Joseph ben Joshua HaCohen. Divrei HaYamim LeMalchei Tzarfath U’Malchei Beith Othoman HaTogar. [”History of the Kings of France and the Ottoman Turks.”]

(AMERICAN JUDAICA).

Tobias Foa

Sabbioneta

1553

First Edition. The Salman Schocken copy. Some marginalia.

Vinograd, Sabbioneta 12.

An important and rare work of historiography with much material relating to the discovery of the New World. The first Hebrew book to use the word “America” to describe the New World (see ff. 154-55). This broad chronological account of Euro-Asian history, is one of the foremost productions of the Genoese Jewish scholar Joseph HaCohen (1496-1575), a native of Provence, who wrote in Voltaggio, a small village above Genoa. HaCohen was one of the few Jewish historians of the Renaissance (and later) who also focused upon non-Jewish themes. The author presents here his text on the basis of the struggle between East and West - the outcome of which depended upon the treatment of Jews by each civilization: Christian and Muslim. France represented to HaCohen the leading Western power and the Ottoman Empire the Eastern power – each, battling for supremacy. The work is divided into two parts. The first covers the period from the decline of the Roman Empire to the deaths of Maximilian I (in 1519) and Selim I (in 1520). The larger second part focuses upon the 33 years between 1520 to the year of the book’s publication. Clearly the author felt that the period he was living in was a new and significant era that had broken with the past. The book includes a lengthy account of the discovery of the New World recording recent explorations and discoveries, which in turn shone a perspective on the often negative relationship between Europe’s Jews and Christians.‑ HaCohen envisioned the settlement of newly discovered territories in the Americas as a harbinger of a new age in which social injustice and discrimination would cease to exist. See N.J. Efron, “Knowledge of Newly Discovered Lands among the Jewish Communities of Europe” in: P. Bernadini and N. Fiering (eds.), The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West 1450-1800 (2001), pp. 54-7; AJHSP, Vol. II, R. J. H. Gottheil, Columbus in Jewish Literature (1894); M.J. Heller, The Sixteenth-Century Hebrew Book, Vol. 1 (2004) p. 387.