[DESFORGES, PIERRE]. Memoires Anecdotes pour servir a l’histoire de M. Duliz, fameux Juif Portugais a La Haye

(ANGLO JUDAICA)

Samuel Harding

London (i.e. Paris?)

1739

FIRST EDITION. Title in red and black with engraved vignette. Extraordinary anti-semitic engraved frontispiece portraying an iron cage and tall gallows at the ready

Jacob Lopez de Liz was an enormously wealthy Portuguese Jew who moved to The Hague from London. His luxurious life-style, and extravagant pursual of art, music (and possibly women), resulted in wide-spread envy. This scurrilous work was penned by the manager of The Hague’s French Comedy Theater, who had been unable to stand up to the competition of a theatrical company formed by de Liz. With the notorious Jud-Süss trial and barbarous hanging having occured just a year earlier in Germany, this libelous attack suggests a similar fate for the “Dutch Jud-Süss.” See M.H. Gans, Memorbook (1971) pp.240-1; and for the de Liz Family in England, see A.M. Hyamson, The Sephardim of England (1950) pp.212-3