(AMERICAN JUDAICA)

(AMERICAN JUDAICA)
Solis, Solomon da Silva (1819-54). Autograph Manuscript Signed (“S.S.”) Entitled “The Law of the Immutable.” With autograph edits by <<Isaac Leeser.>>

Six pages, browned, lower portion of pages cleanly detached. Folio.
(Philadelphia: 1843)
Isaac Leeser’s edited draft of an article by Solis on the immutability of the commandments (published in The Occident (1:9) December 1843, pp. 429-34.) After demonstrating the contrary from many biblical examples, Solis asks rhetorically: “Now, is it to be supposed that the immutable God should descend to the earth, clothed in this terrible majesty, to give all these laws which He ordained to be of eternal duration, and then allow finite, erring man to abrogate that which He deemed of sufficient importance so as to require his own presence at its promulgation? and to substitute another, in which a man is the judge and the redeemer?” Thus we see that Christian arguments were deemed of sufficient persuasive import to American Jews that both Solis and Leeser held their refutation to be necessary in a periodical to be read by American Jews. Indeed, this was a theme in many early issues of the Occident.===Solomon da Silva Solis was a regular contributor to the pages of The Occident. He was among the founders of the American Jewish Publication Society (a forerunner of the JPS founded in 1888) and the Hebrew Education Society of Philadelphia. Solis was close to Grace Aguilar, the remarkable English author whom he befriended in London and was responsible for bringing her work to America. All this he accomplished before he was thirty. Gone at thirty-five, Leeser, in mourning, wrote of his friend: “Young as he was yet, he was ripe for immortality… a pious Israelite… a worthy citizen…the Israelites of America have lost one of their brightest ornaments.” Of his many contributions to The Occident, Leeser notes simply “My readers will miss hereafter his contributions, full as they were of truth and tenderness.” (The Occident (12:4) July 1854, pp. 231-32).