Thesoro de Preceptos a Donde Se Encierran las Joyas de los Seys cientos y treze Preceptos [“Thesuarus of the Commandments. Where are Locked the Jewels of the Six Hundred and Thirteen Commandments.”]

Atias, Isaac

Semuel ben Israel Soero

Amsterdam

1649

Second Edition. Spanish text interspersed with Hebrew. Two parts in one volume. With Menasseh ben Israel’s device (see Yaari, Hebrew Printers' Marks 58). French and Hebrew inscriptions by Jacob Mezeis of Bordeaux, 1743

Palau 19334; Kayserling, p. 15; Cat. Menasseh, 60; Den Boer, Spanish and Portuguese Printing 34; J.H. Coppenhagen, Menasseh ben Israel Bibliography 312

Isaac Atias was a disciple of Isaac Uziel in Amsterdam. He became Haham of the Portuguese Synagogue of Hamburg before accepting in 1622 the call to serve as rabbi of Venice where he later died. (The first edition of Thesoro de Preceptos appeared in Venice in 1627.) Following the lead of Maimonides in his Sepher HaMitzvoth, the author has divided the book into two parts: the first, an enumeration of the 248 positive precepts; the second, an enumeration of the 365 negative precepts. The work was intended for the Spanish and Portuguese Marranos who reverted to their ancestral faith in such places as Amsterdam, Venice and Hamburg, but did not know Hebrew and were largely ignorant of the Orthodox practice of Judaism. In the Prologue, Athias explicitly refers to his Marrano brethren as the "noblest nation of Spain" who had been punished with "exile, calamities, death and excessive suffering... and whose major part had been miserably buried in the darkness of perdition until the Lord assisted them and they returned to adore his blessed service" (p. 3, right column). See JE, Vol. II, p. 268