The Form of Prayers According to the Custom of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews.
Inscribed To Rebecca Seixas
[Judaica] Leeser, Isaac. Form of Prayers According to the Custom of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews. Volume Sixth. Fast Day Service. Edited, and with former translations carefully compared and corrected, by Isaac Leeser, reader of the congregation Mikveh Israel of Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Haswell, Barrington, and Haswell, 5598 [1837].
8vo.; Hebrew and English on facing pages; few pages lightly foxed; contemporary bookplate on front endpaper (Charles Shulman); full tan morocco, leather spine labels stamped in gilt; worn.
First edition of this significant translation, one of Leeser’s earliest works. A presentation copy, inscribed to the wife of Isaac Leeser’s mentor: Rebecca S. Seixas/ New York/ Presented to her /by the / Author. Rebecca Seixas was the wife of Isaac Benjamin Seixas (1781-1839), an early mentor of Leeser. Leeser met Seixas when he moved to Richmond, Virginia, from Germany, in 1824. Seixas quickly recognized the young German’s potential and, serving the Beth Shalom Synagogue as a hazan at the time, schooled Leeser in the Sephardic rite. Leeser’s interest and desire to publish this translation of a Sephardic text can be linked back to his early days with Seixas. Leeser stayed in Richmond for five years, serving his synagogue as a hazan, before he moved to Philadelphia.
This rare presentation copy documents the closeness of the Jewish American community in the early ninetieth century, when fewer than 7,000 Jews resided in the United States. In Form of Prayers According to the Custom of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews links the Sephardic community, from which this texts originates, and the Ashkenazi community, to which Leeser belonged. It appeared several years before Leeser’s first American translation of the Hebrew Bible in 1845; and decades before he co-founded the Jewish Publication Society of America, in 1888.
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