THE TWENTY-FOUR BOOKS OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURES, CAREFULLY TRANSLATED ACCORDING TO THE MASSORETIC TEXT, AFTER THE BEST JEWISH AUTHORITIES. TORAH, NEVI'IM VE-KHETUVIM.
Cincinnati ; Chicago : From the American Hebrew Pub. House, the Bloch Pub. and Print. Co., 1853 [1870s?]. Item #30983
Original Full Leather, 16mo, [6], iii-xii, 1243 pages. 17 cm. Title in Hebrew at head of title. The scarce Chicago Bloch edition, retaining the copyright page date of 1853, but probably published in the late 1860s given the inclusion of the “Advertisement to the London Edition" (which appeared in 1865, with 7 holdings in OCLC,) and its mid-19th Century calf binding. Bloch’s first office in Chicago dates to the 1870s, and Bloch did also publish an 1884 edition, but, unlike our copy, it lists the 1884 date and only Cincinnati (not Chicago, as this copy does) and contains 1236 pages (not 1243 as ours does). A Bloch publication of Leeser’s bible could almost certainly not have occurred before Leeser’s death in 1868, given the enmity between the Leader of American Orthodoxy and the Reform-oriented publishing house owned by Isaac M. Wise’ brother-in-law, Edward Bloch. Leeser, famously, had printed an “anonymous attack on Wise signed ‘Lawyers’ in the pages of his Occident shortly after the appearance of Minhag Amerika in 1857; this anti-Reform rejoinder singled out Bloch & Co. for allegedly keeping its store open on the Jewish Sabbath and closing it on Sunday, the Christian Sabbath” (Singerman). In our Bloch copy, the copyright is still held by Isaac Leeser; It was not until 1888 that “his [Bloch’s] firm obtained the copyright of this popular and frequently reprinted landmark text.” OCLC lists only 2 holdings of the Chicago Bloch [1853] edition (Andrews University in Michigan and the Community of Christ library in Missouri), both in the Midwest, perhaps reflecting Bloch’s still-Midwestern orientation at the time. Indeed, not many years later, Bloch left Chicago completely and moved its second headquarters to New York. This edition not listed in Singerman nor in Goldman. Edgewear to leather boards and many pages. Spine professionally rebacked. Good Condition thus. (AMR-38-23).
Price: $1,750.00