(MOSES MENDES SEIXAS). (BIBLE, Hebrew). Tikun Sopherim

(AMERICAN JUDAICA)

for Samuel Rodrigues Mendes, Moses Sarfati and David Gomes da Silva

Amsterdam

1726

Six volumes (Five Books of Moses and Book of Haphtaroth). THE MOSES M. SEIXAS SET OF CHUMASHIM - WITH HIS NEAT SIGNATURE ON TITLE-PAGE OF EACH VOLUME, with year alongside, “5531” (1771). First five volumes with exquisite engraved historiated title by Bernard Picart, first volume with additional title in Spanish and Hebrew, last volume with title within engraved cartouche by Picart. Includes Hebrew poems dedicated to various notables. The 6th volume includes Solomon de Olivera’s Calendario, with three folding tables. An attractive set, uniform contemporary Dutch mottled calf, elaborately gilt, spines in panels, covers within floral borders, spine in compartments, marbled endpapers

Steinschneider, Cat. Bodl. no.865; Kayserling 80

This beautifully bound Pentateuch belonged to Reverend Moses Mendes Seixas (1744-1809) of Newport, Rhode Island. A most iconic item of American-Judaica. Born in New York, Seixas settled in Newport, and served as Mohel and as Warden of the Yeshuat Yisrael synagogue. Following the departure of the congregation's minister Gershom Mendes Seixas, (the brother of Moses Seixas), with the onset of British Occupation during the Revolutionary War, Moses ensured that the synagogue continue to function. After the War, Moses Seixas founded the Bank of Rhode Island and, more importantly, helped reconstitute the Jewish community. He is most celebrated for having composed the letter of congratulations presented by the Jewish community to George Washington when he visited the city in 1790. - Less well known is that Washington's celebrated statement in his response, that the new government "gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance," was indeed Seixas's own words in his original letter to the President. See M.A. Gutstein, The Story of the Jews of Newport (1936) Owing to the absence of Hebrew printers in Colonial America, the Jews of the New World relied upon European communities to supply them with the texts necessary for Jewish life. Not until the flowering of the community in the 19th-century did American Jewry begin to publish its own books.