The first complete machzor was printed in America.
Hebrew and English on facing pages, parallel pagination.
Isaac Leeser (1806-1868), one of the first leaders of American Jewry, head of the Jewish community of Philadelphia, cantor, philosopher, and author of many sermons and essays. He was very active in founding Jewish institutions and in bequeathing Jewish religion and history. Among other activities, he translated Jewish books into English. One of his more renowned translations is this machzor, which is the first complete machzor printed in America, including festival prayers. Publishing this machzor was a complex project. Leeser based his translation on a prayer book printed in London but he added and improved upon the original and also revised the Hebrew text. Afterward, he ordered new Hebrew types from Europe but did not find printers who were familiar with Hebrew and had to teach two Christian printers the Holy Tongue to prepare them for the printing. In spite of all the difficulties involved, the machzorim were published in a total of 13 months.
Leeser marketed his prayer book both to audiences in America and the British Empire and therefore included prayers on behalf of a monarch and a republican government.
From the Title page:
Original cover, gold embossed with previous owner name Mrs. Mo Sonneborn.
Excellent condition.
Undated
The copy of Mrs. Mo[ses] Sonneborn.
Near the end of the 1840s, Henry Sonneborn, the son of Moses in Breidenbach, immigrated to the United States, where he settled in Baltimore, Maryland and founded a men’s clothing factory. By the 1880s portions of the family had left Breidenbach for Cologne where they founded a business that eventually became known as the Ölwerke Stern-Sonneborn AG (Ossag), with branch offices in England, Paris and Italy; the firm was eventually bought by Shell Oil in 1925. Several family members moved to Baltimore to join their relatives there, among them Auguste Sonneborn, daughter of Levi Sonneborn of Marburg and his wife Amalie (née Bacherach), and her brothers Siegmund and Ferdinand, who followed in the family tradition by founding L. Sonneborn Sons, Inc., in 1903, a petroleum and oil company.
In 1935 the two Sonneborn brothers living in Baltimore, Siegmund and Ferdinand, pledged to pay for the transportation to Israel (then Palestine) and education of thirty-eight Sonneborn boys and girls from Germany as part of their contribution to Youth Aliyah, thereby saving the children’s lives. At that time Youth Aliyah only accepted teenagers and young adults.
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Lot #65