Description

Coburg: Joh. Georg Steinmarck, 1737. In German. 215 × 165 mm (8.5 × 6.5 inches). 4to. 7 p.l., 591, [1 – blank] pp. One copper engraved frontispiece, title page printed in red and black ink, two copper engraved plates, large woodcut headpiece, 3 woodcut tailpieces. Very good. Contemporary vellum, laced case binding, damp stain to lower board, red-stained edges, early manuscript notation on upper pastedown, recto of frontispiece, and lower pastedown, faint marginal damp staining to first 5 leaves.

First edition of a highly antisemitic work describing the trial of two Jewish men who are accused of grand theft. Written by the lawyer and magistrate of Saxe Coburg who was involved with this trial, Paul Nicolaus Einert. The author “used the case as justification to publish an antisemitic treatise that ascribes to Jews fundamentally insincere and criminal tendencies. According to his views, all Jews were potential accomplices to crime since solidarity existed between all members of the Jewish people.”

In the preface, Einert decries the deplorable amount of money spent in bringing to trial this band of thieves, or Baldober. He writes, however, that the several thousand Reichs-Thaler spent was well worth the money, as it brought to light the many misdeeds of Jewish thieves in the area.

With two copper engravings showing the two men brought to trial, Emanuel Heinemann (alias Mendel Carbe) and Hoyum Moyses (alias Johann Ingolstädter), who were eventually sentenced to death and executed. The frontispiece depicts a more fanciful rendition of the events, in which the plan of the robbery is shared with the gang, and then the leader of the gang is illustrated as a man in a “Schlangen=haut, mit Fisch=Schuppen, Adlers=klauen und Fledermaus=Flügeln, seinen Jüdischer Dallis, oder Decke Mosis, auf dem Kopff habend, welche aber eine Hand aus der Wolcke abnimmt” (snake’s skin with fish scales, eagle’s claws and bat’s wings, with his Jewish Dallis, or blanket of Moses, on his head, which is being removed by a hand coming out of the clouds). The final image on the frontispiece shows the robbers with their Diebs=Instrumenten (thieves’ tools) and boots strewn about the ground, in the foreground and their eventual execution in the background.

OCLC

Jewish Theographic Seminary of America, Columbia University, New York Public Library, University of Chicago, Hebrew Union College, Ohio State University, Leo Baeck Institute, Harvard, and multiple locations outside of the United States.

Provenance

Collection of Felix Guggenheim.

References

Stepf, Johann Heinrich. Gallerie aller juridischen Autoren von der ältesten bis auf die jetzige Zeit (through World Biographical Information System), Band 2 (1821).

Additional information