Joseph ben Joshua HaCohen. Divrei HaYamim LeMalchei Tzarfath U’Malchei Beith Othoman HaTogar. [”History of the Kings of France and the Ottoman Turks.”]

AUCTION 64 | Thursday, March 19th, 2015 at 1:00
Fine Judaica: Books, Manuscripts, Autograph Letters, Ceremonial Objects, Maps and Graphic Art

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Lot 6
(AMERICAN JUDAICA).

Joseph ben Joshua HaCohen. Divrei HaYamim LeMalchei Tzarfath U’Malchei Beith Othoman HaTogar. [”History of the Kings of France and the Ottoman Turks.”]

<<First Edition. The Salman Schocken copy.>> Some marginalia. ff. 328. Stained in places, opening leaves with some wear expertly repaired. Modern blind-tooled calf in antique style. 12mo. Vinograd, Sabbioneta 12.

Sabbioneta: Tobias Foa 1553

Est: $20,000 - $25,000
PRICE REALIZED $20,000
<<An important and rare work of historiography with much material relating to the discovery of the New World.>> The first Hebrew book to use the word “America” to describe the New World (see ff. 154-55). This broad chronological account of Euro-Asian history, is one of the foremost productions of the Genoese Jewish scholar Joseph HaCohen (1496-1575), a native of Provence, who wrote in Voltaggio, a small village above Genoa. HaCohen was one of the few Jewish historians of the Renaissance (and later) who also focused upon non-Jewish themes. The author presents here his text on the basis of the struggle between East and West - the outcome of which depended upon the treatment of Jews by each civilization: Christian and Muslim. France represented to HaCohen the leading Western power and the Ottoman Empire the Eastern power – each, battling for supremacy. The work is divided into two parts. The first covers the period from the decline of the Roman Empire to the deaths of Maximilian I (in 1519) and Selim I (in 1520). The larger second part focuses upon the 33 years between 1520 to the year of the book’s publication. Clearly the author felt that the period he was living in was a new and significant era that had broken with the past. The book includes a lengthy account of the discovery of the New World recording recent explorations and discoveries, which in turn shone a perspective on the often negative relationship between Europe’s Jews and Christians.‑ HaCohen envisioned the settlement of newly discovered territories in the Americas as a harbinger of a new age in which social injustice and discrimination would cease to exist. See N.J. Efron, “Knowledge of Newly Discovered Lands among the Jewish Communities of Europe” in: P. Bernadini and N. Fiering (eds.), The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West 1450-1800 (2001), pp. 54-7; AJHSP, Vol. II, R. J. H. Gottheil, Columbus in Jewish Literature (1894); M.J. Heller, The Sixteenth-Century Hebrew Book, Vol. 1 (2004) p. 387.