Lot 151: De la Divina Providencia ... Tratado Theologico Dividido en dos Dialogos.(On Divine Providence ...a Theological Treatise Divided into Two Dialogues) David Nieto, London: James Dover, 1704

2 leaves+ 90 pages (8 1/2 x 6 in.; 215 x 155 mm). Lightly browned at edges; title page with some soiling and minor losses. All edges decorated. Contemporary calf, scuffed; rebacked.

David Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in early Modern Europe, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. pp 310-330.

David Nieto studied medicine at the University of Padua, and later served as a dayyan, preacher, and physician in Livorno before relocating to London and assuming the position of Chief Rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese community. This volume is a detailed exposition of ideas about God and nature originally presented in a sermon by Nieto in 1703. The printed text takes the form of a philosophical dialogue and was meant to clarify and elaborate upon the earlier verbal discourse. Nieto's original sermon had given rise to a major controversy within the Sephardic Jewish community of London and a small number of congregants were so upset with what they assumed to be an espousal of Spinoza style pantheism that they took their case to the Beth Din (Rabbinical court) of Amsterdam (see next lot). Eighteenth century London was a crucible of scientific and philosophical inquiry that would go on to change the way the West would look at nature, man and the Divine. Upon his arrival in London in 1701, David Nieto fully engaged these new ideas; he combined his erudition in the natural sciences and his firm grasp of Talmudic and philosophical texts to craft an interpretation of Judaism that was at once orthodox and yet firmly moored within the bounds of reason. As modern scholarship has shown, Nieto's ideas about Nature and Divine providence were closer to Newtonian models of the relationship between the Creator and creation, than Baruch Spinoza's pantheism.