Douglass & Aikman’s Almanack and Register for the Island of Jamaica: Calculated for the Year of our Lord 1781, From the Creation of the World, 5785, And of the Julian Period, 6494

(AMERICAN JUDAICA).

Douglas & Aikman, Printers to the Kings Most Excellent Majesty

Kingston, Jamaica,

[1780]

No copy located in Library of Congress, Harvard, JTSA or NYPL

An Early Specimen of Hebrew Type in the Western Hemisphere. This almanac contains a “Kalendar of Months Sabbaths and Holy Days, the Hebrews or Jews observe & keep. For the Years 5541 and 5542 of the Creation” (p. 17). The names of the Jewish holidays and new months are listed in English and Hebrew type. Jamaican almanacs included a Jewish calendar (English only) as early as 1776, which “would seem to be an indication of the importance of Jewish residents in the eyes of Christian Jamaicans” (See B. W. Korn, The Haham DeCordova of Jamaica in: American Jewish Archives 18.2 [Nov. 1966], 141n2). The first almanac to list the holidays and new months in Hebrew type was Ann Woodland’s almanac, issued in 1779 in Kingston. These Jamaican calendars contain the earliest appearance of Hebrew type in the Western hemisphere in a publication intended for Jews. (Earlier works with Hebrew type, such as Judah Monis’s Hebrew grammar, were intended for Gentile audiences.) Freiman and Rosenfeld were both unaware of these calendars and they erroneously record later Kingston imprints as the first with Hebrew print on the island. The first book published for the Jews of North America containing Hebrew type was not issued until almost four decades later (Singerman 289) and the first Hebrew calendar on the continent was not printed until 1851 (Singerman S463)!