Écrit par le quel on montre évidemment que dans peu de temps le Commerce sera entièrement detruit dans Avignon, & dans le Comtat, si on n'a recours à des remedes prompts & efficaces ["Writing wherein we clearly demonstrate how trade in Avignon and Comtat will be swiftly (and) utterly ruined, if we do not resort to hasty and effective measures"]. Unnamed printer and place of publication. 1736. French. Rare.

Antisemitic composition purporting to demonstrate the negative influence of the local Jews on the economy of the city of Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin (an enclave in the Provence region, subject at the time to the direct rule of the Pope). The work was published in 1736, many years after the expulsion of Jews from France in the 14th through 16th centuries. It was, in effect, an attempt to convince Pope Clement XII to expel the Jews under his protection from the territories of the Papal State in the region of Provence; this was the only Jewish community not to be expelled from France in the previous centuries.
"The Pope’s Jews" (French: "Juifs du Pape") was the term used in reference to small Jewish communities in Provence which remained under the tutelage and direct rule of the Pope over a period of hundreds of years. Members of these communities were spared from expulsion and other legal persecutions by virtue of their residence in the Papal State, in an enclave belonging to the Holy See in the district of the Comtat Venaissin (in what is today Vaucluse, in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region of France) and were thus immune to the various decrees issued by the kings and rulers of France.
Following the expulsions of Jews from Northern France (1394), Spain (1492), Portugal (1497), and Provence (1501), the enclave remained, for centuries, the only district in all of France and most of Western Europe to be home to a Jewish presence of any kind. The "Pope’s Jews" lived in relative isolation from the rest of the Jewish world; as such, they maintained customs, a "nusach" (version) of prayer, and a spoken language that were peculiar and distinctive only to them. Throughout the period in question, the Jews of the enclave were concentrated in four ghettoes, in the city of Avignon, the communes of Cavaillon and Carpentras, and the town of L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. Together, they were known as "the Four Communities" or the "CLA Communities". In the wake of the French Revolution and the reforms of the Napoleonic Code – and with the granting of equal rights and freedom of movement to Jews in France – the Jewish population in the Four Communities gradually and steadily declined, until it disappeared entirely in the course of the Holocaust.

128 pages. 18 cm. Good-fair condition. Stains, incl. minor dampstains. Tears and pinholes to edges of leaves, causing minor damage to page numbers. New leather binding.

For a bibliography of the literature relating to the Jews of the Four Communities, see Hebrew description.