PRIESTLEY, JOSEPH. Letters to The Jews. * Levi, David. Letters to Dr. Priestley

(ANGLO AMERICAN JUDAICA)

J. Harrisson for B. Gomez

New York

1794

Two volumes bound in one. FIRST AMERICAN EDITIONS

Singerman 80, 82; Rosenbach 93,95

David Levi (1742-1801), English Hebraist and polemicist, was the first Jew to write, in English, polemics in defense of his fellow-Jews. In his Letters to Dr. Priestley, he rejected the attempts of the noted scholar to convert Jews to Christianity. This American edition, was printed in New York for a member of the prominent Jewish- American Gomez family, founders of New York’s Shearith Israel synagogue, and active in Jewish affairs throughout the eighteenth century. B. Gomez was in all likelihood the first Jewish bookseller in New York. See EJ, XI col. 78