De Hoop Van Israel (The Hope of Israel), Menasseh ben Israel, Amsterdam: 1660

144 pages (5 x 3 in.; 127 x 75 mm). [xiv], 124 [vi] annotated in margins; biography of the author and a bibliography of his works is appended in manuscript in an eighteenth century Dutch hand on the final three leaves. Later half cloth over marbled paper, remains of paper labels; worn.

first edition; the only known extant copy

Menasseh ben Israel (1604–1657), was born in Portugal to a Marrano family, and escaped in 1614 to Amsterdam where he became a renowned scholar, printer and diplomat.  In addition to his own prolific scholarly works, he founded the earliest Jewish printing press in Amsterdam (1626), where he published works in Hebrew, Yiddish, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and English. His broad theological expertise allowed him to present Judaism in a sympathetic manner acceptable to the Christian world. His writings proved especially influential in England, where Jews had been forbidden to settle, since their expulsion in the late 13th century. In 1650 Menasseh dedicated his work, The Hope of Israel, to the English Parliament in an effort to solicit their goodwill and thereby helped in bringing about the eventual readmission of the Jews to England.

This work describes the reported discovery, in the New World, of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. The work proved so popular that it was eventually printed in Spanish, Latin, Hebrew, Yiddish, English and in 1660, the first Dutch edition, dedicated to the elders of the Amsterdam Jewish community. The present lot however, is the only known extant copy of this first Dutch edition.

The handwritten notations indicate that this volume was passed down among the members of a Dutch Jewish family: Haim  ben Juda Vleeschouwer; Juda Elisha Vleeschouwer; Tirtsa [Vleeschouwer].