contemporary Near Eastern calendars—represented perhaps a deliberate at-
tempt to distinguish themselves from the culture of the Roman Empire and its
Julian calendar (Stern 2001: 45). It is also important, however, to distinguish
the Diaspora from Judaea/Palestine. In Judaea/Palestine, where the Jewish
calendar seems to have been used as official calendar in all areas of public
life, it may be possible to interpret the Jewish calendar, similarly to the lunar
calendars of the cities of Greece in the Roman period, as a subtle (if illusory)
statement of political autonomy (more on this below). In the Diaspora, where
Jewish calendars did not have any official status and where the contrast with
Julian or Julianized calendars would have been more conspicuous and imme-
diate, the dissident, subversive character of Jewish calendars—even if confined
to cultic, religious life—is likely have been more pronounced.
One feature of Diaspora Jewish calendars which points perhaps in the
direction of subversiveness is their tendency towards appropriation from
other calendars and their subsequent hybridity—which, as explained earlier
in this chapter (near n. 9), can be effective strategies of dissidence. This
tendency is apparent at least in two sources from late Antiquity, which
I shall now examine in turn: the document of the Council of Serdica and the
Catania inscription.
As mentioned above, the Council of Serdica document of 343CEpresents a
continuous list of Jewish Passover dates for a 16-year period, alongside a list of
Christian Easter dates. According to this list, Passover only occurred in the
month of March (or‘Dystros’, identical with March in the calendar of Anti-
och), sometimes long before the equinox, in contrast to the Christian Easter
which had to occur after the equinox and therefore often fell in April (Xanthi-
kos). This apparent‘rule of March’on the Jewish side, i.e. use of the Julian
month of March as the criterion for determining the date of Passover and thus
governing the intercalation, set the Jewish calendar clearly apart from the
Christian Easter, but at the same time—paradoxically—made it closely depen-
dent on the Julian (or Antiochene) calendar.^121
The dependence of the Jewish Passover, in this document, on the Julian or
Antiochene calendar is further exemplified by the scheme that seems to have
been employed for the determination of its dates: this scheme, which could be
called–11/+19, consists in deducting every year 11 days from the previous
Passover’s Julian date, except in an intercalated year when instead 19 days are
added (and Passover is thus prevented from falling back into February). To
(^121) Stern (2001) 74–9, 124–32. On the calendar of Antioch, see Ch. 5. For possible reasons
why Dystros might have been associated here with Passover, even though it was the following
month, Xanthikos, that was normally equated with the month of Nisan (the Passover month) in
post-Seleucid calendars (see Ch. 5, Table 5. 2), see Stern (2001) 78–9, and note also that in the
5th-c.CEfastiof Polemius Silvius, March/Distros is equated with the Hebrew Nisan (Degrassi
1963: 263–76, Salzman 1990: 242–6, and Lehoux 2007: 161–2 with text and translation on 311
and 324).
Dissidence and Subversion 337