How Did Jewish Women Know When To Light Shabbat Candles in the 18th C.?

(Please click on any image to enlarge.)

In today’s age we are extremely punctilious when it comes to various zemanim (assigned times). Take Shabbat, for example—we begin and end at a precise minute, and one that varies from week to week. I always wondered, however, exactly how did people know when to light Shabbat candles in an era before clocks and watches were household items. I assume most people did not own a sundial and you can’t always rely on the skies. So how did they know it was 4:53 pm and time to light the candles? Or that the eighteen minutes were up and you had to park your horse and walk home?

A few years ago I discovered the answer of how they knew the difference between 4:53 and 5:07.

Answer: they couldn’t tell the difference.

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A calendar with corresponding civil and Jewish dates is an essential household and congregational item as Jewish holidays and observances fall on different civil dates each year. It is thus no surprise that the second book published for American Jewry was Moses Lopez’s fifty-four-year calendar (1806).*
Among the supplementary matter is a table (no. 8) to determine “the Hour to commence the Sabbath, in the City New-York,” which “may, with a small variation, answer well for all the Northern States of America.” It was originally compiled in 1759 by Joseph Jeshurun Pinto, the hazzan (leader) of New York’s Cong. Shearith Israel.** Note how inexact the times are (right-side page)!
One might be tempted to conclude that the crudeness of the calendar is due to the fact that it was produced by a frontier community whose members were incapable of calculating a more precise table. In fact, the schedule prepared by Pinto remained the standard one for all American Jews—Sephardim, Central Europeans and East Europeans alike—into the twentieth century.

When Isaac Leeser commenced publication of his monthly Occident and American Jewish Advocate in 1843, he included a Jewish calendar. Although it was prepared for publication by the Jacob Ezekiel of Richmond, the Sabbath times (in the third column) are identical to those established by Pinto. (Pinto is not acknowledged here). This schedule continued to appear in the Occident’s calendars until it ceased publication in 1869 (neither Pinto nor Ezekiel were acknowledged after 1843).
(Note that Leeser distinguished between the starting times according to "Minhag Sephardim" and "German Jews"?)

Eleven years after the Occident first appeared, Leeser heralded the publication of A Jewish Calendar for Fifty Years in a book review, noting that it “has been looked for by many for some time past with anxiety, the old book of Mr. Moses Lopez, of Newport, being long since inaccessible, besides its time being nearly run out.”***
This 1854 calendar indicates that Pinto's schedule was still in force, at it was included in the in the communal register section in the synagogue listings of the two co-authors (New York's Shearith Israel, where Lyons ministered, and Montreal's Shearith Israel, where de Sola was the leader.)
(There is one minor difference in the dates of the schedule as used by the two congregations.)

I’ve seen dozens of Jewish calendars published between 1854 and the close of the century, and all (perhaps with one exception*****) continued to use Pinto’s schedule (without any attribution). Some calendars used the the times, but paired them with a lectionary rather than with Gregorian dates.
And just one more thing: that ubiquitous Sabbath schedule prepared by Pinto may have been more (or worse) than imprecise. According to the “official” history of Shearith Israel:

The calendar by which to this day [1955!] the congregation [Shearith Israel] sets the time of its Sabbath eve services was drawn up by him in an approximate adaptation of the calendar used in the parent congregation in Amsterdam. He was neither an astronomer, however, nor even a geographer, and the times set in his calendar not infrequently vary rather widely from the times of sunset in New York.

(For more history/bibliography posts, click here.)
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* I have been unable to identify this Moses Lopez. There is a Moses Lopez (nephew of Aaron Lopez) who moved to New York in 1822 and is remembered as “the last Jew of Newport,” but it is not known whether these two individuals are really one and the same. Note that Lopez who moved to New York was described as mathematician in Edward Peterson, History of Rhode Island (New York: John S. Taylor, 1853), 181-82.

** On Pinto, who should not be confused with Isaac Pinto (author of the “Pinto Prayer Book”), see H. P. Salomon, “Joseph Jeshurun Pinto (1729-1782): A Dutch Hazzan in Colonial New York,” Studia Rosenthaliana 13.1 (Jan. 1979), 18-29. He was the author of the first Jewish publication in America (click here).

*** Occident 12.6 (Sep. 1854), 320. The calendar was printed in Montreal, but in the particular copy pictured here a Bloch label was pasted over the original imprint information. The volume contained the first (?) detailed description of the Jewish calendar in English and the first communal register of American Jewry.

**** David and Tamar de Sola Pool, An Old Faith in the New World: Portrait of Shearith Israel, 1654-1954 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 165.

***** I think I may have seen one calendar with more specific Shabbat times, but I am unable to recall the particular edition.