The first edition of the first English translation of the entire Hebrew Bible by a Jew.

Isaac Leeser (1806-1868), a German-born immigrant to America, contributed significantly to the growth of Jewish life in his adoptive country. Having published a five-volume Pentateuch-cum-haftarot (lections from the Prophets) translation in 1845-1846, as well as a complete, vocalized and accentuated Hebrew Bible in 1848 (the first such edition published in the U.S.), he proceeded, from April 1852 to September 1853, to extend his translation efforts to the entire Hebrew Bible. The result was his Twenty-Four Books of the Holy Scriptures, the first translation of all of Tanakh into English by a Jew, complete with short explanatory notes. Leeser explained in the preface to his magnum opus that he undertook the project in order to provide Anglophone J🅺ewry with a vernacular version of t🦩he Bible “which has not been made by the authority of churches in which they can have no confidence” (pp. iii-iv). The book achieved wide popularity among English-speaking Jews (and even some Gentiles), especially in America, and went through multiple editions.