Anonymous. Nouvelles Observations, Sur La Seconde Lettre de Mr. de Pinto A L’Occasion des Troubles de L’Amerique Septentrionalle.

(AMERICAN JUDAICA).

London

1776

French text.

Not in Roth nor in Szajkowski

Isaac de Pinto (1717-87), a prominent economist and Jewish apologist who debated Voltaire on the Jewish question, published a number of pamphlets in 1776 critical of the America Revolution. He feared that once independent, the American colonies would seek to take control of other European possessions in North America and thereby dominate the flow of bullion. Most of all, Pinto considered the American Revolution an uprising against basic political order. Among those who argued against Pinto’s position was the anonymous author of the present Nouvelles Observations. See Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews, 150-2. Born into a Portuguese family in Bordeaux and a resident of Holland, Pinto was “the most important Jewish literary figure who wrote in French before the revolution…he left a considerable body of work and, at least as an economist, he was far ahead of his time” (Hertzberg, 142-3)