The Jewish Year No. I. / Shabbath Bereishith

AGUILAR, GRACE

England

1838-47

Autograph Poem Signed. English with smattering of Hebrew letters

In her thirty-one years, the English Jewess, Grace Aguilar (1816-1847), of a Portuguese Marrano family, accomplished much in the way of literary achievement. She authored several works of a religious nature, perhaps her most famous is “The Spirit of Judaism,” a re-working of the sermons of Rabbi Isaac Leeser of Philadephia. The third edition of The Spirit of Judaism, published posthumously (Cincinnati, 1864), has an appendix containing thirty-two poems, bearing the dates 1838-1847. The present manuscript four-page poem, arranged in rhymed couplets, is one of the poems comprising the collection. In it, Aguilar describes the Creation of the World and goes on to establish an intimate relation between each individual Jew and his Maker