Folio, (312 x 215 mm). ff. [186]. Recent green morocco, spine with raised bands and tooled in gilt. Professionally cleaned, probably in the 19th century, first leave with upper margin restored, some residual staining and foxing, overall in very good condition; annotated by a contemporary hand in several leaves.

Extremely rare first edition of an important translation of the classical text of Josephus’ The Jewish War and Against Apion, published only four days before the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, translated into Spanish by a Jewish convert, likely aiming to ameliorate the escalating tensions between the Christian and Jewish communities of the Iberian Peninsula.

Very rare, only two American institutions hold copies, the Hispanic Society and the Huntington.

Whilst there is no known direct connection between the publication of this work on 27 March 1492 and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain on 31 March, it is most probable that Palencia’s decision to translate these texts was influenced by the desire to ameliorate the escalating tensions between the Christian and Jewish communities of the Iberian Peninsula – and there are many similarities between Josephus and his translator, Alfonso de Palencia (1423–92). Palencia, an early Renaissance humanist in the service of the Catholic Kings, was a Castilian converso whose father had converted from Judaism to Christianity. He enjoyed, nevertheless, considerable status in the Spanish Court holding an official position as chronicler to Queen Isabella of Castile, to whom, revealingly, he dedicates his translation of Josephus’ The Jewish War and Against Apion. Although his earlier coverage of the Reconquest of Spain from the Moors had led Queen Isabella to withdraw much of her patronage, Palencia was, much like Josephus, an erudite man in the service of and loyal to a non-Jewish ruler at a time of heightened tensions between a Jewish and a more powerful non-Jewish community. Palencia had completed the translations the previous year in 1491 and no comment is made in the preface or text which indicates an awareness of the edict implementing the expulsion.

A particularly interesting copy, it is annotated in a near contemporary hand which makes a variety of observations that not only insert additional information on subjects such as the full names or relations of those being discussed in the text but also make value judgements such as finding the actions or people being discussed virtuous or reprehensible. The neatness with which these annotations have been made illustrates the reverence in which incunables were held in their own day and the detailed attention with which they were read.

Rarity: in the market is extreme, no copy seems to have gone through auction in history; the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue records only thirteen copies (four of them imperfect), these are located, in Spain, at the Royal Library at El Escorial, the Lázaro Museum in Madrid, the National Library in Madrid and the university libraries of Valencia and Zaragoza. Copies are also located in the National Library in Lisbon, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, the university libraries of Braga and Évora in Portugal, San Tomás in the Philippines and Uppsala in Sweden, and, in the United States, in the collections of the Huntington Library and the Hispanic Society of America.

‘During the Middle Ages the Jewish community had played an outstanding part in the cultural and economic life of both Castile and the Crown of Aragon. Where other west European states had expelled their Jews, they continued to be tolerated in Spain, partly because they were indispensable, and partly because the existence of a tolerant Moorish kingdom on Spanish soil would have reduced the effectiveness of any general measure of expulsion. During the plague-stricken and insecure years of the mid-fourteenth century, however, their position began to grow difficult. Popular hatred of them was fanned by preachers, and mounted to a terrible climax in anti-Jewish riots which swept Castile, Catalonia, and Aragon, in 1391. To save their lives, many submitted to baptism; and, at the end of the fourteenth century, these converted Jews – known as conversos or marranos – equalled and perhaps outnumbered those of their brethren who had survived the massacres and remained true to the faith of their fathers’ (J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1983, p. 106). Anti-semitism continued to grow in the fifteenth century occasionally erupting in savage outbursts such as the Toledo riots of 1449, which provoked the first decree of limpieza de sangre, or purity of blood, and excluded all persons of Jewish ancestry from municipal office in Toledo. Similar restrictions were also imposed in other regions, in Seville where Palencia’s work was published, for example, an edict of 1483 banished Jews from certain areas of the city. At Court, tolerance continued to be shown to both conversos and Jews in the early years of the reign of the Catholic Monarchs (Ferdinand, as it happens, had Jewish blood) but rising tensions led to the establishment of the Inquisition in Castile in 1483 and Aragon and Catalonia in 1487. It was only intended to ensure that those who had converted to Christianity, conversos, had truly converted but the difficulties in ensuring this pushed anti-Semitic feeling still further. This, in combination with the hubris which followed on the conquest of Granada in 1492, encouraged a desire to achieve religious as well as territorial cohesion in Spain and thus less than three months after the successful conquest of Granada, the Catholic Kings issued the edict ordering all professed Jews from their kingdoms within the alloted time of four months. According to J. H. Elliott, from 120,000 to 150,000 people in all, Jewish and converso, were displaced and forced to flee leaving a vacuum difficult to fill in the Catholic Monarchy’s government structure, its administration and in society in general.

In the context of this environment, Palencia reveals a desire to avert further discord and create some common ground by translating Josephus’ Jewish War, which was highly critical of the intransigence of the Jews in resisting Roman rule, but alongside Against Apion, which though less famous than, for example, Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities, represented Josephus’ most ardent defence of the Jewish people, their traditions and history.

Palencia’s translation of Josephus, however, also represented a broader movement in the cultural development of Europe at the end of the fifteenth century. Palencia was a leading figure in Spain during the beginnings of Renaissance humanism and he spent several years of his early career in Rome and Florence where this movement was most pronounced. As part of this tradition he believed like Petrarch that Europe had fallen into a dark age following the collapse of the Roman empire and that it was necessary to revisit classical Roman and Greek authorities analysing them empirically and rationally in order to be able to transcend them. Once back in Spain, Palencia thought that it was important to make classical texts more generally available by translating them into Spanish and his translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives was issued in 1491. The publication of Josephus’ Jewish War and Against Apion the following year fitted into this scheme. ‘Like his more famous fellow humanist, Antonio de Nebrija, who boasted that he had “dispelled barbarity” from Spain, Palencia’s attempts to revive the classics through translation and emulation [Palencia’s history of Spain from the reign of John II to 1581, for example, was deliberately structured like Titus Livius’ History of Rome] were motivated by the belief that the recuperation of classical models would empower the present, enabling his compatriots to see, think, and write their world afresh’ (J. Weiss, ‘Flavius Josephus, 1492’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 23:3, Oct 2016, pp. 180–95).

Though Palencia died in 1492 before his humanist ideas saw fruition, they did have a profound effect on the development of Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries following Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the Americas, also in 1492. Palencia’s translation of Josephus, in particular The Jewish War, and his aim to make this period of Roman-Jewish history easily accessible to his contemporaries contributed to making the Roman conquest and subjugation of Palestine the model by which those involved in the conquest of Central and South America measured their own success. Conquistadors such as Hernán Cortés (1485–1547) and Bernal Díaz del Castillo (c. 1495–1584) as well as Christian missionaries such as Toribio de Benavente Motolinía (c. 1482–1569), actively sought to juxtapose the Spanish conquest of America and the fall of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan with the Jewish-Roman war which culminated with the sack of Jerusalem by Titus’ Roman troops. In so doing, Josephus was their key authority. The chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478–1557), author of the Historia General y Natural de las Indias, Islas y Tierra Firme del Mar Océano the first part of which was published in 1535 and which is today accepted as one of the principal contemporary works on the Spanish conquest of America included an extensive comparison of the fall of Tenochtitlan with the fall of Jerusalem acknowledging as its inspiration Josephus’ account. In Oviedo’s analysis, David A. Lupher has noted that Oviedo sought to imply that Spain had surpassed Rome, Cortés had outdone Titus and Oviedo’s history-writing had excelled that of Josephus, ‘a respected ancient historian’, which gives an indication of the high esteem in which Josephus’ work was held in sixteenth-century Spain. In his history, Oviedo does, in fact, concede that he had not been responsible for ‘the Jerusalem-Tenochtitlan parallel’ and that the parallelism ‘was standard among “muchos hidalgos e personas”. This is a valuable hint that the “Roman model” was not merely a piece of chroniclers’ pedantry, but a living formula of the oral tradition of the conquistadors’ and one in which Josephus’ The Jewish War, made accessible in Spanish through the converso humanist, Alfonso de Palencia, played an important role (see Lupher, Romans in the New World, 2006, pp. 35–37).

The text:

Josephus’ The Jewish War provides a first hand account and history of the First Jewish-Roman War (66–73 AD). Roman legions in Palestine under the command of the future emperor, Vespasian, were charged with subduing a Jewish revolt against Rome. Josephus originally participated in the uprising as a Jewish rebel commander in Galilee but, after he was taken prisoner by the Romans, he changed sides and subsequently earned Vespasian’s favour by prophesying that the latter would become emperor. He was thus present during the seven-month siege of Jerusalem begun by Vespasian but continued by his son, Titus, after Vespasian had been called to Rome to be proclaimed emperor in AD 69 (as Josephus had predicted). Despite fierce resistance, the Romans overran Jerusalem in the summer of AD 70 and the Jewish revolt was crushed. After the war, with his prohecy vindicated and Vespasian now emperor, Josephus continued in imperial favour and was granted a pension, Roman citizenship and property in Rome where he wrote four works, all extant.

The first was The Jewish War which provided a contemporary history of the conflict in which he had been a participant on both sides and for which he was granted access to the memoirs of Vespasian and Titus, both apparently having vetted his text. It was written first in his own language, Aramaic, and then translated into Greek and Latin, from which this translation into Spanish was subsequently carried out. As a result of Josephus’ account ‘we know more of Palestine in the first century AD than of any other part of the [Roman] empire: in Josephus, a Roman province found a voice and spoke of itself and of the experience of Roman rule. A writer neither Greek nor Roman had exhibited his people to a wider world, within the conventions of Graeco-Roman historiography’ (J. Burrow, A History of Histories, 2009, pp. 150–51).

‘Josephus was a Jewish scholar, a priest and a Pharisee. In view of his role in the war – which he ended, from a nationalist point of view, as a collaborator with the Romans – it is important to stress that, although he was no political radical, and deplored the rebellion and the behaviour of nationalist leaders, whom he saw as fanatics and terrorists bringing misery to his people, he was nonetheless a proud and patriotic Jew, anxious that the Greek-speaking world should understand and respect Jewish law and customs. This comes out most clearly in his last, polemical, work [the second work included in this Spanish translation by Palencia], which acquired the title Against Apion (Apion being one of the Greek critics he attacked), in which he set himself to refute Greek slanders against Jewish beliefs and practices and dismissal of the antiquity of the Hebrew sacred records’ (Burrow, p. 149).

According to ISTC, only two institutions in the United States hold copies: the Huntington and the Hispanic Society.

Goff J 491; Haebler, Bibliografía Ibérica 344; Hain 9461; Juchhoff, Druckerzeichen 96; Ruppel, Stanislaus Polonus s.103, no. 9; Vindel, Manual Gráfico-Descriptivo V 118, 40.