privileges of the Marranos seems to have got abroad. Many of the Jews in
London were of Spanish birth, and others, though natives of Portugal,
were probably endenizened Spaniards, since in their guise of _Nuevos
Cristianos_ they had held high office under the King of Spain.[140] It
was clear, then, that if the case against Robles was established other
prosecutions would follow, and in that way the small Jewish community
would be broken up. The danger was all the greater since the protection
and privileges so recently acquired by the Jews had only been granted
verbally, and might easily be repudiated if public opinion proved too
strong for the Protector. There was, however, no immediate reason why
the leading Marranos, who had hitherto been in negotiation with
Cromwell, should take up Robles’s cudgels, for he belonged to a party in
the Synagogue which had imbibed strong Royalist sympathies in Holland
and France, and which, consequently, had kept itself aloof from
Menasseh’s Readmission campaign. They accordingly confined themselves to
the presentation of a petition to the Protector, in which they asked
that the “favours and protection” accorded to them, including the right
of worship, might be confirmed in writing. At the same time they prayed
for a license to acquire ground for a Jewish cemetery. This document was
signed by Menasseh ben Israel, Antonio Fernandez Carvajal, and five
other Marranos, but Robles was not among its signatories.[141]
Cromwell at once referred this petition to the Council, but the Lord
President, apparently recognising that the Jewish question was coming up
in a new form, held it back until the Robles case had been dealt
with.[142] The fact that Robles was a Jew had, indeed, already been
ascertained, and the belief that the prosecution was aimed at all his
co-religionists was gaining ground owing to a new outburst of activity
on the part of the anti-Semites. The anxiety of the Marranos at the
shelving of their petition became accentuated by this agitation, and
especially by the doubts which it seemed to be producing in the minds of
some of their best friends. The wavering feeling in high places was made
disagreeably manifest to them by a letter addressed to Menasseh ben
Israel by John Sadler, in which that friend of the Jews pointed out that
the charges of ritual murder and _quasi_ idolatry preferred by Prynne
and Ross were being widely discussed, and that a public answer to them
was urgently necessary.[143] Before Menasseh’s reply was written Colonel
Jones presented an interim report to the Council, from which it appeared
_inter alia_ that Knevett had filed a further information denouncing
other Marranos as Spanish subjects.[144]
It was now no longer possible to ignore the existence of an anti-Jewish
conspiracy. The first action of the Jews was to hurry forward the
publication of Menasseh’s reply to Prynne and Ross. This took the form
of the famous _Vindiciæ Judæorum_—the third tract printed in the present
volume. It was described merely as “A Letter in Answer to certain
Questions propounded by a Noble and Learned Gentleman touching the
reproaches cast on the Nation of the Jewes.” The date of its appearance,
however, fixes its relation to the Robles crisis, for it was published
ten days after Colonel Jones’s report, while the seriousness of that
crisis is strikingly illustrated by the urgent and earnest tone of the
pamphlet. Menasseh evidently felt that not only his own grandiose idea
of a new asylum for Israel was at stake, but that even the small
progress that had been achieved towards that end was threatened by a
more rigid exclusion of the Hebrew nation. He threw his whole soul into
this fresh vindication of his people and their claims. Nothing, indeed,
that had come from his facile pen had been more dignified, more
impressive, more convincing. The vanity, the superficiality, the
pretentious mysticism of his former works had gone. He was no longer
playing a part even to himself. He was merely the champion of his people
in a moment of their sore trial, writing from a heart whose every throb
was for their welfare and their honour. The simple eloquence of this
essay, its naïve garrulousness, the glimpses it yields of a pious,
gentle, self-denying character, made it one of the most effective
vindications of the Jews ever written. The best tribute to its value is
afforded by the fact that it has since been frequently reprinted in all
parts of Europe when the calumnies it denounced have been revived.
The _Vindiciæ Judæorum_ was a fitting prelude to the dénouement that
followed. With this certificate in their hands the Marranos felt that
they might risk claiming their legal rights as Jews, and thus at once
repudiate their Spanish nationality and challenge a settlement of their
status in the country. The decision was a bold one, but there was shrewd
method in its apparent rashness. If the Marranos were technically
Spanish subjects, they were in reality testimonies to the intolerance of
Spain which made that country, in Cromwell’s words, “the natural, the
providential enemy of England,”[145] and which was one of the grounds of
the war. Like the Protestant traders whose liberty of conscience had
been trampled on in Spain they also had been persecuted, though in a
worse form. They were fugitives from the Inquisition, and consequently
had a peculiar claim on the indulgence and consistency of the English
people, who at that moment were filled with righteous horror at the
religious policy of the “Popish enemy.”
In pursuance of this idea Robles now addressed a fresh petition to the
Protector, which reached the Council of State on the 15th April,[146]
five days after the publication of the _Vindiciæ_. In this document the
purely legal question of nationality was dropped, and Robles confined
himself to reciting how he and his kindred had been persecuted by the
Inquisition in Portugal and Spain, how his father had died under
torture, how his mother had been crippled for life, and other members of
his family burnt or sent to the galleys because they were Jews. He
related that he had sought refuge in England, “intending therein to
shelter himselfe from those tiranicall Proceedings and injoy those
Beneffitts and Kindnesse which this Com̄onw^{th} ever aforded to
aflicted strangers.” He appealed to Cromwell’s notorious sympathy for
“afflicted ones,” and especially “owr nation the Jews,” and skilfully
suggested that a continuance of his prosecution would be tantamount to
the introduction of the Inquisition into England. A week later
affidavits confirming the statements in this petition were signed by all
the leading Marranos and handed to Colonel Jones.[147] Thus the
Crypto-Jews threw off their disguise. In the investigations which
followed, the existence of over twenty Jewish families in London was
revealed, and it was given in evidence that many of them had resided for
years in the country.
These tactics produced dismay in the ranks of the anti-Semites. Knevett
made a last despairing effort to construct a fresh case against the Jews
by trying to bribe Robles’s servants to assist him in framing a new
information. In this he failed.[148] The case was now quickly disposed
of. On April 25th the Council of State, still anxious to avoid
responsibility for a decision, sent all the papers to the Admiralty
Commissioners, with a request for a prompt report. On May 11th the
Commissioners summoned the witnesses before them, but extracted little
else from them than that Robles was believed to be Portuguese, and that
they were all victims of the Inquisition. On May 14th the Commissioners
reported that they were unable to give a definite opinion on the
question of nationality. Two days later the Council screwed up their
courage to a decision, and, without giving any reasons, ordered all the
warrants to be discharged, and reinstated Robles in the possession of
his goods, premises, and ships.[149]
The Jewish battle was won, and nothing now remained but to secure the
fruits of victory in an inexpugnable form. What followed is, in detail,
a matter of conjecture, but the broad lines of the settlement we know
from the petition of the Corporation of the City of London, already
quoted. Rights of “cohabitation and trade in these dominions” were
formally accorded to the Jews in writing.[150] That this happened before
the end of 1656 we may gather from a statement of Cromwell’s intimate
friend, Samuel Richardson, who, in his “Plain Dealing,” published in
that year, says of the Protector, “He hath owned the poor despised
people of God, and advanced many of them to a better way and means of
living.”[151] The first steps were probably taken on the 26th June, when
the longdeferred petition of the Marranos for a license to acquire a
burial-ground and for a confirmation in writing of their rights of
residence and worship came up for consideration.[152] The Council, still
reluctant to engage their responsibility, made no entry of the
discussion in their Order Book, and it was probably arranged that
Cromwell should personally confirm the Jewish right of residence,
subject to an understanding that the spirit of the recommendations
presented to the Council after the Whitehall Conferences should be
observed. The right to acquire a cemetery was certainly granted.
Cromwell probably further engaged himself to instruct the London city
authorities to place no impediments in the way of the Jews trading on an
equality with other citizens.[153] On their side, the Marranos must have
agreed not to assist in an indiscriminate immigration of their
co-religionists, not to obtrude their worship and ceremonies on the
public, not to engage in religious controversy, and not to make
converts.[154] The restriction with regard to worshipping in private
houses was also probably revised, and the maintenance of a synagogue,
subject to the other conditions, sanctioned.[155] In February 1657
Antonio de Carvajal and another leading Marrano, Simon de Caceres,
signed the lease for a Jewish cemetery in Mile End.[156] Shortly
afterwards another result of the settlement was made public. Solomon
Dormido, a son of David Abarbanel Dormido and nephew of Menasseh ben
Israel, was admitted to the Royal Exchange as a duly licensed broker of
the City of London, the authorities waiving in his favour the
Christological oath essential to the induction of all brokers.[157] As
wholesale trading in the City was transacted exclusively through
brokers, the admission of a Jew to that limited fraternity is a
substantial proof of the acquisition of untrammelled trading rights by
the new community.
The victory, it will be observed, secured to the local Marranos all they
required, and in a measure realised the aims of Cromwell’s own policy.
To Menasseh ben Israel, however, it was no victory: it was a compromise
of a purely selfish nature, which left his idea of a proclamation of a
free asylum to the persecuted and scattered remnants of Israel as remote
as ever. We may be certain that he did not hide his grief or his
indignation. There is indeed abundant reason for believing that he
quarrelled over it with the new Jewish community. His hopes of returning
to his old position in Amsterdam were shattered, for the Dutch Jews, who
had always shared the Stuart sympathies of their Christian compatriots,
had formally abandoned him when they found they had nothing to gain from
his mission, and had opened negotiations on their own behalf with the
exiled king at Bruges.[158] He might, perhaps, have secured his future
by becoming Rabbi of the London community had he been content to abide
by the terms of the new settlement. This, however, he sturdily refused,
and although he was deserted by all his friends, and his monetary
resources were exhausted, he continued from his lodging in the Strand to
urge on Cromwell the issue of the proclamation on which he had set his
heart.
That he must have quarrelled with the London Marranos immediately after
the settlement is shown by a letter he addressed to Cromwell towards the
end of 1656, in which he asked for pecuniary help, and stated that he
(the Protector) was “the alone succourer of my life in this land of
strangers.”[159] Cromwell responded with a gift of £25, and in the
following March granted him a pension of £100 a year, dating from
February, and payable quarterly.[160] Unfortunately this pension was
never paid, and Menasseh became overwhelmed with cares.[161]
Nevertheless, for six months longer he doggedly pursued his mission. In
September 1657 his only surviving son, Samuel ben Israel, who had
remained with him in England, died.[162] Then his spirit broke. Begging
a few pounds from the Protector[163] he turned his steps homewards,
carrying with him the corpse of his son.
A broken and beggared man he met his family at Middelburg, in Zeeland.
He was now bent with premature age. The comely, good-tempered face, with
its quizzing eyes and dandyish moustache, so familiar to us in
Rembrandt’s etching, had become hollow-cheeked and hollow-eyed. From the
crow’s-feet under the temples the whiskers had grown wildly until they
formed a white patriarchal beard.[164] It was the wintering touch of the
hand of death. Two months later Menasseh died of a broken heart at the
house of his brother-in-law, Ephraim Abarbanel, in the fifty-third year
of his age.[165]
VI. THE REAL “VINDICIÆ”
One more question remains to be elucidated. How did the seemingly
precarious settlement of the London Jews manage to survive the wreck of
the Commonwealth?
Both Menasseh and Cromwell had builded more solidly than they knew. If
the solution of the Jewish question arrived at towards the end of 1656
was not wholly satisfactory, it was precisely in that fact that its real
strength lay. Experimental compromise is the law of English political
progress. From the strife of wills represented in its extremer forms by
Cromwell’s lofty conception of religious liberty on the one hand, and by
the intolerance of the sectaries on the other, had emerged a compromise
which conformed to this law, and which consequently made the final
solution of the question an integral part of English political
evolution. The great merit of the settlement was that while it disturbed
little, it gave the Jews a future in the country on the condition that
they were fitted to possess it.
The fact that in its initial stage it disturbed so little rendered it
easy for Charles II. to connive at it. Had Menasseh ben Israel’s idea
been realised in its entirety, the task of the restored Monarchy would
have been more difficult. London would have been overrun by destitute
Polish and Bohemian Jews driven westward by persecution, some
fanaticised by their sufferings, others plying the parasitic trades into
which commercial and industrial disabilities had driven the denizens of
the Central European Jewries.[166] Many of them would have become
identified with the wild Judaical sectaries who were the bitterest
enemies of the Stuarts, while the others would have given new life to
the tradition of Jewish usury, which for nearly four hundred years had
been only an historical reminiscence in the country. Under these
circumstances, we can well conceive that a re-expulsion of the Jews
might have been one of the first tasks of the Restoration.
From this calamity England and the Jews were saved by the restricted
character of the compromise of 1656. When the Commonwealth fell to
pieces the Jewish community of London consisted only of some forty or
fifty families of wealthy and enterprising merchants, scarcely
distinguishable in their bearing and mode of life from the best kinds of
merchant-strangers hailing from Amsterdam, Bordeaux, Lisbon, Cadiz, and
Leghorn.
Nevertheless, efforts to procure their expulsion were not wanting.
Royalists who recognised in them a relic of the hated Commonwealth,
merchants whose restricted economic science resented their activity and
success, and informers who imagined that their toleration was a
violation of English law, set to work early to denounce them. These
manœuvres began, indeed, as soon as the breath was out of Cromwell’s
body. Only a few weeks after the Protector’s death a petition was
presented to Richard Cromwell demanding the expulsion of the Jews and
the confiscation of their property.[167] At the same time, Thomas
Violet, the notorious informer and pamphleteer, made a collection of
documents bearing on the illegality of the Jewish settlement, which he
submitted to Mr. Justice Tyril, together with an application that the
law should be set in motion against the intrusive community. The worthy
Justice shrewdly suggested to Mr. Violet that in the then confused
political situation he would do well to take no action. It would, he
opined, be only prudent to await the establishment of a stable
Government before moving in so serious a matter.
A few months later Charles II. re-entered London, and the Commonwealth
was at an end. Naturally, everybody looked to the new régime to redress
the particular grievance or grievances he harboured against “the late
execrable Usurper,” and the anti-Jewish party was particularly prompt in
its representations under this head. Scarcely had Charles arrived in the
Metropolis when the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London
presented to him a humble petition, bitterly complaining of the action
of Cromwell in permitting the Jews to re-enter the land, and asking the
King “to cause the former laws made against the Jews to be put in
execution, and to recommend to your two Houses of Parliament to enact
such new ones for the expulsion of all professed Jews out of your
Majesty’s dominions, and to bar the door after them with such provisions
and penalties, as in your Majesty’s wisdom should be found most
agreeable to the benefits of religion, the honour of your Majesty, and
the good and welfare of your subjects.”[168] The long pent-up wrath of
the City found full expression in this petition, which must be read in
its entirety to be appreciated. Thomas Violet followed with another
petition, which was equally violent.[169] He declared that by law it was
a felony for any Jew to be found in England. He did not, however,
propose their expulsion, as he did not think that would be the best way
of turning them to profitable account. His suggestion was in the first
place that all their estates and properties should be confiscated, and
then that they should be cast into prison and kept there until ransomed
by their wealthy brethren abroad. A third petition, dated November 30,
1660, is preserved among the Domestic State Papers, but the names of the
authors are not given. It runs very much on the lines of the City
petition, but it admits the hypothesis of Jews residing in England under
license, provided they were heavily taxed.[170]
No direct reply to any of these petitions is recorded. The views of the
new Government are, however, no mystery. In the first place, there was
no real Jewish question in the country, inasmuch as the Jews were very
few, their character was above reproach, and the practice of their
religion was conducted with so much tact and prudence that it was
impossible in sober truth to be moved by Violet’s impassioned complaint
of “a great dishonour of Christianity and public scandal of the true
Protestant religion.”[171] Consequently the Government were free to
consider the question exclusively from the point of view of secular
politics. Once regarded in this light the conclusion could not be long
in doubt. Cromwell’s maritime and commercial policy had been adopted by
the statesmen of the Restoration, and the success of this
policy—represented by the re-enacted Navigation Act—depended to no
inconsiderable extent on toleration of the Jews.
Moreover, Charles was under personal obligations to the Jews, and had
assured them of his protection even before he came by his own. The Jews
of Amsterdam, and some of the wealthier Jews in London, had assisted him
during his exile, especially the great family of Mendez da Costa and
Augustin Coronel, the agent for Portugal and a personal friend of
Monk.[172] Shortly after the mission of Menasseh ben Israel to Cromwell
these Jews had approached Charles II. at Bruges and had assured him that
they had neither assisted nor approved the Rabbi’s negotiations.
Thereupon General Middleton had been instructed to treat with them for
their support to the Royalist cause, and Charles had promised that “they
shall find when God shall restore his Majesty that he would extend that
protection to them which they could reasonably expect, and abate that
rigour of the law which was against them in his several dominions.”[173]
That these negotiations were not without practical result is beyond
question, for the Da Costas and Coronels, as well as several other
Jewish families, were exceedingly active on Charles’s behalf during the
last few years of the Commonwealth.
It must not be imagined that this Royalist activity represented any
double-dealing on the part of the Jews. Those who, like Carvajal and De
Caceres, had fled direct from the Inquisition to England, were faithful
to Cromwell to the end. The Royalist Jews were men who had acquired
their Cavalier sympathies in France and Holland, and shared them with
their Christian fellow-citizens in those countries. None of them were
parties to the negotiations with Cromwell in 1655–56, and none had ever
affected Puritan sympathies. They probably had conscientious objections
to Republicanism, for they were of the aristocratic Sephardi branch of
Israel, with some of the bluest blood of Spain in their veins and
immense wealth in their strong-boxes. Their dissent from their Puritan
brethren was an early illustration of the falsity of the hypothesis of
Jewish political solidarity, which is to this day a cherished delusion
of the anti-Semites.
Charles II. did not confine himself to ignoring the anti-Semitic
petitions. Having made up his mind that the Jews should be protected, he
sought, like Cromwell, to throw the responsibility for his decision on
the Constitutional Government. Before the end of 1660 an Order of the
Lords in Council was sent to the House of Commons, recommending that
measures should be taken for the protection of the Jews.[174] There is
no record of any such measures having been adopted. It was probably felt
that the most convenient course to pursue was to continue the policy of
personal connivance inaugurated by Cromwell, as by that means men’s
minds would be least disturbed, and an experiment which was likely to
produce good results would not be hampered. Moreover, should the
experiment fail, it would be all the easier to deal with it if it had
not received any legislative sanction.
Accordingly, the Jews passed from the personal protection of Cromwell to
that of Charles. In 1664, when an attempt was made by the Earl of
Berkshire and Mr. Ricaut to obtain their expulsion, the King in Council
disavowed the scheme, and assured the Jews “that they may promise
themselves the effects of the same favour as formerly they have had so
long as they demean themselves peaceably and quietly with due obedience
to his Majesty’s laws and without scandal to his Government.[175]” A
similar course was taken by the Privy Council in 1673 and 1685, when
attempts were made by informers to prosecute the Jews for the exercise
of their religion.[176] Finally the King marked his personal gratitude
to the Jews by knighting Coronel soon after the Restoration, and by a
generous distribution of patents of denization among the members of the
Synagogue.[177]
Thus the Cromwellian settlement was confirmed, and the path was
definitely opened by which the Jews might win their way to the
citizenship of the United Kingdom.
How that path was successfully trodden is a story which cannot be told
in detail here. Its main feature, however, must be briefly referred to,
for it supplies the justification for the campaign which Menasseh ben
Israel and Oliver Cromwell waged so gallantly on behalf of the Hebrew
people in the first half of the seventeenth century.
The Jews won their way to English citizenship not because they remained
the _servi cameræ_, which had been their status under the Norman and
Angevin kings, and which they had practically resumed under the
Protectorate and the Restoration, but because they literally realised
the portraiture of the Hebrew citizen which Menasseh ben Israel vainly
placed before the British nation in 1655 in his tract, _De Fidelitate et
utilitate Judaicæ Gentis_. In this way they gradually substituted for
the personal protection of the Crown the sympathy and confidence of the
nation.