[Enchiridion.] Manuale di Epitteto con la tavola di Cebete Tebano. Versione dal greco del p. Giuseppe Maria Pagnini tra gli arcadi Eritisco Pilenejo.

Reggio Emilia: G. Davolio for Anania Coen, 1805. Very Good. Octavo (185mm); 40, [2], 36 pages. Bound in contemporary green pastepaper wraps, worn and perished at spine (reinforced with strong Japanese paper on spine and edgers). Pages untrimmed. Text block lightly foxed in places, but generally clean and unblemished. References: CLIO III, 1721; cf Brooks, #489-90; not in Oldfather.

After decades of ghetto confinement and yellow-hat stigmatization, the Jews of Reggio in Emilia enjoyed a period of liberalism in Napoleon's Cisalpine Republic, established in 1797. In this environment, Rabbi Anania Coen, melamed and principal of Reggio's Hebrew school, became interested in publishing secular literature. In association with Giuseppe Davolio, he issued Italian translations of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man, of some of Walter Scott's novels, and, here, the Enchiridion of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus together with the arcane dialogue on the meaning of art by a Cebes, a contemporary of Plato and student of Socrates. (The Italian translation of Epictetus by Pagnini had been published by Bodoni in 1793.) How odd that a distinguished rabbi, who would proceed to establish his own Hebrew press in Reggio and later in Florence, should promote the unorthodox and questioning philosophies of Epictetus and of Socratics! Coen's own work in Hebrew is equally fascinating, centered on rhetoric, on the development of a modern spoken Hebrew, and on Hebrew-Italian lexicography. Coen left Reggio in 1825 to become the chief rabbi of Florence.