Only edition. [4], 420 pp., quarto, 217:135 mm., light age staining, wide margins. A very good copy bound in contemporary cloth over boards, rubbed and split.

One of the most prominent rabbis and Jewish authors in mid-nineteenth century America, Morris Jacob Raphall is best remembered for his defense of slavery.
Raphall was born in Stockholm, where his father was a banker to the king of Sweden. His studies would take him to Copenhagen, England, the University of Giessen, in Hesse, and finally the University of Erlangen, where he received and PhD.

Having settled in England, Raphall in 1834 began publishing the Hebrew Review, and Magazine of Rabbinical Literature, a rare Jewish periodical at the time. The journal ran for a couple years, after which acted as an aide to Solomon Herschell, the chief rabbi of Great Britain. He translated numerous rabbinic and biblical texts into English, and together with the D. A. de Sola published a translation of eighteen tractates of the Mishnah. He wrote a defense of Judaism against the accusations of an anonymous writer in the Times and published a textbook on post-biblical Jewish history. When in 1840, several Jewish communal leaders in Damascus were arrested on the charges of having murdered a monk—what came to be known as the Damascus Affair—Raphall traveled to Damascus and published in French, English, German and Hebrew a widely circulated defense of the accused.
In 1841 he was appointed minister and headmaster of the school of the Birmingham Synagogue in England. In 1849 he left to take up a post as rabbi at Manhattan’s B’nai Jeshurun, where he served until 1866, when he stepped down because of failing health, two years before his death.
In the lead-up to the Civil War, Raphall, like many Jewish leaders, engaged in the debates about slavery. Although typically, rabbis from the Southern states supported slavery, Raphall was an exception. On January 4, 1861, President Buchanan called for a national fast day of fasting and prayers for the preservation of the Union. At B’nai Jeshurun, Raphall declared that Judaism sanctioned slavery, and provided numerous textual exegeses to prove his point. The text of his sermon was published in the New York Herald and the New York Evening Express and reported on in the New York Times. Two leading Jewish scholarly voices, Rabbi David Einhorn and Michael Heilprin, each wrote extensive rebuttals to Raphall, arguing, among other things, that the slavery practiced in the American South was cruel and at odds with Jewish morality.