Isaac Baer Levinsohn. “Efes Damim” (against Blood Libels) 1890, Warsaw, in Hebrew
“Efes Damim against Blood Libels Efes Dammim and other polemical works
Warschau, ed. by Samuel Lewin 1890, 94 pp.- in Hebrew; 28 pp. – in Italian, Russian and Polish.
Hard cover, 22 x 15 cm.
Condirion: front cover is missing, rear cover detached; bindig is partly loose; brown fragile paper; pages chipped to edges because of fragile paper; title page with missing edges and laid to endpaper; ca. 1/3 of last pages with damages to top near spine – tears, chipping, missing places/
Around this time, the Jewish community of Zaslavl in Volhynia was accused of ritual murder; many families were imprisoned, and the entire community was in despair. Levinsohn's opponents then laid aside their enmity and turned to him as the only man capable of proving the falsity of the accusation. In spite of his sickness Levinsohn began his Efes Dammim, in defense of the accused Jews. But the necessary means not being forthcoming, he was obliged to spend his own money in collecting material and information. "The purpose of my book, " says Levinsohn, "is to acquit the Jews before the eyes of Christians, and to save them from the false accusation of using Christian blood." Efes Dammim is written in the form of a dialogue between a patriarch of the Greek Church in Jerusalem, Simias, and the chief rabbi in the Jewish synagogue there. The book shows the remarkable dialectic talent of the author. It was completed in 1834, published in 1837, republished three times, and was translated into English at the time of the "Damascus Affair" in 1840, at the instance of Sir Moses Montefiore and Adolphe Crémieux. It was translated also into Russian (1883) and German (1884; another German edition appeared in 1892). Another polemical work, Yemin Tzidki, Levinsohn proves the absurdity of the accusations against Judaism and the Talmud. This work was left by him in manuscript.
Isaac Baer Levinsohn (Yiddish: יצחק בער לעווינז×הן; October 13, 1788 – February 13, 1860), also known as the Ribal (ריב״ל), was a Jewish scholar of Hebrew, a satirist, a writer and Haskalah leader. He has been called "the Mendelssohn of Russia." In his Bet Yehudah (1837), he formulated a philosophy and described Jewish contributions to civilization in an effort to improve Jewish-Christian relations.