Defence of the Old Testament to Thomas Paine…, A.
A Jewish Scholar Attacks Paine’s The Age Of Reason:
Published By A Young Jewish-American Bookseller
A Remarkable Copy
[Judaica]. Levi, David. A Defence of the Old Testament, in a Series of Letters, addressed to Thomas Paine… New York: Printed by William A. Davis for Naphtali Judah, Bookseller, 1797.
12mo.; endpapers lightly stained; contemporary tree sheep, leather label. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First edition of this tract written by English Hebraist and polemicist David Levi (1740-1799), preceding all English editions by a number of years. Evans 32376; Rosenbach 114; DNB. A Defence is a continuation of a dialogue begun when, in 1787, Levi replied to Dr. Joseph Priestly‘s Letters to the Jews which invited Jews to consider the merits of Christianity. When Priestly acknowledged Levi’s reply in a second volume of Letters, Levi responded with A Defence in 1789, answering other queries generated by his first Letters to Dr. Priestly, as well. Levi was the first Jew to write, in English, polemics in defense of Jews and Judaism, and took up the mantle with enthusiasm: during the years that followed he produced Letters to Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, M.P. as well as A Defence, of which several editions in both the States and England were produced. This first edition was published and sold by Naphtali Judah (1774-1855), one of only two eighteenth-century Jewish publishers in America. Judah and Benjamin Gomez, the best-known “booksellers and printers in eighteenth-century New York” with publishing interests, were “businessmen rather than publishers, employing printers to do their work” (A History of Book Publishing in the United States, vol. 1, 468). As Judah was only 23 at the time of publication, A Defence was surely one of his earliest endeavors, and though the number of copies printed is unrecorded, it surely must have been small, 500 or fewer.
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