Descrizione

8vo (213 x 120 mm). 83, [5: catalogue of books published by Hendel] pp. Collation: A-B⁸ C-E⁴ F-G⁸. Contemporary cloth-backed marbled boards. Two small tears on the title page, minimally affecting the text. Oxford Bodleian Library's duplicate stamp. Engraving showing Chinese characters in the text. Lightly and uniformly browned, but overall a good copy.
Second revised and expanded edition.  Ignaz Kögler (1680–1746), known in China as Dài Jìnxián, was an eminent German Jesuit astronomer, mathematician, and missionary who spent nearly three decades serving at the Qing imperial court in Beijing. Born in Landsberg am Lech, Kögler joined the Society of Jesus and served as a professor of mathematics and Hebrew at the University of Ingolstadt before setting sail for China in 1715. Arriving in Beijing in 1716, he earned the trust of three successive emperors - Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong. He was appointed Director of the Imperial Astronomical Bureau, a prestigious role he held for almost thirty years.
His scholarly Latin treatise Notitiae S.S. Bibliorum Judaeorum in imperio Sinensi ("Account of the Sacred Scriptures of the Jews in the Chinese Empire"), represents one of the earliest Western documentations of the Kaifeng Jewish community. Kaifeng, located in Henan province, was home to an ancient Jewish population that had settled along the Silk Road centuries earlier and had her own synagogue with original Hebrew scrolls. Kögler examined these manuscripts, noticing that the Kaifeng scrolls aligned almost identically with European Hebrew scriptures, providing crucial evidence for the textual stability of the Old Testament. The work, particularly in its expanded 1805 edition published by the German scholar Christoph Gottlieb von Murr, also contains extensive comparative tables that line up the structural divisions, section titles, and verse counts of the Kaifeng Hebrew codices against European printed Bibles. It includes a detailed chronological table outlining the history of the Kaifeng community alongside Chinese dynastic timelines and early Jesuit encounters.
OCLC, 863630095