Hebrew Printing in Sabbioneta 1 AFFO, Ireneo - Schulz-Falster Rare ...

economic advance had been promoted by her public debt and public credit.
He takes Hume to task on this matter, and comments on a number of other
contemporary authors, such as Berkeley, Boisguilbert, BuVon, Colbert,
Diderot, Mirabeau, Petty, Rousseau and Voltaire. He is also well known
for his criticism of the agricultural enthusiasm of Boisguilbert, as expressed
in his Le Detail de la France and the physiocrats.
‘Pinto’s Traité is written from a national as well as an international perspective.
His experience as a merchant and Wnancier in the Republic, along
with his knowledge of French and English economic thought, laid the
foundations for his European economic model. Pinto wanted above all to
convince his readers of the soundness of the British system of public debt.
With the adoption of improvements in the redemption policy proposed in
his book, the system would achieve a high degree of perfection. In France
the physiocratic opinions of the elder Mirabeau in particular required Pinto
to respond, and in England the otherwise admiring Hume was in disagreement.
By means of a critical discussion of the work of these and other
authors, Pinto propagated a Wnancial policy that he thought would beneWt
both the State and the individual’ (Nijenhuis).
This copy contains the sheet H*, entitled L’Etat des Finances en Angleterre
à la fin de la session du Parlement en 1770, which is not always present and
not mentioned by Einaudi. It does not contain the Addition au Traité (pp.
369–384) and the errata leaf, which were later inserted in some copies.
Einaudi 4447; Goldsmiths’–Kress 10791; Higgs 5282; INED 3603; Mattioli
2851; Stourm, p. 42; Szajkowski, Franco-Judaica, 868; for an elaborate analysis of
Pinto’s work see I. J. A. Nijenhuis, Een Joodse Philosophe. Isaac de Pinto (1717–1787),
Amsterdam, NEHA, 1992.
A Jew’s Defence of Religion
92 PINTO, Isaac de. Der Jude für die Religion oder Kern der
Beweisgründe wider die Materialisten, nebst neuen Anmerkungen
über die natürliche BeschaVenheit unserer Kenntnisse das Daseyn
Gottes, und das Unkörperliche Wesen und die Unsterblichkeit
der Seele. Frankfurt, Leipzig, van Düren, 1776. £1500
8vo, pp. 19, [v] contents and advertisement, 164; engraved vignette
on title; title dust-soiled, paper restoration to upper outer corner of
Wrst four leaves, lightly browned and spotted throughout, due to paper
quality; recently rebound in modern marbled boards; mss number to
upper corner of title.
First edition in German, very rare, of Pinto’s philosophical and psychological
defence of monotheistic religions against the attacks of the ‘materialists’.
The Précis des arguments contre les matérialistes was Wrst published
in the Hague in 1774. Pinto here was inspired by Hemsterhuis’s earlier
anti-materialist Lettre sur l’Homme et ses Rapports (1772), and borrowed his
argumentation against the materialist principle that physical causes deter-
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