Beschreibung:

A masterful versification of the Psalms by “the first Jamaican Jewish author of note.” Daniel Israel López Laguna (ca. 1650-ca. 1730), born into a converso family and raised in France, was arrested and imprisoned by the Inquisition while studying the arts in Spain. After escaping to the English colony of Jamaica, he began professing his Judaism openly. While incarcerated, López Laguna had conceived the idea of paraphrasing the Psalms in Baroque Spanish verse. The result of twenty-three years of labor, Espejo fiel de vidas was intended to make the biblical book more accessible to Western Sephardim insufficiently familiar with the Hebrew original. At the same time, the content of the Psalms gave voice to the wide range of religious emotions experienced not only by their original authors but by López Laguna, their modern-day interpreter, as well as his fellow victims of the Inquisition. Through the mechanism of paraphrase, the poet was able to bring renewed relevance to the biblical text as he lamented suffering, protested persecution, and exulted in divine redemption. To print his work, López Laguna traveled from Jamaica to London, where he secured the approbations and earned the plaudits of some of the leading lights of contemporary English Jewry, including Rabbis David Nieto and Joseph Abendanon. The publication of the volume was financed by Mordejay Nunes Almeyda, to whom it was also dedicated. The book was adorned with engravings executed by the Dutch Jewish artist Abraham Lopes de Oliveira, including an elaborate geroglifico (hieroglyph) whose accompanying explanation attributes messianic significance to the book’s production. Espejo fiel de vidas has been hailed as “one of the most remarkable products of Jewish-Spanish literature,” and to this day its verses constitute a powerful monument to Western Sephardic religious poetry. Physical 286 pages, 26 unfoliated leaves, 1 (of 2) plate(s) (9 1/4 x 7 1/2 in.; 236 x 190 mm) on paper; text mostly in Latin characters, interspersed with occasional Hebrew lettering, as in the alphabetic Psalms. Elaborately engraved frontispiece and engraved illustration of David playing the harp on the title page, both executed by Abraham Lopes de Oliveira; various woodcut decorative elements and decorated initials throughout. Slight scattered staining; light dampstaining in gutters; some dogearing and creasing (see esp. pp. 229-234); ink a bit light in places; short tears in outer edges of ff. [1-3], emerging from the gutters of ff. [6-7], and in upper edges of pp. 197-198; minor foxing on final 8 folios. Elaborately blind-tooled modern leather over board; spine in five compartments with raised bands; modern paper flyleaves and pastedowns. LiteratureConcepción Cabezas Alguacil, “Un acercamiento a la obra de Daniel López Laguna: Espejo fiel de vidas,” MEAH: Miscelánea de estudios árabes y hebraicos 37-38 (1988-1989): 151-162. Harm den Boer, “La Biblia entre los judíos sefardíes de Amsterdam y otras colonias en Europa occidental,” in Gregorio del Olmo Lete (ed.), La Biblia en la literatura española (Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2008), 315-352, at pp. 337-338. Ruth Fine, “The Psalms of David by Daniel Israel López Laguna, a Wandering Marrano,” trans. William Childers, in Kevin Ingram and Juan Ignacio Pulido Serrano (eds.), The Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond, vol. 3 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2016), 45-62. Joseph Jacobs and Lucien Wolf, Bibliotheca Anglo-Judaica: A Bibliographical Guide to Anglo-Jewish History (London: Office of the “Jewish Chronicle,” 1888), 200 (no. 1875). Meyer Kayserling, “The Jews in Jamaica and Daniel Israel Lopez Laguna,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 12,4 (July 1900): 708-717. Meyer Kayserling, Biblioteca española-portugueza-judaica (New York: Ktav Pub. House, 1971), 55-56. Laura Arnold Leibman, “Poetics of the Apocalypse: Messianism in Early Jewish American Poetry,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 33,1 (2014): 35-62, at pp. 50-56. Ronnie Perelis, “Dani