Physical Description

viii, 576 p., quarto, 210:125 mm., wide margins, light age and damp staining, library stamps. A good copy bound in later cloth over boards, rubbed.

First English edition of the first Jewish History work by a women, American first edition was in 1812.

Detail Description

A history of the Jews from the destruction of the Jerusalem to present by an American woman. Hannah Adams (October 2, 1755 – December 15, 1831) was a Christian author, born in Medfield, Massachusetts and died in Brookline. She was the first woman in the United States who worked professionally as a writer. She was the second of five children born to Thomas Adams and Elizabeth Clark. Her mother died when Hannah was 11 years old. Showing at an early age a fondness for study, she acquired a fair knowledge of Greek and Latin from divinity students boarding with her father, who was himself a man of literary tastes. He became bankrupt when she was in her seventeenth year, and she and her brothers and sisters were obliged to provide for themselves. During the Revolutionary War she supported herself by making lace, and afterward by teaching. She was a woman of varied learning and indomitable perseverance.

Her writings brought her little money, yet they secured her fame and many friends, among them the Abbé Grégoire, with whom she carried on an extensive correspondence, and also received his aid in preparing her History of the Jews (1812). A voyage from Boston to Nahant, about ten miles, was her only journey by water, and a trip to Providence her farthest by land. Nonetheless, she was a popular guest in New England society, and once stayed for two weeks at the house of her distant cousin, President John Adams.

During the closing years of her life she enjoyed an annuity provided by friends in Boston. Her autobiography, edited with additions by Mrs. Hanah F. Lee, was published in Boston in 1832. She described herself as a Unitarian Christian. Her birthplace is preserved in Medfield. Her remains were interred at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts on November 12, 1832. Her monument "erroneously proclaims" that she was the cemetery's "First Tenant," but she was, in fact, the ninth.

Hebrew Description:

Bibliography:

EJ; JE