Shirei Teferet Book, Rabbi Naftali Hirtz Wessely – Berlin 1789 – First Edition – With an old handwritten ...

Shirei Teferet Book, Rabbi Naftali Hirtz Wessely – Berlin 1789 – First Edition – With an old handwritten inscription defaming the author
The author: Rabbi Naftali Hirtz Wessely (1726-1805), a virtuous Torah scholar. Among the fathers of the Jewish Enlightenment Movement. He stood all his life on the border between religious and halachic adherence and Enlightenment.
The book is a lyric epos on the Biblical period, dealing with the image of Moses. It includes six parts and eighteen poems; the volume before us, the first, includes four of them. All the poems "recall the glory of God, his might and wonders, which he did to our Forefathers when taking them out of Egypt and bringing them to Mount Sinai". The book influenced generations of poets after him and some researches see it as the outset of New Hebrew poetry. It seems that the author's inspiration for writing the book had been Biblical creations written by German poets at the time. The poems describe Moses' greatness and his humaneness. They also contain psychological ideas, actual implications and a request for spiritual and political redemption for the Jewish nation. Naftali Hirtz himself wrote that his goal in writing the poems was not to write a new lyric creation but to interpret the Scriptures and "bring people closer to the Torah by their means". He continues his religiously conservative belief in the poems and the poems hardly contain issues that have not been mentioned by the Sages. 'Shirei Teferet' made a deep impression with its publication and was translated to French and German.
On the first page of the book there is a long text that begins with the words "Oh traitors!... going devious ways …" probably defaming the book and ending with an unidentified signature of "Menachem Mendel…[?]".
There are various inscriptions on the back cover.
At the beginning of the book and at its end there are illustrations of Moses.
84 pp.
Condition: Very Good.