Catalogo de' neofiti illustri usciti per misericordia di Dio dall'Ebraismo e poi rendutisi gloriosi nel Cristianesimo per esemplarità di costumi, e profondità di dottrina opera di Paolo Sebast. Medici sacerdote dottore in Sacra Teologia, Lettor pubblico delle Lett. Ebraiche, ed Accadem. Fiorent. all'altezza reale di Cosimo III [...]

8vo (150x100 mm). XXIV, 80 pp. Contemporary stiff vellum, manuscript title on spine (back joint partly cracked at the bottom). Ownership entry inked out on the title page. Some pale staining at the beginning of the volume, a good, genuine copy.
Rare first edition of this compendious work, drawn mainly from the Bibliotheca Magna Rabbinica, dedicated to celebrating the deeds of the most illustrious Jewish converts, a category to which the author himself belonged.
Paolo Sebastiano Medici, whose Jewish name was Mosé, was born in Livorno on July 30, 1671, to Alessandro “Leone” of Ancona. He was baptized in June 1688, on the eve of his seventeenth birthday, in the Collegiate Church of Livorno. He was an itinerant preacher in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and occasionally also in the Papal States, active in places where there were Jewish communities. From 1692, he taught Hebrew at the Florentine Studio and from 1718, he was a professor of Sacred Scripture. Author of numerous books, both in Hebrew and on biblical exegesis, he was noted for the particular vehemence and harshness of his sermons, delivered mostly in Livorno, Pisa, and Florence, where he took up residence. The Jewish communities, who were forced to attend sermons aimed at their spiritual salvation on Saturdays, protested against the fundamentalist violence of Medici's predication. A written protest against his sermons was submitted to the Holy Office in 1705 by the famous and highly learned Roman rabbi Tranquillo Vita Corcos, with the endorsement of Catholic scholars. In particular, Corcos eruditely rejected Medici's theses, which essentially sought to portray Jewish rites as superstitious and demonic. The fact that I riti e costumi degli Ebrei confutati dal dottore Paolo Medici sacerdote fiorentino (Florence, 1736), Medici's main work, was published only thirty years after Corcos' complaint, is considered by M. Caffiero as indicative of the Christian authorities' concerns about his work (cf. L'odio del convertito, in: “Battesimi forzati. Storie di ebrei, cristiani e convertiti nella Roma dei papi”, Rome, 2004, pp. 36-42; see also F. Parente, Il confronto ideologico tra l'Ebraismo e la Chiesa in Italia, in: “Italia Judaica. Atti del convegno internazionale Bari 18-22 maggio 1981”, Rome, 1983, p. 366).
Italian Union Catalogue, IT\ICCU\BVEE\027639; E.P. Goldschmidt, Catalogue XX, London, 1929, no. 212.