EFES DAMIM. A series of Conversations at Jerusalem between a patriarch of the Greek church and a chief Rabbi of the Jews concerning the malicious charge against the Jews of using Christian blood. By J. B. Levinsohn. Translated from the Hebrew as a tribute to the memory of the martyrs at Damascus by Dr. L[ouis] Loewe, member of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, of the Asiatic Society at Paris, Oriental linguist to his royal highness the Duke of Sussex, and author of the "Origin of the Egyptian Language," and of "Letters from the East." London, 1841

Levinsohn, J. L [Levinsohn, Isaac Baer, 1788-1860. ]., by; Loewe, Dr. L[ouis] (1809-1888), translated by

Verlag: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, London, England, 1841

Beschreibung

xvi, 208 pages. 23 x 15 cm. Signed dedication by the translator, Dr. Louis Loewe, to "his eternal friend Ed. J. Andrews Esquire." A few penciled notations that can easily be erased, but have been left here since they enhance and do not detract. Newly bound in quarter leather with gilt lettering and marbled boards. Isaac Ber Levinsohn is one of the founders of the Haskalah in Russia. A child prodigy, he began heder at the age of three and composed a Kabalistic work at the age of nine. At ten, Levinsohn was versed in Talmudic lore, and knew the Hebrew Bible by heart. He mastered the Russian language, an unusual achievement for a Russian Jew of that time. From 1813 to 1820 Levinsohn lived in Eastern Galicia, where he was befriended by such leaders of the Haskalah as Nahman Krochmal, Isaac Erter, Joseph Perl, and S. J. Rapoport. From 1820 to 1823 he spread the ideas of the Haskalah as a private tutor in wealthy homes in Berdichev and other towns. He attempted to persuade the Russian authorities to mitigate the persecution of the Jews and to introduce reforms in the spirit of the Haskalah, including a plan for agricultural settlement of Jews. It was on his advice that the Russian authorities limited the number of Hebrew printing presses to three: Warsaw and Vilna in 1836, and Zhitomir in 1846 and imposed censorship on imported Hebrew books. In 1856, the Russian government decided to support him by buying 2,000 copies of his book Beit Yehudah and distributing them to synagogues and Jewish schools. Levinsohn's literary work was mainly polemical and propagandistic. He published the first Hebrew grammar for Russians in 1817. Levinsohn wrote satires against Hasidim and their zaddikim. His most influential work is Te'udah beYisrael, which is severely critical of traditional Hadarim which he calls "Hadrei mavet" (rooms of death) and opposes their Talmudic-centered curriculum, as well as the use of Yiddish, favoring instead its replacement by "pure" German or Russian. In his second major work, Beit Yehudah (Vilna, 1838) Levinsohn, who follows Moses Mendelssohn's Jerusalem, purports to reply to 35 questions asked by "the great Christian nobleman Emanuel Lipen" (the name is a scramble of the Hebrew letters Peloni Almoni, concerning the nature of the Commandments, the Talmud, the Karaites, the Pharisees, the Zohar, Shabbateanism, Hasidism, and poses the question: "Is there still hope to reform the House of Israel and how?" His contemporaries called him the Russian Mendelssohn. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 007470

Bibliografische Details

Titel: EFES DAMIM. A series of Conversations at ...

Verlag: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, London, England

Erscheinungsdatum: 1841

Einband: Hardcover

Zustand: Very Good

Signiert: by translator