Description

Small 8°.  XXXVII, [8] title, index and a full page portrait, 126 pp., [3] notes, original printed wrappers, bound in period half-calf binding with marbled boards, spine with gilt raised bands and gilt embossed red title piece, marbled endpapers (Very Good, first pages with very light foxing, boards slightly worn). 

[This is Hope of Israel: Reprint of the Book of Menasseh Ben Israel on the Origin of the Americas Published in 1650 ]

This is a late 19^th century reprint of a 17th book by Menasseh ben Israel with an introduction by Santiago Perez Junquera. Menasseh ben Israel, with a real name Manoel Dias Soeiro (1604 –1657), also, Menasheh ben Yossef ben Yisrael was a Portuguese rabbi, kabbalist, writer, diplomat, printer and publisher, founder of the first Hebrew printing press (named Emeth Meerets Titsma`h) in Amsterdam in 1626.

The book was published in 1881, in the year of first wave of modern Jewish migration to Ottoman-ruled Palestine, known as the First Aliyah.