MENASSEH BEN ISRAEL’S
MISSION TO
_OLIVER CROMWELL_
[Illustration:
Menasseh ben Israel
from an Etching by Rembrandt
]
MENASSEH BEN ISRAEL’S
MISSION TO
_OLIVER CROMWELL_
Being a reprint of the Pamphlets published by _MENASSEH BEN ISRAEL_ to
promote the _Re-admission of the Jews to England_ 1649–1656
_Edited with an Introduction and Notes_
_By_ LUCIEN WOLF
_Past-President and Vice-President of the Jewish Historical Society of
England Co-Editor of the “Bibliotheca Anglo-Judaica,” &c. &c._
[Illustration: PEREGRINANDO QUAERIMUS]
Published for the
_Jewish Historical Society of England_
_By_ MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED, LONDON
1901
TO MY WIFE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE
The Jewish Historical Society of England, soon after its establishment,
resolved on the publication of the present volume as a memorial of
Menasseh ben Israel, whose name must always hold the chief place on the
first page of the history of the present Anglo-Jewish community. The
Society did me the honour of entrusting me with the preparation of the
work.
Menasseh’s tracts have been printed in facsimile. They have not been
reproduced by any photographic process, but have been entirely reset in
types similar to those employed in the original. Thanks to the resources
of the printing establishment of Messrs. Ballantyne, Hanson & Co. of
Edinburgh, and the taste and care they have devoted to the work, a much
finer effect has been produced than would have been possible had
photography been employed, while exact fidelity to the originals has not
been sacrificed.
To me the preparation of this volume has been a labour of love. Nothing
in the whole course of a very varied literary career, extending over
nearly thirty years, has fascinated me so much as the story of the
Return of the Jews to England. Its mysteries belong to the highest
regions of historical romance, and it forms a page of history which is a
real acquisition both to the annals of the British Empire and to that
wider and more thrilling panorama of human activities which depicts the
fortunes of my own co-religionists. I have not, however, spoken the last
word on this subject in the present volume, which is chiefly concerned
with the transaction with Oliver Cromwell in 1655–56 and its proximate
causes. I hope to tell the whole story in detail in another volume,
which I have long had in preparation for the “Jewish Library.”
The preliminary essay on the Return of the Jews to England is in no
sense a _réchauffé_ of the papers on the same subject contributed by me
to various periodicals during the last fifteen years. Those papers were
written at successive stages of an uncompleted investigation. The
present essay is a re-study in the light of all the facts, and it will
be found that some of my former judgments have been modified, and a few
even reversed.
I have to thank many friends for their assistance. Mr. Israel Abrahams
very kindly relieved me of the labour of reading the proofs of the
tracts, and made many valuable suggestions which have added to the
completeness and beauty of the volume. Mr. B. L. Abrahams was good
enough to revise my introduction, and thus saved me from not a few slips
of style and memory. The Rev. S. Levy has given me useful assistance in
preparing the annotations, and Dr. S. R. Gardiner was good enough to
place at my disposal his unrivalled knowledge of the politics of the
Commonwealth in solving some of the difficulties in the negotiations of
1655. My acknowledgments are also due to Miss S. R. Hirsch for the
excellent index she has compiled. Finally, Mme. de Novikoff kindly
obtained for me from the Hermitage Collection at St. Petersburg an
excellent photograph of the alleged portrait of Menasseh ben Israel by
Rembrandt, which I have reproduced, together with two other better known
and more authentic portraits.
L. W.
LONDON, _December 1900_.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION xi
THE RETURN OF THE JEWS TO ENGLAND:—
I. DAYS OF EXILE xi
II. THE HOPE OF ISRAEL xviii
III. CROMWELL’S POLICY xxviii
IV. THE APPEAL TO THE NATION xxxvii
V. CROMWELL’S ACTION lvi
VI. THE REAL “VINDICIÆ” lxix
VII. DOCUMENTS lxxvii
“THE HOPE OF ISRAEL, WRITTEN BY MENASSEH BEN ISRAEL”(1652) 1
“TO HIS HIGHNESSE THE LORD PROTECTOR OF THE COMMON-WEALTH OF
ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, AND IRELAND, THE HUMBLE ADDRESSES OF
MENASSEH BEN ISRAEL” (1655) 73
“VINDICIÆ JUDÆORUM, OR A LETTER IN ANSWER TO CERTAIN QUESTIONS
PROPOUNDED BY A NOBLE AND LEARNED GENTLEMAN, WHEREIN ALL
OBJECTIONS ARE CANDIDLY, AND YET FULLY CLEARED, BY RABBI
MENASSEH BEN ISRAEL” (1656) 105
NOTES 149
INDEX 171
PORTRAITS _Frontispiece and facing pages_ 1 and 105
INTRODUCTION
THE RETURN OF THE JEWS TO ENGLAND
I. DAYS OF EXILE
Shrouded in the fogs of the North Sea, the British Isles were, for two
centuries after the Great Expulsion by Edward I., little more than a
bitter memory to the Jewish people. In other lands they came and went,
but England was as securely closed against them as was the Egypt of
Danaus to the Greeks. With the exception of a few adventurous pilgrims
who trickled into the country to enjoy the hospitality of the Domus
Conversorum, they ceased gradually to think of the land which had been
so signal a scene of their mediæval prosperity and sufferings. The
Jewish chroniclers of this period, while dealing with the politics of
other European countries, have scarcely a word to say of England.
Towards the beginning of the sixteenth century the fogs began to lift,
and England once again appeared as a possible haven to the “tribe of the
wandering foot and weary breast.” The gigantic expulsions from Spain by
Ferdinand and Isabella had created a new Jewish Diaspora under
conditions of the most thrilling romance. The Jewish martyrs “trekked”
in their thousands to all the points of the compass, fringing the coasts
of the Mediterranean with a new industrious population, founding
colonies all over the Levant as far as the Mesopotamian cradle of their
race, penetrating even to Hindostan in the East, and throwing outposts
on the track of Columbus towards the fabled west. But this was only the
beginning of a more remarkable dispersion. The men and women who took up
the pilgrim’s staff at the bidding of Torquemada could only go where
Jews were tolerated, for they refused to bear false witness to their
ancient religion. They left behind them in Spain and Portugal a less
scrupulous contingent of their race—wealthy Jews who were disinclined to
make sacrifices for the faith of their fathers, and who accepted the
conditions of the Inquisition rather than abandon their rich plantations
in Andalusia and their palaces in Saragossa, Toledo, and Seville. They
embraced Christianity, but their conversion was only simulated, and for
two centuries they preserved in secret their allegiance to Judaism.
These Crypto-Jews, in their turn, gradually spread all over Europe,
penetrating in their disguise into countries and towns and even guilds
which the Church had jealously guarded against all heretical intrusion.
It was chiefly through them that the modern Anglo-Jewish community was
founded.[1]
The Iberian Crypto-Jews, or Marranos,[2] as they were called,
represented one of the strangest and most romantic movements in the
religious history of Europe. Marranism was an attempt by the Jews to
outwit the Jesuits with their own weapons. Both sides acted on the
principle that the end justified the means, and each employed the most
unscrupulous guile to defend itself against the other. The Inquisition
was ruthless in its methods to stamp out Judaism, the Marranos were
equally unprincipled in preserving their allegiance to their proscribed
religion. Abandoning their ceremonial, abandoning even the racial
limitation on marriage, the Jewish tradition was maintained by secret
conventicles chiefly composed of males, and thus Jewish blood and the
Jewish heresy became distributed all over the peninsula, and crept into
the highest ranks of the nation. The Court, the Church, the army, even
the dread tribunals of the Holy Office itself were not free from the
taint.[3] A secretary to the Spanish king, a vice-chancellor of Aragon,
nearly related to the Royal House, a Lord High Treasurer, a Court
Chamberlain, and an Archdeacon of Coimbra figure in the lists of
discovered Marranos preserved by the Inquisition.[4] At Rome the
Crypto-Jews commissioned a secret agent supplied with ample funds, who
bribed the Cardinals, intrigued against the Holy Office, and frequently
obtained the ear of the Pontiff.[5] Some idea of the social
ramifications of the Marranos is afforded by the careers of the early
members of the Amsterdam Jewish community. Many of them were men of high
distinction who had escaped from Spain and Portugal in order to throw
off the burden of their imposture. Such were the ex-monk Vicente de
Rocamora, who had been confessor to the Empress of Germany when she was
the Infanta Maria; the ex-Jesuit father, Tomas de Pinedo, one of the
leading philologists of his day; Enriquez de Paz, a captain in the army,
a Knight of San Miguel, and a famous dramatist; Colonel Nicolas de
Oliver y Fullana, poet, strategist, and royal cartographer; Don
Francesco de Silva, Marquis of Montfort, who had fought against Marshal
de Créqui under the Emperor Leopold; and Balthasar Orobio de Castro,
physician to the Spanish Court, professor at the University of
Salamanca, and a Privy Councillor.[6] It was by Jews of this class that
the congregations of Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Antwerp were founded, and
it was largely through them that those towns in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries were enabled to wrest from Spain her primacy in
the colonial trade.
At a very early epoch Marranos reached England. We hear of them, almost
immediately after the expulsion from Spain, figuring in a lawsuit in
London.[7] In 1550 a Marrano physician was discovered living in London.
Another, Roderigo Lopes, was court physician to Queen Elizabeth, and the
original of Shakespeare’s Shylock.[8] When the Earl of Essex, after the
sacking of Cadiz in 1596, brought the Spanish Resident, Alonzo de
Herrera, a prisoner to England, he turned out to be a Marrano. After his
liberation, this descendant of the great Captain Gonsalvo de Cordova
proceeded to Amsterdam, entered the synagogue, and spent his old age in
the compilation of cabalistical treatises.[9] Amador de los Rios states
that the Marranos founded secret settlements in London, Dover, and
York;[10] and it has been shown that they possessed a secret synagogue
in London early in the seventeenth century, if not before.[11] As in
Amsterdam and Antwerp, they were largely concerned in the development of
the Spanish trade, in the importation of bullion, and in the promotion
of commercial relations with the Levant and the New World.
While the people of England were unconscious of this immigration, it
could not have been altogether unknown in the continental Jewries. That
no trace of this knowledge is to be found in printed Hebrew literature
is not strange, since the keeping of the secret was a common Jewish
interest. It no doubt helped to stimulate Jewish hopes of a return to
England, which more public circumstances had already founded. The
Reformation in England first turned Jewish eyes towards the land from
which they had been so long excluded. They were especially interested by
Henry VIII.’s appeal to Jewish scholars during his conflict with the
Papacy in regard to his divorce from Catherine of Aragon.[12] Still more
deeply must their feelings have been stirred by Elizabeth’s struggle
with Spain. All over Europe, indeed, Jewish sympathies were with
Elizabeth. The secret negotiations carried on by Roderigo Lopes, through
his influential Marrano relatives, with the Grand Turk and with the
Hebrew bankers of Antwerp and Leghorn, have yet to be made public; but
it is certain that they played an important part in the story which
culminated in the confusion of the Great Armada. But it was the
increasing Hebraism of English religious thought, as represented by the
Puritan movement, which chiefly attracted the Jews. This movement sent
not a few Englishmen and Englishwomen to the continental ghettos to seek
instruction at the feet of Hebrew Rabbis, and even to obtain entrance to
the synagogue as proselytes.[13] When the Commonwealth, with its
pronounced Judaical tendencies, emerged from this movement, the Jews
could not fail to be impressed. The more mystical among them began to
dream of the Golden Age. Indeed the doctrines of the Fifth Monarchy Men,
carried to Smyrna by Puritan merchants, paved the way for the rise of
the pseudo-Messiah, Sabbethai Zevi.[14] The more practical saw that the
time had arrived when it might be reasonably hoped to obtain the
revocation of Edward I.’s edict of banishment.
Towards the end of 1655, the question of the readmission of the Jews to
England was brought to a climax by Menasseh ben Israel’s famous mission
to Oliver Cromwell. The story of this mission has been briefly narrated
by Menasseh himself in the _Vindiciæ Judæorum_, one of the tracts
printed in the present volume.[15] As my object in this preliminary
essay is to set forth the story more fully, and to endeavour to
elucidate its obscurities, I cannot do better than take as my text this
authoritative, though somewhat vague, statement by the chief actor in
the events with which I am dealing. Here is what Menasseh wrote under
date of April 10, 1656:—
“The communication and correspondence I have held for some years
since, with some eminent persons of _England_, was the first
originall of my undertaking this design. For I alwayes found by
them, a great probability of obtaining what I now request, whilst
they affirmed that at this time the minds of men stood very well
affected towards us, and that our entrance into this Island would be
very acceptable and well pleasing unto them. And from this beginning
sprang up in me a semblable affection, and desire of obtaining this
purpose. For, for seven yeares on this behalf, I have endeavoured
and sollicited it, by letters and other means, without any
intervall. For I conceived that our universall dispersion was a
necessary circumstance, to be fulfilled before all that shall be
accomplished which the Lord hath promised to the people of the
_Jewes_, concerning their restauration, and their returning again
into their own land, according to those words, _Dan._ 12,7: _When we
shall have accomplished to scatter the power of the holy people, all
these things shall be finished_. As also, that this our scattering,
by little, and little, should be amongst all people, _from the one
end of the earth even unto the other_, as it is written _Deut._
28,64: I conceived that _by the end of the earth_ might be
understood this _Island_. And I knew not, but that the Lord who
often works by naturall meanes, might have design’d and made choice
of me for the bringing about this work. With these proposals
therefore, I applyed my self, in all zealous affection to the
_English Nation_, congratulating their glorious liberty which at
this day they enjoy; together with their prosperous peace. And I
entituled my book named _The Hope of Israel_, to the first
Parliament, and the Council of State. And withall declared my
intentions. In order to which they sent me a very favorable
passe-port. Afterwards I directed my self to the second, and they
also sent me another. But at that juncture of time my coming was not
presently performed, for that my kindred and friends, considering
the checquered, and interwoven vicissitudes, and turns of things
here below, embracing me, with pressing importunity, earnestly
requested me not to part from them, and would not give over, till
their love constrained me to promise, that I would yet awhile stay
with them. But notwithstanding all this, I could not be at quiet in
my mind (I know not but that it might be through some particular
divine providence) till I had anew made my humble addresses to his
Highnesse the Lord Protector (whom God preserve), and finding that
my coming over would not be altogether unwelcome to him, with those
great hopes which I conceived, I joyfully took my leave of my house,
my friends, my kindred, all my advantages there, and the country
wherein I have lived all my lifetime, under the benign protection,
and favour of the Lords, the States Generall, and Magistrates of
_Amsterdam_; _in fine_ (I say) I parted with them all, and took my
voyage for _England_. Where, after my arrivall, being very
courteously received, and treated with much respect, I presented to
his most Serene Highnesse a petition, and some desires, which for
the most part, were written to me by my brethren the _Jewes_, from
severall parts of _Europe_, as your worship may better understand by
former relations. Whereupon it pleased His Highnesse to convene an
Assembly at _Whitehall_, of Divines, Lawyers, and Merchants, of
different persuasions, and opinions. Whereby men’s judgements, and
sentences were different. Insomuch, that as yet, we have had no
finall determination from his most Serene Highnesse. Wherefore those
few _Jewes_ that were here, despairing of our expected successe,
departed hence. And others who desired to come hither, have quitted
their hopes, and betaken themselves some to _Italy_, some to
_Geneva_, where that Commonwealth hath at this time, most freely
granted them many, and great privileges.”
II. THE HOPE OF ISRAEL
The first point in Menasseh’s story which needs elucidation is his
statement that he was originally induced to move in the question of the
resettlement of the Jews by the assurances of “some eminent persons of
England,” that “the minds of men stood very well affected towards us.”
How had this philo-Semitic sentiment arisen, and who were the men who
had communicated it to the Amsterdam Rabbi?
The evolution of English thought which rendered Menasseh ben Israel’s
enterprise possible is of considerable complexity, but its main features
are easily distinguishable. The idea of Religious Liberty in England was
due, in its broader aspects, to the struggle between the Baptists and
the Calvinists. The Reformation established only a restricted form of
Religious Liberty, and it was not until the Baptists found themselves
persecuted as the Reformers had been before them, that the cry arose for
a liberty of conscience which would embrace all religions. In the
Separatist Churches, founded by English refugees in Amsterdam and
Geneva, the idea grew and strengthened. The earliest noteworthy tract on
the subject—Leonard Busher’s “Religious Peace, or a Plea for Liberty of
Conscience,” published in 1614—was written under the influence of these
exiles, and it is noteworthy that already in that work the extension of
religious liberty to Jews was specifically demanded.[16] Amsterdam was
at that time the seat of a flourishing Jewish community, some of whose
members came into contact with the philo-Jewish refugees. In this way
they probably learnt to understand the political significance of the
successive rise of the Puritans and Independents, for at the very
beginning of the Civil War the Royalist spies in Holland noted that the
Jews sympathised with the Republicans, and even alleged that they had
offered them “considerable sums of money to carry on their designs.”[17]
The progress of Religious Liberty in the seventeenth century reached its
highest point, when in 1645 the Independents captured the Army under the
scheme known as the “New Model.” Meanwhile Roger Williams, the famous
Baptist, who had already founded in America a community based on
unrestricted liberty of conscience, had published his “Bloudy Tenent of
Persecution,” in which he generously pleaded for the Jews.[18] In 1646 a
reprint of Leonard Busher’s pamphlet was published in London, much to
the joy of the Separatists in Amsterdam,[19] and a year later Hugh
Peters, one of Cromwell’s Army Chaplains, wrote his “Word for the Army
and Two Words for the Kingdom,” in which he proposed that “strangers,
even Jews [be] admitted to trade and live with us.”[20] The question of
the readmission of the Jews was, however, still far from taking
practical shape. Although frequently referred to, it had only been
raised incidentally as an illustration of the advanced tendencies of the
advocates of Religious Liberty.
In December 1648, the Independents contrived the famous “Pride’s Purge,”
which put an end to the Presbyterian domination of Parliament. The hopes
of the advocates of Religious Liberty ran high, and the Jewish question
at once came to the front. The Council of Mechanics, meeting at
Whitehall, marked their sense of the meaning of the _coup d’état_ by
immediately voting “a toleration of all religions whatsoever, not
excepting Turkes, nor Papists, nor Jewes.”[21] To this the Council of
Army Officers responded with a resolution, the text of which has,
unfortunately, not been preserved, in which they favoured the widest
scheme of Religious Liberty. It was, indeed, rumoured at the time that
the Jews were specifically mentioned in the resolution.[22] However that
may be, it is certain that in the following month two Baptists of
Amsterdam, Johanna Cartwright and her son Ebenezer, were encouraged to
present a petition to Lord Fairfax and the General Council of Officers,
in which they asked that “the statute of banishment” against the Jews
might be repealed. The petition, we are told, was “favourably received,
with a promise to take it into speedy consideration when the present
more public affairs are dispatched.”[23]
Unfortunately, the “more public affairs” obstructed the triumph of
Religious Liberty, and with it the Jewish cause, for a good many years.
In the same month that Mrs. Cartwright’s petition was considered,
Charles I. was beheaded, and the chiefs of the Revolution, with a great
work of reconstruction before them, felt that they must proceed
cautiously. Toleration of the Jews meant unrestricted liberty of
conscience, and this was held by the extreme Independents to imply not
only the abolition of an Established Church, but a licence to the
multitude of sects—many of them of the maddest and most blasphemous
tendencies—which had been hatched by Laudian persecution and the
reaction of the Civil War. Cromwell and his advisers were resolved to
pursue a more conservative policy, and the toleration plans of the
Independents were accordingly shelved. For a hundred years—until,
indeed, Pelham’s “Jew Bill” in 1753—they were not heard of in this
purely secular shape again.
The cause of Religious Liberty was, however, not the only force which
was working in the country for the readmission of the Jews. The
religious fervour of the nation had been stirred to a high pitch, and
there were few men whose minds had not become influenced by Messianic
and other mystical beliefs. It is curious indeed to note that this
current of thought ran parallel with the evolution of the secular idea
of Toleration. Seven years after the first publication of Leonard
Busher’s famous Toleration pamphlet, Mr. Sergeant Finch wrote
anonymously a book entitled “The Calling of the Jewes” (1621), with a
prefatory epistle in Hebrew, in which he invited the children of Israel
to realise the prophecies by asserting their national existence in
Palestine. At the same time he called upon all Christian princes to do
homage to the Jewish nation. This early manifestation of Zionism did not
meet with much sympathy in high places, for James I. was so incensed at
it that he clapped its publisher into jail.[24] The book, however, was a
symptom, and the movement it represented only derived strength from
persecution. The gloomier the lot of the sectaries, the more intense
became their reliance on the Messianic prophecies. Even after the
triumph of the Puritan cause, the sanest Independents held to them
firmly side by side with their belief in Religious Liberty; and in the
Cartwright petition we find both views expounded. Extremists like the
Fifth Monarchy Men made them the pivots for fresh outbursts of
Sectarianism. Judaical sects arose, the members of which endeavoured to
live according to the Levitical Law, even practising circumcision.
Prosecutions for such practices may be traced back to 1624.[25] Some of
the saints, like Everard the Leveller, publicly called themselves
Jews;[26] others went to Amsterdam, and were formally received into the
synagogue.[27] Colchester was the headquarters of one of these Judaical
sects, but there were others in London and in Wales.[28] The practical
effect of this movement was not only the production of a very widespread
philo-Semitism, but a strong conviction that, inasmuch as the conversion
of the Jews was an indispensable preliminary of the Millennium, their
admission to England, where they might meet the godliest people in the
world, was urgently necessary.
It was this feeling which, on the collapse of the Toleration movement in
1649, began to make itself most loudly heard. Edward Nicholas, John
Sadler, John Dury, Henry Jessey, Roger Williams, and even Thomas Fuller,
who was far from being a mystic, urged this view on the public, and an
agitation for the Readmission of the Jews, as a religious duty outside
the problem of Religious Liberty, was set on foot. This mystical
agitation found a response in what to us must at first sight appear a
strangely inappropriate quarter. It brought forth from Amsterdam a Latin
pamphlet, entitled “Spes Israelis,” with a prefatory address “To the
Parliament, the Supreme Court of England,” the author of which was
Menasseh ben Israel, one of the Rabbis of the congregation. This
pamphlet illustrates the inception of the enterprise for the
Resettlement of the Jews in England, which its author endeavoured to
carry out six years later.
Menasseh ben Israel was the son of a Marrano of Lisbon, who had suffered
at the hands of the Inquisition, and had, as a result, taken up his
abode in Amsterdam. Menasseh was educated under the care of Rabbi Isaac
Uziel, and, at the age of eighteen, was ordained a Rabbi. He was an
indefatigable student, became a mine of learning, an accomplished
linguist, a fluent writer, and a voluble preacher. His attainments made
considerable noise in the world, at a time when public attention was
riveted on Biblical prophecy, and the question of its fulfilment through
the Jews. His voluminous writings obtained for him a high reputation as
a scholar, and the readiness with which he afforded information to all
who corresponded with him made him many influential friends, who spread
his fame far and wide. The secret of the distinction Menasseh secured
for himself, in spite of the weaknesses of his character and the
eccentricity of his mental tendency, lies in the fact that the world in
which he lived was very largely given over to philo-Semitism, and to the
special form of mysticism to which he had yielded himself. His alliance
with a scion of the Abarbanel family, in whose tradition of Davidic
descent he was a firm believer, inspired him with the idea that he was
destined to promote the coming of the Messiah; and hence the wild dreams
of the English Millenarians appealed to him with something of a personal
force. It was not, however, until the triumph of the Republican cause in
England that he resolved to throw in his lot with the Puritan mystics,
and even then he had some difficulty, as we may readily believe, in
adopting an attitude which would at once conciliate the English
Conversionists, and harmonise with his allegiance to the synagogue.[29]
At first his sympathies, like those of most of the leading members of
the Amsterdam community, seem to have been Royalist, for in 1642 we find
him extolling the queen of Charles I. in an oration.[30] In 1647 he was
still far from recognising in the Puritan revolt a movement calling for
his Messianic sympathy; for, writing to an English friend in that year,
he described the Civil War, not, as he afterwards believed it to be, as
a struggle of the godly against the ungodly, but as a Divine punishment
for the expulsion of his co-religionists from Britain in the thirteenth
century.[31] This letter is interesting as showing that his mind was
then already beginning to be exercised by the Resettlement question; but
he evidently had as yet no definite idea of taking any practical action.
In the autumn of 1649 a method of action was suggested to him by a
letter he received from the well-known English Puritan, John Dury, whose
acquaintance he had made in Amsterdam five years previously.
A friend of John Dury, one Thomas Thorowgood, was deeply interested in
the missionary labours of the famous evangelist, John Eliot, among the
American Indians; and in order to prevail upon the philo-Jewish public
to provide money for the support of the mission, had compiled a treatise
showing that the American Indians were the Lost Tribes. This work was
largely founded on the conjectures of the early Spanish missionaries,
who had up to that time a monopoly of this solution of the Ten Tribes
problem. It was written in 1648, and dedicated to the King, but the
renewal of the Civil War in that year prevented its publication.[32]
Thorowgood thereupon sent the proofs of the first part of the work to
John Dury to read. It happened that Dury, while at the Hague in 1644,
had heard some stories about the Ten Tribes which had very much
interested him. One was to the effect that a Jew, named Antonio de
Montezinos, or Aaron Levy, had, while travelling in South America, met a
race of savages in the Cordilleras, who recited the _Shema_,[33]
practised Jewish ceremonies, and were, in short, Israelites of the Tribe
of Reuben. Montezinos had related his story to Menasseh ben Israel, and
had even embodied it in an affidavit executed under oath before the
chiefs of the Amsterdam Synagogue. As soon as Dury received Thorowgood’s
treatise, he remembered this story, and at once wrote to Menasseh ben
Israel for a copy of the affidavit. The courteous Rabbi sent it to him
by return of post,[34] and it was printed for the first time as an
appendix to an instalment of Thorowgood’s treatise, which, at Dury’s
instance, was published in January 1650.[35]
This incident, coupled with some letters he received from the notorious
Millenarian, Nathaniel Holmes, came as a ray of light to Menasseh. For
five years he had had Montezinos’s narrative by him, and had not
regarded it as of sufficient importance to publish. He had, perhaps,
doubted the wisdom of publishing it, seeing that it tended to
substantiate a theory of purely Jesuitical origin, for which no sanction
could be found in Jewish records or legend. Moreover, he had no strong
views on the prophetical bearing of the question, as we may see by a
letter he addressed to Holmes as late as the previous summer, in which
he stated that he had grave doubts as to the time and manner of the
coming of the Messiah.[36] Now, however, the question began to grow
clear to him, and it dawned upon him that the long-neglected narrative
of Montezinos might be used for a better purpose than the support of
Christian missions in New England. The story was, if true, a proof of
the increasing dispersion of Israel. Daniel had foretold that the
scattering of the Holy People would be the forerunner of their
Restoration, and a verse in Deuteronomy had explained that the
scattering would be “from one end of the earth even to the other end of
the earth.” It was clear from Montezinos and other travellers that they
had already reached one end of the earth. Let them enter England and the
other end would be attained. Thus the promises of the Almighty would be
fulfilled, and the Golden Age would dawn. “I knew not,” he wrote later
on, “but that the Lord who often works by naturall meanes, might have
design’d, and made choice of me, for bringing about this work.”[37] In
this hope he wrote the famous מקוה ישראל which in 1650 burst on the
British public under the title of the “Hope of Israel.”
The central idea of this booklet did not occur to Menasseh immediately
on receiving John Dury’s letter. His first intention, as he explained in
a letter dated November 25, 1649, was to write a treatise on the
Dispersion of the Ten Tribes for the information of Dury and his
friends. The volume, however, grew under his pen, and a week later he
announced to Dury his larger plan. His letter gives a complete synopsis
of the work, and he finishes up by informing Dury that “I prove at large
that the day of the promised Messiah unto us doth draw near.”[38] Thus
he had already made up his mind on a question which, only a few months
before, he had assured Holmes was “uncertain,” and was intended to be
uncertain. Holmes was at the time unaware of his conversion, for, on
December 24, he wrote to him an expostulatory letter, in which,
curiously enough, he advised him to study the Danielic Prophecies.[39]
Still, Menasseh does not seem to have fully grasped the application of
his treatise to the Resettlement question, for neither in the body of
the work nor in the Spanish edition does he refer to it. It was only
when he composed the Latin edition that his scheme reached maturity. To
that edition he prefixed a dedication to the English Parliament,
eulogising its stupendous achievements, and supplicating “your favour
and good-will to our nation now scattered almost all over the earth.”
The tract produced a profound impression throughout England. That an
eminent Jewish Rabbi should bless the new Republican Government, and
should bear testimony to its having “done great things valiantly,” was
peculiarly gratifying to the whole body of Puritans. To the Millenarians
and other sectaries it was a source of still deeper satisfaction, for
their wild faith now received the sanction of one of the Chosen People,
a sage of Israel, of the Seed of the Messiah. Besides the Latin edition
which Dury distributed among all the leading Puritans, and which was
probably read in Parliament, two English editions issued anonymously by
Moses Wall were rapidly sold. Nevertheless, its effect proved
transitory. Sober politicians, who still recognised that the new-fledged
Republic had, as Fairfax said, “more public affairs” to despatch than
the Jewish question, had begun to fear lest their hands might be forced
by Menasseh’s _coup_. This feeling was strikingly reflected in a tract
by Sir Edward Spencer, one of the members of Parliament for Middlesex.
Addressing himself with feline affection “to my deare brother, Menasseh
ben Israel, the Hebrewe Philosopher,” he expressed his readiness to
agree to the admission of the Jews on twelve conditions artfully
designed to strengthen the hands of the sectaries who believed that,
besides the dispersion of the Jews, their conversion was also a
necessary condition of the Millennium.[40] Spencer’s tract was the
signal for a revulsion of feeling. Sadler, afterwards one of Menasseh’s
firmest friends, threw doubts on the authenticity of Montezinos’s
story,[41] and Fuller did not scruple to criticise the Zionist theory on
practical grounds.[42] Even the faithful Jessey held his peace in tacit
sympathy with Spencer’s scheme. As for Menasseh, he showed no
disposition to acquiesce in Spencer’s proposals. The result was that the
sensation gradually died away, though a few stalwart Tolerationists like
Hugh Peters still clamoured for unconditional Readmission.[43]
Thus both the Toleration and Messianic movements proved unavailing for
the purposes of the Jewish Restoration. There remained a third view of
the question which made less noise in the world, but which was destined
to bring about gradually and silently a real and lasting solution—the
view of Political Expediency.
III. CROMWELL’S POLICY
The statesmen of the Commonwealth, who knew so well how to conjure with
human enthusiasm, were essentially practical men. To imagine that they
were the slaves of the great religious revival which had enabled them to
overcome the loyalist inspiration of the cavaliers is entirely to
misconceive their character and aims. The logical outcome of that
revival, and of the triumph of the Puritan arms, would have been the
Kingdom of Saints, but Cromwell’s ambition aimed at something much more
conventional. Imperial expansion and trade ascendency filled a larger
place in his mind than the Other-worldly inspirations which had carried
him to power.
With the unrestricted Toleration principles of the Baptists he had no
sympathy, and still less with the Messianic phantasies of the Fifth
Monarchy Men which Menasseh ben Israel had virtually embraced. His ideas
on Religious Liberty were certainly large and far in advance of his
times,[44] but they were essentially the ideas of a churchman. Their
limits are illustrated by his ostentatious patronage in 1652 of Owens’
scheme of a Toleration confined to Christians.[45] Still he was not the
slave of these limits. The ingenious distinction he drew between the
Papistry of France and that of Spain, when it became necessary for him
to choose between them, and his complete disregard of the same
principles in the case of the Portuguese alliance, show how readily he
subordinated his strongest religious prejudices to political exigencies.
As for the mystics and ultra-democrats, his views were set forth very
clearly in his speech to the new Parliament in September 1651, when he
opposed the Millenarians, the Judaisers, and the Levellers by name.[46]
It is impossible for any one reading this speech side by side with
Menasseh ben Israel’s tracts to believe that the author of it had any
sympathy with the wilder motives actuating the Jewish Rabbi.
What was it, then, that brought these two different characters so
closely together? That the Readmission of the Jews to England was one of
Cromwell’s own schemes—part and parcel of that dream of Imperial
expansion which filled his latter days with its stupendous adumbration
and vanished so tragically with his early death—it is impossible to
doubt. We have no record of his views on the subject, beyond a short and
ambiguous abstract of his speech at the Whitehall Conferences, but there
is ample evidence that he was the mainspring of the whole movement, and
that Menasseh was but a puppet in his hands. His main motives are not
difficult to guess. Cromwell’s statecraft was, as I have said, not
entirely or even essentially governed by religious policy. He desired to
make England great and prosperous, as well as pious and free, and for
these purposes he had to consider the utility of his subjects even
before he weighed their orthodoxy. Now the Jews could not but appeal to
him as very desirable instruments of his colonial and commercial policy.
They controlled the Spanish and Portuguese trade; they had the Levant
trade largely in their hands; they had helped to found the Hamburg Bank,
and they were deeply interested in the Dutch East and West Indian
companies. Their command of bullion, too, was enormous, and their
interest in shipping was considerable.[47] Moreover, he knew something
personally of the Jews, for he was acquainted with some of the members
of the community of Marranos then established in London, and they had
proved exceedingly useful to him as contractors and intelligencers.[48]
There is, indeed, reason to believe that some of these Marranos had been
brought into the country by the Parliamentary Government as early as
1643 with the specific object of supplying the pecuniary necessities of
the new administration.[49]
Until the end of 1651 the Readmission question presented no elements of
urgency, because there was a chance of its favourable solution without
its being made the object of a special effort on the part of the
Government or the legislature. By the treaty of coalition proposed to
the Netherlands by the St. John mission early in 1651, the Jewish
question would have solved itself, for the Hebrew merchants of Amsterdam
would have _ipso facto_ acquired in England the same rights as they
enjoyed in Holland. That proposal, however, broke down, and as a result
the famous Navigation Act was passed. The object of that measure was to
exclude foreign nations from the colonial trade, and to dethrone the
Dutch from their supremacy in the carrying and distributing traffic of
Europe. Consequently it supplied a strong inducement to Jewish
merchants—especially those of Amsterdam who were then trading with
Jamaica and Barbados—to transfer their counting-houses to London. As
such an immigration would have well served the policy embodied in the
Navigation Act, it became desirable that some means of legalising Jewish
residence in England should be found, and hence the question of
Readmission was brought within the field of practical politics. This was
the new form in which it presented itself. It was no longer a question
of Religious Toleration or of the hastening of the Millennium, but
purely a question of political expediency.
It appears that the St. John mission, when its failure became probable,
was instructed to study the Jewish question, and probably to enter into
negotiations with leading Jews in Amsterdam. Certain it is that its
members saw a great deal of Menasseh ben Israel during their sojourn in
Holland, and that Cromwell’s benevolent intentions were conveyed to him.
Thurloe, who was secretary to the mission, had several conferences with
the Rabbi, and the Synagogue entertained the members of the mission,
notwithstanding that public opinion ran high against them.[50]
Strickland, the colleague of St. John, and formerly ambassador at the
Hague, was ever afterwards regarded as an authority on the Jewish
question, for he served on most of the Committees appointed to consider
Menasseh’s petitions. Still more significant is the fact that within a
few weeks of the return of the Embassy a letter, the text of which has
not been preserved, was received from Menasseh by the Council of State,
and an influential committee, on which Cromwell himself served, was at
once appointed to peruse and answer it.[51] Towards the end of the
following year two passes couched in flattering terms were issued to the
Rabbi to enable him to come to England.[52]
Meanwhile, the long-feared war broke out, and negotiations were perforce
suspended. From 1652 to 1654 the popular agitation for the Readmission
of the Jews spluttered weakly in pamphlets and broadsheets. In 1653
there was a debate in Parliament on the subject, but no conclusion was
arrived at.[53] In the following year, shortly after the conclusion of
peace, a new element was introduced into the question by the appearance
on the scene of a fresh petitioner from Holland, one Manuel Martinez
Dormido, a brother-in-law of Menasseh ben Israel, and afterwards well
known in England as David Abarbanel Dormido.
The mission of Dormido was clearly a continuation of Menasseh’s
enterprise, and it was probably undertaken on the direct invitation of
the Protector. With the restoration of peace on terms which rendered
persistence in the policy of the Navigation Act indispensable, Cromwell
must have been anxious to take the Jewish question seriously in hand.
The negotiations opened by Thurloe with Menasseh in 1651 were probably
resumed, and an intimation was conveyed to the Jewish Rabbi that the
time was ripe for him to come to England and lay his long-contemplated
prayer before the Government of the Commonwealth. Menasseh’s reasons for
not accepting the invitation in person are not difficult to understand.
He doubtless refers to them in the passage from the _Vindiciæ_ I have
already quoted, where he says he was entreated by his kindred and
friends, “considering the chequered and interwoven vicissitudes and
turns of things here below, not to part from them.”[54] His kindred and
friends were wise. Owing to his quarrels with his colleagues in the
Amsterdam Rabbinate his situation had become precarious, and it might
have become hopelessly and disastrously compromised had he, in the then
incensed state of Dutch feeling against England—a feeling in which the
leading Jews of the Netherlands participated—undertaken a mission to the
Protector. Hence the delegation of the work to his brother-in-law. An
indication of Menasseh’s interest in the new mission is afforded by the
fact that his only surviving son, Samuel ben Israel, was associated with
Dormido, and accompanied him to London.
Unlike his distinguished relative, Dormido had nothing to lose by
approaching Cromwell. A Marrano by birth, a native of Andalusia, where
he had enjoyed great wealth and held high public office, he had been
persecuted by the Inquisition, and compelled to fly to Holland. There he
had made a fortune in the Brazil trade, and had become a leading
merchant of Amsterdam, and one of the chiefs of the Synagogue. The
conquest of Pernambuco by the Portuguese early in 1654 had ruined him,
and he found himself compelled to begin life afresh.[55] He saw his
opportunity in the mission confided to him by Menasseh. It opened to him
the chance of a new career under the powerful protection of the greatest
personality in Christendom. Unlike his brother-in-law, he had no
Millenarian delusions. The Jewish question appealed to him in something
of the same practical fashion that it appealed to Cromwell. While the
Protector was seeking the commercial interests of the Commonwealth,
Dormido was anxious to repair his own shattered fortunes.
On the 1st September he arrived in London, and at once set about
drafting two petitions to Cromwell.[56] In the first of these documents
he recited his personal history, the story of his sufferings at the
hands of the Inquisition, and of the confiscation of his property by the
Portuguese in Pernambuco. He expressed his desire to become a resident
in England and a subject of the Commonwealth, and wound up by praying
the Protector to use his good offices with the King of Portugal for the
restitution of his fortune. The second petition was a prayer for the
Readmission of the Jewish people to England, “graunting them libertie to
come with theire famillies and estates, to bee dwellers here with the
same eaquallnese and conveniences wch yr inland borne subjects doe
enjoy.” The petition, after a violent tirade against the Inquisition and
the intolerance of the Apostolical Roman Church, pointed out that the
Readmission of the Jews would be to the advantage of trade and industry,
and would vastly increase the public revenues. These adroit appeals to
the chief motives of the Protector’s statecraft were followed by a
suggestion that in the event of the prayer being granted the petitioner
might be appointed to the control and management of the new community,
with, of course, appropriate compensation for his services.