Lettres juives, ou Correspondance philosophique, historique, et critique, entre un juif voyageur à Paris et ses correspondans en divers endroits (Jewish Letters, or Philosophical, Historical, and Critical Correspondence between a Jewish Traveler in Paris and His Correspondents in Various Locations) [FIRST EDITION OF THE AUTHOR'S FIRST BOOK]

The Hague: Pierre Paupie, 1736. First edition. Hardcover. Very Good+. Six volumes (published between 1736 and 1737), octavo in 4s. [8], 240; [8], 240; [8], 240; [16], 240; [16], 240; [16], 244pp. Contemporary polished and speckled calf; spines with raised bands, elaborately tooled and lettered in gilt; dentelles. Light wear at corners, mild chafing at a few covers. Bookplates, old owner entry at free endleaves. An attractive set, with crisp, clean text, handsomely bound.

Collation: (vol.1) [asterisk]4, A-Gg4 (= 124 leaves); (vol.2) [asterisk]4, A-Gg4 (= 124 leaves); (vol.3) [asterisk]4, A-Gg4 (= 124 leaves); (vol.4) [asterisk]8, A-Gg4 (= 128 (truncated) leaves); (vol.5) [asterisk]8, A-Gg4 (= 128 leaves); (vol.6) [asterisk]8, A6, B-Gg4 (= 130 leaves)

First edition of the author’s first book. “A young diplomat and soldier from the Provence, the Marquis d’Argens (1703-1771) left his native country to live in Holland among her philosophes and littérateurs; there he wrote his first book -- the Lettres juives. Later in Berlin, as a member of the French entourage which Frederick the Great had assembled, he served as director of the philosophical section of the Prussian Academy. His Lettres juives, a fictitious correspondence between prominent Jews, show d’Argens’ interest in Spinoza, evidenced also in many of his subsequent works [La philosophie du bons-sens, 1737; Mémoires secrets, 1744; Lettres chinoises, 1739-1740]" (Bamberger). An enlarged edition of the Lettres appeared in 1764; an English version appeared in 1739-1740 as The Jewish Spy.

Jonathan Israel describes d'Argens as "[o]ne of the most widely read radical deist writers of Early Enlightenment Europe, an author steeped in Bayle and Spinoza, a born rebel, unrelentingly hostile to the European status quo, if not politically then certainly in everything concerning thought and belief." According to his own Memoires, d'Argens' philosophical odyssey "began in 1727 in Constantinople, where he lived for some time and was converted to a philosophical cast of mind by a sophisticated Sephardic Jew and a formidable Armenian who had lived in Amsterdam where he had become a 'grand Spinosiste.'" Throughout his life D'Argens "nurtured a strongly philo-Semitic attitude, at least regarding such emancipated and culturally sophisticated Sephardic Jews as he had met in Venice and Holland, and deliberately deploys the term 'Jew' polemically to designate individuals who have escaped the bondage of theological ways of thinking." In a remarkable passage within his Lettres Juives, d'Argens "has his Sephardic interlocutor comically report to his rabbinic correspondent in Constantinople that he has discovered in Paris 'un nombre infini de Juifs qui le sont, sans croire l'être, et sans en rien savoir' [an infinite number of Jews who are (philosophical deists), without believing they are, and without knowing anything about it" (Israel).

Provenance: engraved bookplate of Marston House at the front paste-downs. References: Cf. Caillet 1606 (ed. 1754). Cf. Bamberger 340 (ed. Amsterdam: P. Gautier). For d’Argens, see J. Israel, Radical Enlightenment (O.U.P., 2001), esp. pp. 586-90. (Inventory #: 48879)