A Jew’s Guide to New Year’s Eve
The Sacred, the Secular, and the Silly
This light-hearted essay aimed to entertain readers of The American Interest when it was first published in electronic-only format on December 31, 2013 (and then reposted on December 31, 2018 and 2019 as directed by the publisher). It also contains some stealth historical information I thought might interest or rub off on some readers. I have slightly edited it for The Raspberry Patch, adding a subtitle, too, since the Substack format asks for one.
I am doing this because I sort of like the essay, and because, with TAI now several years defunct and its vestigial website useless for searching the archive, Substack is a means to spread the cheer to those who likely have not known of its existence—for whatever that might be worth.
Finally by way of introduction, I anticipate a question: “Can I read this if I’m not Jewish?” Answer: Sure, by all means; but caveat lector: Some sentences may not go down all that easy.
A Jew’s Guide to New Year’s Eve
It’s one thing to be a Jew on Christmas in a majority-Christian land like the United States, an incongruity made famous (infamous?) in recent pop culture all the way from Adam Sandler songs to South Park episodes. But it’s another to be a Jew on New Year’s Eve. Pop culture offers little, all the way to nothing, to help on that score. So here’s a modest attempt to fill that yawning empty space.
As everyone here in the U.S. of A. knows, the evening of December 31 is New Year’s Eve. And that’s right, if one reckons by the common solar calendar, used virtually worldwide these days thanks to the antique successes of European imperialism. And the coming year is 2025. But why is December 31 New Year’s Eve, and why is the next year the number 2025?
If you’re like most normal Americans, historically oblivious and proud of it, this question simply does not come up. If by chance or accident it ever does, the most popular answer is easy to predict: “It’s New Year’s Eve on December 31 because it just is and always has been, and the year ahead is 2025 because it follows 2024, you big dummy—…..what the deuce are you talking about?”
Well, OK—and I’ve been called much worse than “big dummy.” Those folks can get to work mixing this evening’s punch; but for you, dear reader, just a moment’s reflection can convince even the preternaturally uncurious that, no, it hasn’t always been this way, “always” being a pretty long time when pointed backwards as well as forwards. So here’s the story, briefly rendered.
In 46 or 45 BCE—historians seem not quite sure….a calendar problem about a calendar problem, imagine that…..—the Roman Emperor of that day, Julius Caesar, when he wasn’t busy inventing new kinds of salads and salad dressings, established January 1 as New Year’s Day even as he introduced a calendar far more accurate than the one Rome had been using up to that point. The old calendar, attributed by mythic tradition to Rome’s founder Romulus, had only 304 days, divided among only ten months, from March to December. The first four months were named after gods, Martius, Aprilis, Maius, and Iunius; then the Romans of that time apparently experience a deity shortage and were forced to name the other six months Quintilis (fifth), Sextilis (sixth, so not what you thought, you pervert), September (seventh), October (eighth), November (ninth), and December (tenth). The 61 days of what later became January and February were left to fend for themselves unnamed and unnumbered through the winter, left by the superstitious Romans as a kind of temporal offering to sate the maws of the vengeful ghosts of drought, famine, disease, and death. And that’s not the only bizarre thing they did to ward off otherworldly dangers—like the ritual butchering of goats and dogs, for example—but we’ll not go into that lest children, other innocents, and already somewhat disturbed people may be upset by what they learn.
Now, it is true that Numa Pompilius, Rome’s king in the mid-5th century BCE, had devised a much better calendar, with 355 days and with January—named after the Roman god of doors and gates, Janus, who had two faces, one looking forward and one looking backward—as its first month and its first day marking the new year. This was a terrific idea. Problem was, however, that no one seemed to pay any attention to it, and the reason, in part at least, is that January first, then and ever since, corresponds to nothing special astronomically or otherwise. Life being what it is, people can stand only so much artificial randomness; so Romans continued to mark the new year at the vernal equinox, like pretty much everyone else in the northern hemisphere. Some six centuries later, after Rome had expanded from a medium sized city to a major empire, Caesar reintroduced Numa Pompilius’s calendar, slightly amended, again with January as the first month and January 1 as new year’s day. With Roman administrative duties expanded and its efficiencies much improved, with more lands needing a fuller calendar to mark times for planting and harvesting in different parts of the realm, and with Caesar’s far greater authority to issue diktats, collect taxes, make war, and so forth, this time Roman calendar reform stuck.
It stuck so well that, before very long, Roman pagans began marking December 31 eve with drunken orgies. They rationalized their debauchery by claiming that it constituted a solemn re-enactment of the chaotic void—ανδρελομοσία in the original Greek, אַנְדַּרְלָמוּסְיָה as taken into Hebrew, androlamusya in transliteration into the Roman alphabet—that existed before the gods brought order to the cosmos. Even way back then, people invented improbable but attention-arresting excuses to party hard and have sex with people whose names seemed not to be particularly important at the time. It’s good to know that some things don’t change.
But December 31/January 1 did not remain the start of the year for long. (And never mind for now how the Romans numbered their years; Julius Caesar obviously didn’t think it was 46 BCE in 46 BCE! To figure out how and why we will number the onrushing year 2025, we would need to go back to a guy named the Venerable Bede in 8th-century Britain, and we certainly don’t want to do anything like that just in advance of party time, do we?)
Anyway, as Christianity spread, and then became the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380 (Constantine allowed the toleration of Christianity in 313, but it was left to Emperor Theodosius to do the deed for which Constantine is often credited), pagan holidays were either incorporated in a new guise into the Christian calendar or abandoned. In the case of January 1, it was incorporated, very conveniently becoming Western Christianity’s Festival of the Circumcision.[1]
Yes, that’s right, if you count inclusively from December 25 to January 1 you get eight, as in the eight days of circumcision. That January 1 would be the day of Jesus’ brit milah was painfully obvious to 4th-century Christians. January 1 thus became an important day in early Christianity, but not as New Year’s Day. The Festival of the Circumcision came to symbolize the triumphal rise and reign of Christianity and the would-be death of Judaism—the supersession of the Church over the Jews as God’s chosen people. By the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325, this interpretation was standard fare and was formally ratified theologically at that Council.
Now, it so happens that the Pope at the time, whose name was Sylvester (285-335), convinced Constantine to prohibit Jews from living in Jerusalem. At the Council of Nicaea, too, Sylvester promulgated a host of other new anti-Semitic legislation, mainly, it seems, because the pesky Jews insisted on remaining pesky Jews. Sylvester became a saint in the Church for this and other achievements, and his Saint’s Day is, you guessed it, December 31. (This is probably because he died on December 31, in the year 335.)
Israelis today call the secular New Year’s Eve revelries “Sylvester.” It is a curious custom since Sylvester was sort of an ass from a Jewish point of view, and since in many places in medieval Europe the night of December 31 was sometimes reserved for synagogue and Hebrew book burnings, torture, and standard-issue murder-for-sport. Most likely the term was imported more or less thoughtlessly from East/Central Europe, from whence many Zionist pioneers came, where the term is still used for that purpose in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary—majority-Catholic Central and East European countries, in other words.
But already by that time, as I have suggested, January 1 was not New Year’s Day anymore. That connection was still associated with Caesar’s pagan Rome, and Christians sought to separate themselves from that presumably unenlightened, pre-Gospel, pre-Christian time. So Christian Europe regarded March 25, Annunciation Day, as the beginning of the year. That made practical marketing sense because it was near the vernal equinox, the New Year for many of the European tribes the Church in those days sought to convert.
The one main exception, starting in the 11th century, was England. William the Conqueror was crowned King of England on December 25, 1066, and at that time (his transition team was very efficient) he decreed that January 1 should once again be the New Year. He thus ensured that, with Jesus’ birthday aligning with his coronation, Jesus’ circumcision would start the New Year and symbolize the supersession of the Normans over the earlier Saxon inhabitants of Britain. He tried, in other words, to make the calendar of Christian Norman England align with his personal biography.
This was very clever, but William’s innovation eventually lost favor. England’s Catholic clergy in due course realigned English custom to fit with that of the rest of the Christian West. March 25 it was to mark the New Year, and there it remained for several centuries.
Then, in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII moved it back to January 1. As with Caesar, the occasion was the introduction of a new calendar, the eponymous Gregorian one still in general use today. The problem with the Julian calendar, as is well known, is that its slight inaccuracy caused Easter to creep too far back from the vernal equinox, at the rate of about one day per century. That creep had amounted to fourteen days by the time Gregory became Pope. That really screwed up the religious calendar and everyone’s general sense of right-fittedness, for you’ll be wanting lilies and daffodils blooming on Easter, not a foot of snow on the ground.
Pope Gregory XIII based his new calendar on the day 1,257 years earlier when the aforementioned Council of Nicaea convened on the vernal equinox: March 21, 325. Otherwise, in the Julian calendar the vernal equinox in 1582 would have fallen on March 11, way off from where the sun and stars were supposed to be for an equinox. So Gregory kicked the calendar ahead ten days, turning the day after October 4, 1582 into October 15, 1582, and January 1 again became the New Year because, apparently, Gregory thought the New Year should start on the first day of some month, not the 25th day. (Must have been anal retentive……)
Except in England and, by extension, in its colonies. The English resisted the change, not because they were still ticked at William the Conqueror’s vanity, but for reasons having to do with the still young and feisty Reformation, whose clerical leaders thought it apposite to resist Papal authority in all things. The Gregorian calendar did not win adoption in England, and hence here in North America, until 1752, and oh-gosh-and-golly what a mess that caused.
As one can learn from Ben Franklin’s Almanac of that time, to get the math to work out, 1751 consisted of only 282 days, from March 25 to December 31. The year 1752 began on January 1, but January 1 had to be advanced 10 days to catch up with the Gregorian count, so 1752 had only 355 days. This must be the origin of the wild drunkenness we often witness in Britain and North America on New Year’s Eve: How else was a person to cope with such disturbing, disorienting stuff? (Nota bene: This explanation does not apply to the Irish.)
What does this have to do with the Jews? Well, back on New Year’s Day 1577 the selfsame Pope Gregory decreed that all Roman Jews must attend a Catholic conversion sermon given in Roman synagogues after Friday night Sabbath services. The penalty for skipping out was death. Then, on New Year’s Day of the next year, the Pope signed a law forcing Jews to pay for a “House of Conversion” whose purpose was to convert Jews to Roman Catholicism lest, Heaven forfend, they convert instead to a Protestantism then very much on the make.
The House of Conversion idea did not work out as well as the Pope had hoped, so on New Year’s Day 1581 he ordered the confiscation without remuneration of all the Roman Jewish community’s Hebrew scrolls and books. That provoked a fair bit of violence; the Jews took it in the neck as usual, when, virtually unarmed, they faced a vastly superior state-backed force.
* * *
Does any of this matter anymore? Few Jews know this history, whether they live in Israel, America, or somewhere else. They don’t associate their own natural use of the Gregorian calendar with its inventor’s rather unfriendly attitude toward their forebears. Very few non-Jews in the United States and Canada associate New Year’s Eve with Pope Sylvester or with the Festival of the Circumcision, or know that January 1 became New Year’s Day in British North America only in 1752. Indeed, most Americans presume that the whole shebang is wholly secular in nature, having nothing to do with any church calendar (Catholic and Anglican, anyway) going back some 1,700 years. Well, duh: Did either Guy Lombardo or Dick Clark seem like a religious type of person to you?
Except that, as ought by now to be clear, New Year’s origins linked to January 1 very much do go back to church calendars, and to Roman pagan calendars before it, as well. Besides, if the dates for New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day really were secular in origin, they could not be much older than a few centuries; in other words, not older than the notion of secularism itself. That surely throws the “always” premise into question, doesn’t it? (No, I’m not calling you Shirley; knock it off.)
And that is not quite all. The New Year’s resolutions thing a lot of people do, so where does that come from? It almost certainly comes from a religious calendar: ours, the Jewish lunar calendar. What do observant Jews do on the High Holy Days, from the first to the tenth of the month of Tishrei? We say penitential prayers, we introspect about how we can gain atonement for our sins and become better people in the next year. We resolve, in other words, to do better. That has got to be the source of our secular new year’s resolution tradition, shoved from September/October to the end of December, only made more ecumenical, more matter-of-factly materialist, less deeply ethical in focus, than the original model.
It all comes down to this: If you would join in the revelries of New Year’s Eve, you could, if you had a mind to, justify doing it for any number of historically appropriate reasons. You can do it because of the Roman gods turning chaos to cosmos—perfect for pagans. You can do it in memory of Pope Sylvester—just right for anti-Semites. You can do it to commemorate William the Conqueror—tailor-made for Anglophiles. You can do it to mark the advent of Pope Gregory’s much improved calendar—terrific for math/science/astronomy buffs. You can do it to celebrate Jesus’ bris—my personal favorite. Or you can do it just because it’s a convenient pretext to get hammered—most everyone else’s favorite, judging by appearances…… So I hope you don’t have to drive to a party this evening, because it’s amateurs’ night.
Whatever your reasons, stay safe, and Happy New Year 2025! It’s very likely to be a helluva year. [Update, December 27, 2025: It was.]
[1] In the Eastern rite it is January 2, the reason for the distinction not being particular germane to this discussion.