Letters to the Jews, 2nd UK AND 1st US in one slipcase.
First Jewish Publication In America
[Judaica]. (Gomez, Benjamin). Priestley, Joseph. Letters to the Jews; Inviting them to an amicable discussion of the evidences of Christianity.
Bound together, as issued, with:
(Levi, David). Letters to Dr. Priestley, in answer to those he addressed to the Jews…, New York: Printed by J. Harrison for B. Gomez Bookseller and Stationer, 1794.
8vo.; ownership signature on title page; autograph emendations of broken type throughout; brown calf, spine stamped in gilt.
First edition of the first book published in the United States by a Jew. The publisher, Benjamin Gomez (1769-1828), apparently also carries the distinction of being the first Jewish bookseller in New York, though 18th-century American commercial records are too spotty to allow for such a designation without some qualification. Of the books he brought out under his imprint, twenty-one are known. UJE finds Pilgrim’s Progress (1794), The Sorrows of Werther (1796), James Cook’s Voyages (1796), and an abridged Robinson Crusoe (1795) especially noteworthy, and adds that Naphtali Judah, “New York’s second Jewish bookseller, shared some of Gomez’ later imprints” (UJE 5.50). Letters to the Jews was prepared from the revised second English edition (a copy of which is also present), and collects Priestley’s five letters with Levi’s two replies—“Of the present dispersion of the Jewish nation” and “Of the divine Mission of Christ compared with that of Moses,” and includes a separate title page for Levi’s texts. Singerman 0080.
Priestley (1733-1804) is most famous for his discovery of oxygen, but he was a man of God as well as science. In his youth he served as a Presbyterian pastor in several English churches but rejected orthodox Calvinism in favor of Unitarianism. He was a nonconformist in politics as well, standing firmly with the abolitionist and anti-imperial factions in English politics. It is difficult to say how Priestley’s Jewish readers received his pleas for ecumenical solidarity; his ideas certainly didn’t play too well to his Christian readers. His 1782 History of the Corruptions of Christianity was officially burned in 1785, and in 1791 a Church and King mob sacked his house and burned his library and laboratory. He fled to the United States, where rationalist friends like Thomas Jefferson welcomed him with open arms to a new home in Northumberland Pennsylvania in 1794—the same year the Priestley-Levi volume appeared in the United States. The pro-French Jeffersonians also used him as a propaganda tool, citing his case as an illustration of the anti-democratic depths to which the denizens of Albion had sunk.
David Levi’s (1740-1799) career was even more eclectic than Priestley’s: his parents hoped he would become a rabbi, but their economic circumstances forced them to apprentice him to a shoemaker. He later worked as a hatter before settling at last into the printer’s trade. All the while he continued to teach himself Hebrew and write prolifically. His first publication was entitled A Succinct Account of the Rites and Ceremonies of the Jews, in which their Religious Principles and Tenets are Explained, particularly the Doctrines of the Resurrection, Predestination, and Free Will, and the opinion of Dr. Humphrey Prideaux concerning these Tenets refuted (1783). He went on to produce a new translation of the Pentateuch for synagogue use (1787); of the Sephardic liturgy (6 volumes, 1789-93); and the Ashkenzai (1794-96). From 1785-87, he published in weekly parts Lingua Sacra, a Hebrew grammar, complete with a Hebrew-English dictionary and a commentary in English. The finished work ultimately filled three unwieldy volumes on which he had labored, at one point during the process, 16 hours a day. His response to Priestley is the first instance of a Jew defending his faith in English polemical literature. Three years after this work appeared, he answered Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason (1797) with his A Defens
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