SPONSORED BY SIR MOSES MONTEFIORE
GOODMAN, Tobias, Rabbi.
[Emunat Yisrael] אמונת ישראל. The Faith of Israel, selected from the Writings of the most eminent Divine Philosophers and Commentators …
London, [John Wertheimer for] the author, 1834.
8vo, pp. [iv], vii, 228; some offset from place-marker to pp. 112–117; otherwise a handsome copy in contemporary straight-grained red morocco, gilt border of hops, board edges and turn-ins roll-tooled in gilt, flat spine richly gilt in compartments, edges gilt, blue silk place-marker, moiré endpapers; upper inner hinge cracked, light wear to corners and joints, small chip at head.
Added to your basket:
[Emunat Yisrael] אמונת ישראל. The Faith of Israel, selected from the Writings of the most eminent Divine Philosophers and Commentators …
First and only edition in book form of an 1819 sermon given by Rabbi Tobias Goodman, thought to have been the first to have delivered a sermon in English in a British synagogue, our copy from the Rothschild Library at Exbury House, Hampshire.
Goodman’s sermon on the death of Princess Charlotte of Wales in 1817 is the first Jewish sermon printed in English; his Faith of Israel sermon, delivered two years later at Liverpool’s Seel Street Synagogue and published as a twenty-page pamphlet in the same year, was intended to ‘rescue the sacred words of God from the attacks of the enemies of Holy Scripture and Revelation’. He expanded his sermon over the course of several years and its publication in book form was sponsored twenty-five years later by Sir Moses Montefiore (1784–1885) and Lady Judith Montefiore (1784–1862, née Barent Cohen), to whom the book is dedicated. The resulting work is both an educational textbook of sorts and a defence of the Jewish faith from Christians (Goodman was an outspoken opponent of the evangelical London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews) and the then-nascent Reform movement.
Provenance: from the Rothschild library at Exbury House; Exbury House had been acquired in 1919 by Major Lionel Nathan de Rothschild (1882–1942), grandson of Baron Lionel Nathan de Rothschild, the first Jewish MP.
