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Nikelsburger, Jacob : KOUL JACOB IN DEFENCE OF THE JEWISH RELIGION: CONTAINING THE ARGUMENTS OF THE REV. C.F. FREY, ONE OF THE COMMITTEE OF THE LONDON SOCIETY FOR THE CONVERSION OF THE JEWS, AND ANSWERS THERETO

New York; John Reid, 1816

1st American Edition. Original Boards. 8vo. 79 pages. 23 cm. The First Published Jewish Response to Missionaries in America. In English, with some Hebrew. Singerman 0260. Kol Ya’akov = Koul Jacob, in Defence of the Jewish Religion. Nikelsburger takes up the cudgels with an apostate Jew, Rev. Frey, so intent on converting his former coreligionists to Christianity that he is willing to take liberties with Scripture. “Frey [to whom Niklsburger is responding here] was appointed agent of the ASMCJ [The American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews, a conversionist organization],  in 1822, and during that and the following year he travelled through the South and New England collecting money and establishing many local chapters….In January, 1823, the ASMCJ began publishing a periodical called Israel’s Advocate….The emergence of the ASMCJ and the considerable support that it had within the Christian community was a cause of concern to the Jews and they responded to it. The first Jewish literary response to the missionaries came in 1816, the year that Frey had arrived in America,  with the publication of an American edition of Jacob Nikelsburger’s Koul Jacob. Nickelsburger had published ins booklet in Liverpool in 1813 as a rebuttal to a series of pamphlets written by Frey and published bu the Londton Society on the subject of the messiah. The work contains a refutation of the christological interpretatiions of a number of messianic sections of the Bble. Nikelsburger couched his argument in a moderate tone, and assured his readers that he had not written his booklet in order to engage in religious controversy, but only because Frey had challenged the Jews to answer his arguments” (Berlin, Defending the Faith: Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Writing on Christianity and Jesus, Albany, 1989, pp 7-8)  Lacks backstrip, front hinge weak with a touch of separating at blank front end paper, some staining, good copy, good condition. (RAB-58-16A-D)

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