Bidspirit auction | (AMERICA). PHILLIPS, JONAS B.  Camillus;

(AMERICA). PHILLIPS, JONAS B.  Camillus; or, The Self-Exiled Patriot. A Tragedy, in Five Acts. First Edition.  Dedicated to Mordecai Manuel Noah. pp. 59, (1). Bound with three additional plays. Foxed. Contemporary half-roan over marbled boards, rubbed. 12mo. New York, E.B. Clayton & Philadelphia, C. Neal, 1833. Jonas B. Phillips (1805–69), grandson of Revolutionary patriot Jonas Phillips and a member of an illustrious American-Jewish family was among the first Jews to achieve recognition in the American theater.  Later literary scholarship interprets his drama Camillus as an example of coded Jewish-American expression, presenting a Roman hero whose exile, civic virtue and patriotic loyalty resonated with early American Jewish ideals of belonging and national integration. See Yael Shapira, An End to Wandering? Jonas B. Phillips and Mary Shelley’s The Evil Eye, Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, Vol. 15, no. 2 (2017) pp. 217–39. A significant document of early Jewish participation in patriotic American literature.