[JUDAÏCA] L'Esprit des loix mosaïques

First edition of this substantially abridged French adaptation of Johann David Michaelis's Mosaisches Recht, published in Bordeaux in 1785 under the name of M. Senger.  Quatro; xii pp., 2 unnumbered leaves of preface and contents, 270 pp., one unnumbered privilege leaf.

Contemporary full mottled tan calf, smooth spine richly gilt in compartments with floral tools, dark green calf lettering-piece, gilt rolls at head and foot, covers framed with a triple gilt fillet, marbled endpapers and pastedowns, sprinkled edges. Restorations to spine and joints, internally a pleasing copy.

Published at Frankfurt am Main by Johann Gottlieb Garbe in six successive parts between 1770 and 1775, the Mosaisches Recht was one of the major works of Johann David Michaelis (1717-1791), Orientalist, Hebraist, and professor at Göttingen. The present volume retains only a fraction of this extensive work, reorganised and condensed for a French readership by the figure named on the title page as M. Senger, whose identity has not been established.

Michaelis approached the legislation attributed to Moses by seeking not so much a theological commentary as the historical reasons underlying its prescriptions. His method owed much to Montesquieu: laws were related to climate, territory, customs, economic conditions, and the social organisation of the people for whom they had been established. Applied to the Pentateuch, the principles of The Spirit of the Laws thus transformed a sacred legislative corpus into an object of historical and political enquiry, seeking to recover its rationality within the particular circumstances of ancient Israel.

The French transformation of the work acquires particular significance from its opening pages. The volume begins with a dedication “To the Jewish Nation”, a formulation which could hardly have been without resonance in a book printed at Bordeaux in 1785. The city was then home to a substantial Sephardic community of Spanish and Portuguese origin, deeply established in commerce and organised under the designation of the “Portuguese Jewish Nation”. There is no evidence that the dedication was expressly addressed to this community; its wording nevertheless corresponded in Bordeaux to an immediate social and institutional reality.

More strikingly, the dedication stands in contrast to the position Michaelis himself had taken only a few years earlier. When Christian Wilhelm von Dohm published his Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden in 1781, arguing for an improvement in the civil condition of the Jews, Michaelis answered the following year with an extended critique. Although the Göttingen scholar had devoted a substantial part of his career to Hebrew language, history, and institutions, he remained opposed to several of the political conclusions that Dohm drew from Enlightenment principles of toleration.

Something more than simple abridgement therefore took place between the German original and this Bordeaux edition. Michaelis's Montesquieu-inspired historical analysis of Mosaic law was condensed, translated, and placed beneath an address “To the Jewish Nation” in one of the principal centres of French Sephardic life. This first French adaptation thus preserves the record of a particularly revealing intellectual transfer, from Göttingen to Enlightenment Bordeaux.