, and the Dutch almanacs included in the collection shed light on the broader cultural and intellectual atmosphere in which the potential users of these calendars lived. They include studies, essays, and shorter informational writings about Jewish history, Judaism, and Jewish organizations. The advertisements placed in the Uruguayan almanacs depict the material and organizational structure of Jewish life in Montevideo. As these Almanacs record Uruguayan national holidays, printed almost a century earlier, the Yearbook for Israelites for 5607 indicates Protestant and Catholic holidays and important dates and phrases pertaining to time keeping in other countries, such as the names of the months in France. It also features shorter writings by the German rabbi and scholar Ludwig Phillipson, the renowned bibliographer and historian Moritz Steinschneider, the German Jewish historian Isaak Marcus Jost, and the Hungarian rabbi and Leopold Löw. They and the other authors featured in the yearbook were leading Jewish intellectuals of the era, many of them associated with the international scholarly movement, Wissenschaft des Judentums (Jewish scholarship). Poems in German are also included. The 1852 calendar includes some handwritten notes.

The Calendar collection demonstrates changing views of time in different Jewish communities and the practices and ideas associated with time keeping in different Jewish cultures.