(NIETO, DAVID).

An anonymously penned response by the celebrated Haham of London to a vicious sermon preached before the sixty-six miserable victims of an auto-da-fé held in Lisbon in 1705. The brutal tirade was delivered by Dom Diogo da Annunciacoa Justiniano, the titular Archbishop of Cranganor, India. Upon it’s publication, Nieto was moved to provide a fitting response to the Archbishop’s misuse of Jewish sources in attempting to prove the truth of Christianity. Nieto’s brilliant response is one of cool, clear-headed theological scholarship. An enterprise necessitated by the relentless pressure exerted by the Inquisition upon the Marranos of Portugal, which was a painful and ongoing problem of 18th century Jewish life. The Haham’s Spanish reply was issued together with the original Portuguese sermon of 1705. Moses Mocatta produced an English translation of this celebrated work in 1845, which Isaac Leeser published in Philadelphia in 1860. After noting just two copies of Nieto’s refutation extant, both in private hands, Israel Solomons records that “not a single copy is known to exist in any public library.” (See JHSET, Vol. XII pp. 1-99, esp. p. 55). See also H.P. Salomon, New Light on the Portuguese Inquisition: The Second Reply to the Archbishop of Cranganor, in: Studia Rosenthaliana, Vol. V, no. 2 (1971) pp. 178-86.