(AMERICAN JUDAICA)

(AMERICAN JUDAICA)
Leeser, Isaac (1806-68). Autograph Manuscript Signed. School notebook for the May 1823 semester, written in German and Latin.
Entries in Leeser’s careful schoolboy hand include essays on biblical and apocryphal subjects, such as a retelling in Latin of the episode of Joseph and Jacob in the Book of Genesis, and on the Book of Tobit.
29 pages (excluding blanks). Original autographed wrappers. 4to.
Münster (German): May 1823
Isaac Leeser was raised in Dülmen, near Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia. After completing his formal Jewish education, he enrolled at the age of 14, in the Münster Institute, where he received his secular education for two and a quarter years. This notebook is from when he was a 16-year old student. Leeser later recalled this period and the struggles he had to overcome both from within his family and as an outsider in the school seeking to obtain an education in a Christian setting: “We well remember… a venerable grandmother almost dissuading us from learning Latin, for fear of our thereby becoming less a Jew, and imitating the example of others who lapsed into infidelity. And moreover we were the first Jewish boy who ever was permitted to enter the Latin school in our neighbourhood.” See A Call To Israelites, in: The Occident (6:422) December, 1848.===Leeser was a diligent pupil. In a letter to his Talmud teacher Rabbi Benjamin Jacob Cohen, he described the difficult course of his work: “The headmaster requires that each day's task be completed. I have to keep myself awake every night until the hour of midnight if I am to finish my work with satisfaction… Were I to fail, I… should be beaten with the rod of fools. This has happened to many of my companions, but to me only once.” See Lance J. Sussman, Isaac Leeser and the Making of American Judaism (1995) p. 26.