With his unerring instinct for the drama of history, Churchill went to the heart of the matter: after almost four centuries, a Calvinist removed the ban imposed by a Catholic. It is interesting to find him defining that event not in terms of Christian and Jew, but of Calvinist and Catholic, reminding us of the role Protestantism played in Jewish history. It was a Protestant ruler who brought the Jews back to England. By the same token, we may be reminded of the role Judaism played in English history. It was to the Hebrew Bible that Henry VIII looked for the legitimization of his divorce from Catherine of Aragon, which was the initial impetus for the English Reformation. Because the Biblical sources were conflicting (Catherine was his dead brother’s widow, a marriage specifically proscribed in Leviticus and just as specifically prescribed in Deuteronomy), Christian Hebraic scholars were imported from the continent to resolve this problem, inspiring English scholars to engage in the serious study of the Hebrew language and Hebrew texts. In 1536, Henry established Regius Professorships of Hebrew at Oxford and Cambridge, a formal initiation, so speak, of the Hebraist movement which produced the “authorized” King James version of the Bible in 1611. From the perspective of his own day, a Victorian historian was especially appreciative of the profound moral change that that translation brought to the culture of England.
England became the people of a book, and that book was the Bible. It was as yet the one English book which was familiar to every Englishman: it was read in churches and read at home and everywhere its words, as they fell on ears which custom had not yet deadened, kindled a startling enthusiasm. What the revival of classical learning had done on the Continent was done in England in a far profounder fashion by the translation of the Scriptures.2
It was not only the popular culture that was so profoundly changed. Hebraism permeated the high culture as well, for it involved considerably more than the familiar Bible-reading and Bible-quoting in English. It required a scholarly knowledge of Hebrew, and not only of the Old Testament but also of the more esoteric Hebrew texts—the Talmud, Maimonides, and even the Kabbalah. Moreover it was not only Hebraic scholars who read and studied these writings. They were known, to one degree or another, by people of all callings—preachers, pamphleteers, poets, politicians, philosophers; and by people of all ideological dispositions—republican, monarchical, religious, even secular. Of the 150 sermons delivered in the Long Parliament between 1640 and 1645, five times as many were devoted to the Old Testament as to the New—and this by Presbyterians and Anglicans as well as Puritans.3
Even Hobbes, reputed to be the most materialistic and atheistic of philosophers, qualifies as a Hebraist. Much of the second half of the Leviathan is devoted to quotations from the Scriptures, mainly from the Old Testament, designed to demonstrate that the covenant creating society originated with the covenant of God with Abraham and carried out by “Moses the Sovereign Prophet.” “In short,” Hobbes concluded, “the Kingdom of God is a Civil Kingdom, which consisted first in the obligation of the people of Israel to those laws which Moses should bring unto them from Mount Sinai,” later to be delivered by the High Priest, and only finally to be “restored by Christ.”4 Hobbes may have meant this theological exegesis as window-dressing for his heretical (in Cromwellian England) political views. But it is significant that he felt the need to invoke Scripture at such length, that he was knowledgeable enough to do so, and that his readers were comfortable with his endless Biblical quotations and allusions.c
The Hebraicization, so to speak, of the culture occurred before there were any Jews in England, or at least any Jews publicly known to be such. But it did focus attention upon the Jews, the primordial “people of the book”—the Hebrew book. As early as 1621 one venturesome Hebraist scoured the Bible for predictions about the return of the Jews to their ancient land. Sir Henry Finch, a distinguished lawyer and legal scholar, published his findings, anonymously, in a book with a formidable title: The World’s Resurrection or The Calling of the Jews. A Present to Judah and the Children of Israel that Joined with Him, and to Joseph (that Valiant Tribe of Ephraim) and all the House of Israel that Joined with Him. The dedication, in Hebrew, repeating part of the title, adds: “The Lord give them [the Jews] grace, that they may return and seek Jehovah their God, and David their King, in these latter days.” Moreover, it was not individual Jews who were to return but the entire people: “Out of all the places of thy dispersion, East, West, North, and South, his purpose is to bring thee home again, and to marry thee to himself by faith for evermore.” In precise, almost legalistic terms, Finch analyzed the Biblical evidence for that return, insisting that the terms he used—“Israel, Judah, Zion, Jerusalem”—were meant not spiritually or allegorically but literally and specifically. “Israel” referred not to “the church of God” in the general sense which might include “Jews and Gentiles,” but to “Jews” alone—“Israel properly descended out of Jacob’s loins.” And their return was not only to their ancient land but to a “body politic,” a “kingdom of Jerusalem” which would be recognized by all other kingdoms, including those of the Gentiles.5
It was in the reign of James I that Finch issued this bold manifesto, which was far too Puritanical in spirit for the liking of a firmly Episcopalian monarch, and was especially offensive because it suggested that the English king would have to recognize as his equal a king of the Jews. Finch, who had dedicated one of his earlier books to James and whose legal disquisitions had been agreeable to him, was now persona non grata. He and his publisher were arrested, their houses and possessions confiscated, and their licenses revoked. Finch was released from jail only after recanting his “ill-advised” book. He died shortly afterwards—ironically, in the same year as James.
Toward the middle of the century, when the monarchy itself was in peril, Hebraism was fortified by another spiritual movement that had momentous consequences for the absent Jews. Like many Hebraists, Finch envisaged the ultimate conversion of the Jews, but this was not his immediate interest. It was, however, for Millenarians, who sought the conversion of Jews as the precondition for the Second Coming of Christ. And because that conversion, it was widely believed, could take place only in England where the Gospel could be taught in its purest form, the return of the Jews to England took priority over their return to Israel. Thus Millenarianism, flourishing in this period of religious and political upheaval, provided a powerful impulse for the readmission of the Jews to England after centuries of exile.
Among the other revolutionary ideas that emerged in this tumultuous time that which had an obvious bearing upon the Jews was the doctrine of toleration. Initially extended to Baptists and some other Protestant sects, it could be applied to Jews as well. Indeed, it might be applied to Jews more easily than to Catholics (or even Episcopalians), who were still regarded as the enemies of the Commonwealth. Although that doctrine was purely secular and political in principle, it was imbued with religious sentiments which were pervasive and compelling. “The Arraignment of Mr. Persecution,” a pamphlet in 1645 by the Leveller leader Richard Overton, argued for the toleration of all faiths, but even there the Biblical overtones were evident, for among those who were to be tolerated were the Jews, “the apple of God’s eye.”6 In the famous tract, “The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution,” by the American Roger Williams, religion figured not merely rhetorically but substantively. d Published in London in 1644 while he was on a visit there (and publicly burned, by order of Parliament, while he was returning to America), the book is as much a work of Biblical exegesis as it is of public policy. Indeed, much of the argument for toleration is based on Scripture—the Old Testament prefiguring the New (but also sometimes in conflict with it) and the New consummating the Old. “It is the will and command of God,” Williams declared as one of his opening principles, that “the coming of his Son the Lord Jesus, a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish or antichristian consciences and worships be granted to all men in all nations and countries; and they are only to be fought against with that sword which i
s only, in soul matters, able to conquer: to wit, the sword of God’s Spirit, the word of God.”7
In a sequel to the book, replying to the objection that toleration would undermine society as well as religion, Williams put the case for toleration in terms that would appeal to the secular-minded as well as the religious: “A false religion and worship will not hurt the civil state, in case the worshippers broke no civil law; . . . and the civil laws not being broken, civil peace is not broken; and this only is the point in question.”8 On a second visit to England in 1652, Williams addressed the question raised by a parliamentary committee: whether it was the duty of the magistrate “to permit the Jews, whose conversion we look for, to live freely and peaceably among us?” Williams’s answer was unequivocal: “I humbly conceive it to be the duty of the civil magistrate to break down that superstitious wall of separation (as to civil things) between us Gentiles and the Jews, and freely (without their asking) to make way for their free and peaceable habitation amongst us.”9 (This was the first usage of the expression “wall of separation” that was to figure so momentously in the history of the United States.)
Another pamphlet was still more effusive in support of the Jews, and particularly in favor of their readmission to England. “An Apology for the Honorable Nation of the Jews, and all the sons of Israel,” published in 1649 by an “Edward Nicholas, Gent,” reasoned that England’s present troubles were the result of “the strict and cruel laws now in force against the most honorable nation of the world, the nation of the Jews, a people chosen by God.” Unless the English atoned by readmitting the Jews, “God will charge their sufferings upon us, and will avenge them on their persecutors.” He himself, the author assured his readers, was motivated by “the glory of God, the comfort of those his afflicted people, the love of my own sweet native country of England, and the freeing of my own soul in the day of account.”10
It is against this background of Hebraism, millenarianism, and toleration—characterized by such notable historians as Cecil Roth and David Katz as “philosemitic”—that Cromwell was called on to consider the readmission of the Jews after the centuries of their exile.11 The “Calvinist dictator” described by Churchill (a “reluctant and apologetic” dictator) also saw good economic and political reasons for their readmission.12 By the mid-seventeenth century, the “New Christians”—Marranos, converted crypto-Jews who had filtered back to England from Spain and Portugal—had already proved to be a valuable financial asset to the government and to the country. And they could be even more valuable if Jews from the continent, and from Holland in particular, were encouraged to come to England, bringing with them the economic talents that had contributed to the prosperity of England’s chief commercial rival and military enemy.
The subject of the readmission of the Jews took a practical, political turn in December 1648, when a new constitution for England, the Instrument of Government, was being considered. One resolution called for the toleration for all religions, “not excepting Turks, nor Papists, nor Jews”; another recommended the repeal of the act banishing Jews. In January the Council of Officers received a petition written by two English Puritans living in Amsterdam, Joanna Cartwright and her son Ebenezer, proposing that “this nation of England, with the inhabitants of the Netherlands, shall be the first and the readiest to transport Israel’s sons and daughters in their ships to the land promised to their forefathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob for an everlasting inheritance.” For this purpose, it was necessary that the Jews “may again be received and permitted to trade and dwell amongst you in this land.” The Council did not reject this petition but nullified it, in effect, by decreeing that religious freedom be reserved to those who “profess faith in God by Jesus Christ.”13
Another petition, again from Amsterdam, carried more weight and was discussed more seriously. This came from the leading Dutch rabbi, Menasseh ben Israel (who may have inspired the Cartwrights). A scholar, mystic, and Jewish millenarian, he had been much impressed by a Marrano returning from Ecuador who reported on a group of natives who spoke Hebrew, practiced Jewish rituals, and were believed to be of the lost tribes of Reuben and Levi. If the dispersion had spread to that remote part of the world, the rabbi reasoned, England remained the only country where there were no Jews (at least none recognized as such). And since their total dispersion was the precondition for the Jewish messianic deliverance, their return to England was crucial. This was the message of Menasseh ben Israel’s book The Hope of Israel. Written in Latin and immediately translated and published in England in 1650 (with a dedication to the English Parliament), it was an instant success, going through three editions in as many years. It appealed especially to the Hebraists who were much taken with the citations from Deuteronomy, the Book of Daniel, and medieval texts, which seemed to confirm the account of dispersion and redemption.e
The author hoped to deliver his message in person, but because of the war between the two countries, it was not until 1655 that he was able to come to England, bringing with him “The Humble Addresses of Menasseh ben Israel, a Divine and Doctor of Physick, in behalf of the Jewish Nation.” (The original text was in French.) This not so humble petition called upon “His Highness the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland” to readmit the Jews under specified conditions: the free exercise of religion, the right to establish and maintain synagogues and cemeteries, the repeal of all laws against the Jews, an oath by public officials to defend Jews, the right of Jews to try cases by Mosaic law subject to appeal by civil judges, and the unrestricted right of Jews to trade. The Jewish immigrants, in return, would swear allegiance to the English government and would be kept under strict surveillance.
FIGURE 1 Petition to Cromwell by Menasseh ben Israel, 1656, National Archives SP 18/125, f.173. Copyright © National Archives
Menasseh ben Israel had good reason to think that the Lord Protector would be well disposed to his appeal. Two years earlier, toward the end of his opening address to Parliament, Cromwell quoted the sixty-eighth Psalm and called upon the English to fulfill its “glorious prophecy.”
Truly seeing things are thus, that you are at the edge of the Promises and Prophecies.... There [the 68th Psalm] it prophesies that “He will bring His People again from the depth of the sea,” as He once led Israel through the Red Sea. And it may be, as some think, God will bring the Jews home to their station, “from the isles of the sea” and answer their expectations “as from the depths of the sea”. . . . It shall be a gathering of people as “out of deep waters,” “out of the multitude of waters”: such are His People, drawn out of the multitudes of the nations and peoples of this world.... And indeed the triumph of that Psalm is exceeding high and great, and God is accomplishing it.15
Submitted to Cromwell on October 31, 1655, the petition was turned over for consideration to a committee of the Council of State. Two weeks later the Council reported the committee’s recommendation: “that, the Jews deserving it, may be admitted into this nation to trade and traffic and dwell amongst us as providence shall give occasion.”16 Questions raised by some members on the advisability of unlimited immigration were referred to yet another body, the Whitehall Conference. Presided over by Cromwell himself on December 4, the Conference heard the reading of the petition and then adjourned, to reconvene three days later for the debate. That debate and others in later sessions were serious and civil. One of the participants, commenting on the “very great injuries, and cruelties, and murders” inflicted on the Jews, found this was all the more deplorable because even after the Jews had rejected Christ, they still remained his chosen people, “beloved for their Fathers sakes.”17 The two jurists in the Conference pointed out that there was, in fact, no law forbidding the return of the Jews; the 1290 edict expelling them had been based on a royal prerogative and applied only to the individuals concerned. This seemed so compelling an argument that John Evelyn prematurely reported in his diary, “Now were the Jews admitted.”18 Opponents of the petition, however, r
aised economic as well as religious objections. Merchants feared the competition of the newcomers, and clerics were prepared to accept only those adhering to the faith of Jesus.
The most extensive and forceful argument against the petition came not from the Conference or the Council but from an outsider, the polemicist and pamphleteer William Prynne. Once an ardent Puritan, he had became an equally ardent Erastian, favoring a strict control of the state over all religious matters. His pamphlet, A Short Demurrer to the Jews’ Long Discontinued Remitter into England, was a chronicle of records and documents bearing upon the Jews going back to medieval times, intended to give a scholarly basis for the argument against their readmission. The documents themselves have earned the plaudits of later historians, including Jews, who have praised the work as “a monument of learning as well as of acerbity,” and have hailed Prynne as “the father of medieval Anglo-Jewish historiography.” 19 Interspersed with the documents, however, are more than acerbic comments about the people who are the subject of that chronicle.
A most rebellious, disobedient, gainsaying, stiff-necked, impenitent, incorrigible, adulterous, whorish, impudent, froward, shameless, perverse, treacherous, revolting, backsliding, idolatrous, wicked, sinful, stubborn, untoward, hard-hearted, hypocritical people . . . given up to a blind, obdurate, obstinate, impenitent, stupid heart and spirit, a reprobate sense, a cauterized conscience.... How can or dare we then receive into our Christian island, such barbarous, bloody, obstinate murderers . . . ?20
The People of the Book Page 2