Widely distributed among the public as well as in government circles, the Demurrer may well have tilted the balance against the petition.
On the 18th of December, when it was evident that the Conference could not come to a decision, Cromwell entered the chamber and berated the participants. To those objecting to the admission of non-Christians, he pointed out that it was precisely the Christian’s duty to admit the Jews to England, the only country where they could be taught religion in its purity, and “not to exclude them from the light and leave them among false teachers, Papists and idolators.” He rebuked the City men representing the interests of merchants who had so little faith in themselves. “Can you really be afraid that this mean and despised people should be able to prevail in trade over the merchants of England, the noblest and most esteemed merchants of the whole world?” The readmission of the Jews, he assured them, was in accord with Scripture, and so long as there was promise of their conversion, they should be “permitted to reside where the Gospel was preached.” A commentator on that session reported: “His Highness was eager for the scheme, if so it might be.” But it was not to be. When the Conference could not come to a conclusion, Cromwell dismissed it, taking it upon himself and the Council to resolve the problem for the glory of God and the good of the nation.21
The issue was not, in fact, resolved by Cromwell and the Council. It was settled the following year by the courts as the result of a simple judicial decision. With the outbreak of war with Spain the preceding autumn, the property of Spanish Marranos living in England had been expropriated. One of them, a wealthy merchant named Antonio Robles, submitted a petition for the restitution of his property on the grounds that he was not a Spaniard but a Portuguese “of the Hebrew nation.” On May 16, 1656 the Council judged in his favor and ordered his property returned. “As a Spanish Catholic,” Cecil Roth comments, “his position had been open to question. As a refugee Jew he was safe.”22 Thus the readmission of Jews to England was achieved by simply affirming the status quo, recognizing Jews as legal residents of England.
This judicial—not parliamentary—decision confirmed what Cromwell was doing in practice. Even while the Council was still debating the issue, a contemporary report described him as “conniving” to allow Jews greater latitude in religious matters, recognizing their right, for example, to worship privately in their homes.23 After the Robles decision, that latitude was extended. Permission was granted for the lease of a house as a synagogue and for the establishment of a cemetery. A Jew was admitted to the Stock Exchange as a broker without having to take the Christian oath. And Cromwell personally authorized the grant to Menasseh ben Israel of an annual state pension of a hundred pounds a year. (He did not have long to enjoy the pension. He died in 1657.)
Scholars have been wary of interpreting this event, and particularly Cromwell’s role in it, in the familiar “Whig history” mode, seeing history as the ineluctable progress toward a more liberal, enlightened, tolerant—and secular—age.24 In 1828, William Godwin (a radical rather than a Whig) provided just such an interpretation in his History of the Commonwealth. He then paid tribute to Cromwell (whom he disagreed with in other respects) as “sincere in his religion, fervent in his patriotism, and earnestly devoted to the best interest of mankind.” He particularly admired Cromwell’s “resolve” to readmit the Jews on the principle of toleration rather than religion.
It was an enterprise worthy of his character. His comprehensive mind enabled him to take in all its recommendations and all its advantages. The liberality of his disposition, and his avowed attachment to the cause of toleration, rendered it an adventure becoming him to achieve. As a man, he held that no human being should be proscribed among his fellowmen for the accident of his birth.25
This was not quite the Cromwell contemporaries knew. Churchill’s Cromwell was closer to the truth. It was as a Calvinist dictator, if a reluctant one, in a thoroughly religious spirit as well as a practical one, that Cromwell favored the readmission of the Jews. And the debate at the time reflected the religious passions of the protagonists as well as their economic interests.
If the “Whig fallacy” warns us against an overly secular view of the progress of history, it also warns us against too benign a view of those who professed to be progressive—enlightened, rational, tolerant. Even some of those who vigorously supported the principle of toleration and are generally identified with that cause revealed an antipathy to Jews that often overrode that principle. Seeking toleration for themselves, some Dissenters vigorously opposed extending that toleration to others. The Quakers who are now the most tolerant and unbigoted of sects, were, in this early period of their history under the leadership of their founder, George Fox, notably intolerant of others, including, or especially, Jews. In 1656, at the very time that the readmission of the Jews was still in question, Fox petitioned Cromwell to alleviate the situation of Quakers, who were being harassed for their aggressively anti-clerical, anti-political, and, often, anti-social behavior. Yet Fox himself was zealously anti-Jewish, denouncing Judaism as a corrupt, legalistic, pharisaic religion and inveighing against Jews as “Christ killers,” the “persecutors of Christ.”26
Hebraism itself might have equivocal effects. The most renowned of the Hebraists was the leading jurist of the time and Member of Parliament John Selden, whose biographer has bestowed upon him the honorary title of “Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi.”27 His book On Natural Law (written in Latin, as all his works were) focused on the Noahide laws, the seven commandments of the sons of Noah that were incumbent upon non-Jews as much as on Jews. In effect, Selden legitimized natural law by deriving it from Jewish law. Another of his books, on Jewish marital and divorce laws, was intended as a model for the reform of English laws. More ambitious was his three-volume work on the Sanhedrin, the judicial court of ancient Israel. Published in 1650–1655 (at a time when the English constitution was under consideration), it suggested a close parallel between the Sanhedrin and the English Parliament. Each of these works (citing Maimonides and other Hebrew scholars) was directed against those Protestants—Presbyterians, for the most part—who regarded Jewish traditions and precedents not as models to be emulated but as evils to be refuted and eliminated. Selden himself, however, knew few living Jews and had little concern for their conditions or status. Indeed, some occasional passing references to them were belittling or derogatory. Yet the undeniable effect of his work was to elevate Hebrew texts, laws, and institutions, giving them an authority and practical relevance for England at a critical time of its history.
A great admirer of Selden was James Harrington, whose work, although less scholarly than Selden’s, was perhaps more influential, if only because he wrote in English rather than Latin, and because his major book was in the guise of a utopia. (His utopia was also more influential than the earlier utopia, New Atlantis, by the more eminent philosopher, Francis Bacon.)f Published in 1656 and dedicated to Cromwell, Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana was a thinly disguised prospectus for the Commonwealth of England, spelling out in detail the constitution for a reformed England that would be republican, egalitarian, and predominantly agrarian. The Commonwealth of Oceana, Harrington explained, was inspired by the republics of Rome and Venice but principally by the “Commonwealth of Israel.” Unlike Hobbes who invoked the Old Testament as the ideal monarchy, Harrington cited it as the ideal republic, describing, admiringly and at length, the institutions of ancient Israel (including the division of powers and rulers chosen by the people), which were a model for Oceana and thus for England.30g
Modern Jews make their appearance toward the end of Oceana, perhaps as an afterthought prompted by the readmission debate. (Although published in 1656, most of the book had been written earlier.) On the penultimate page of this two-hundred-odd-page book, Harrington created a mini-utopia, so to speak, for Jews—not in Oceana itself but in the neighboring island of Panopea (i.e., Ireland). Panopea, “the soft mother of a slothful and pusillanimous people,” had been de
populated and repopulated with a new race, the Anglo-Irish, but they too had degenerated. Yet the island’s soil was rich and its ports commodious, and if it had been resettled with Jews, “allowing them their own rites and laws,” they would have come in great numbers from all over the world. Moreover, they would have come as farmers as well as merchants (as they had been in Canaan before their exile), thereby contributing to the desirable agrarian nature of the economy. Had that happened, all would have been well in that unfortunate island: “Panopea, being farmed out to the Jews and their heirs forever . . . [under specified expenditures of money and income] . . . , would have been a bargain of such advantage, both to them and this commonwealth, as is not to be found otherwise by either.”
Only at the very end of this mini-Jewish-utopia in Panopea does it appear that it is not quite so utopian. “To receive the Jews,” the concluding sentence reads, “after any other manner into a commonwealth were to maim it; for they of all nations never incorporate, but taking up the room of a limb, are no use to the body, while they suck the nourishment which would sustain a natural and useful member.”31 Oceana itself may appear to be something less than utopian, for that commonwealth, ostensibly modeled on the Hebraic republic, is utopian only because it is unencumbered by Jews—that useless “limb” sucking out the nourishment from an otherwise healthy body.
It was later said, by cynical critics, that Christian Zionists sought a homeland for the Jews in Israel so as to remove them from the countries they currently inhabited. This, in effect, was exactly what Harrington was proposing for Oceana. At just the time when the readmission of the Jews to England was being considered, he suggested admitting them not to Oceana, his utopian England, but only to the neighboring “degenerate” island of Panopea, where they could serve a useful purpose. The only reference to Jews in Oceana itself is a negative one. Earlier in the book, the principle of “liberty of conscience” is applied to those whose worship was “not Popish, Jewish, nor Idolatrous.”32
That Hebraism did not always signify a favorable disposition towards Jews is demonstrated by another much acclaimed Hebraist, John Milton. Puritan, republican, revolutionary, the scourge of King and Church, Milton is the hero of latter-day radicals, liberals, and civil libertarians. Areopagitica, published in 1644 during the Civil War, is still hailed as the classic declaration of the freedom of speech and press (with the caveat, to be sure, that that freedom did not apply to “popery and open superstition,” or that which is “impious” and “against faith or manners”).33 A serious Hebraist, Milton read the Bible in Hebrew, studied commentaries on the Scriptures as well as Maimonides and other Medieval sages, wrote learned theological discourses and Biblical exegeses—and, most memorably, left us a body of poetry steeped in the themes, imagery, and language of the Old Testament.
Yet even Milton’s admirers have cause for doubt and dismay. A careful reading of both his poetry and prose reveals inconsistencies and ambiguities in his renditions of the Old Testament and, more disturbing, a profound ambivalence toward Judaism itself. The title of an essay on Milton perfectly expresses this ambivalence: “Milton’s Dichotomy of ‘Judaism’ and ‘Hebraism’.” 34 Hebraism represented the positive, pro-Jewish side of Milton, Judaism the negative, anti-Jewish side. These were not inconsistencies or ambiguities on Milton’s part, this scholar maintains, but rather a conscious, sustained duality in his thinking, evident in his poetry but especially in his prose. Moreover, the dichotomy is not the familiar one between the ancient and moderns, between the ideal Jews of the Old Testament and the all too real and fallible Jews today. It is more fundamental and profound, appearing within Scripture itself. The Hebraic element is the “spirit” of the Old Testament, the universal, moral principle represented by the covenant of the Jews with God; it is this spirit that is a model for the English people. The Judaic element, however, is the dead “letter” of the Old Testament, the entire body of Mosaic law, including the rites and rituals prescribed in the Bible as well as the positive laws laid down by Moses and the rabbis. All of these Milton contemned as superstitious and pharisaic, a “curse” and a “death.” (The only exception was the law on divorce, of which he approved, at a time when his own marriage was troubled and he was contemplating divorce). And the historic people of the Bible, so far from being a model for the English, he vilified as “servile” Israelites, in “bondage” to the law, little more than “Judaizing beasts.”35
Unlike most Hebraists who celebrated the “Hebraic republic,” Milton saw in the Bible only a despicable and dangerous Jewish monarchy. In the early 1640s, he urged the Church of England to purge itself of its Judaic ceremonies and laws, reminding them that the Gospels had abrogated just those ceremonies and laws. And in the 1660s, he warned the English not to do as the Jews had done: “to put our necks again under kingship, as was made use of by the Jews to return back to Egypt and to the worship of their idol queen.”36 Whatever millenarian and conversion sentiments he expressed on other occasions, they were in abeyance as he contemplated the dispersion of the Jews, which he saw as a punishment—in perpetuity—for their iniquities, a lesson to others as well as to themselves.
[The existence of God] is proved also by the dispersion of the ancient nation of the Jews throughout the whole world, conformably to what God often forewarned them would happen on account of their sins. Nor is it only to pay the penalty of their own guilt that they have been reserved in their scattered state, among the rest of the nations, through the revolution of successive ages, and even to the present day; but also to be a perpetual and living testimony to all people under heaven, of the existence of God, and of the truth of the Holy Scriptures.37h
One scholar, concluding her account of the “fierceness” of Milton’s “theological anti-Judaic attitude” (comparable, she said, to that of Prynne), wryly observed: “We would like Milton, the most deeply Hebraic of English literary writers, to have supported the readmission of the Jews and their toleration. That would fit our cherished notion of the liberal Milton.”39 If Milton did not, like Prynne, publicly come out against their readmission, it was probably because, as an official in Cromwell’s government, it would have been impolitic to speak out against a policy that Cromwell strongly favored. But there is no doubt that the liberal Milton, the champion of freedom of speech and press, displayed toward living Jews the same “anti-Judaic attitude” that appeared in his theological writings. Yet it is Paradise Lost that is Milton’s great legacy, and it is this epic that brought the Hebrew Bible into the permanent canon not only of English literature but of world literature.i
The story of the readmission of the Jews to England is full of such anomalies and ambivalences. In this respect, as in others, it anticipated the future course of Anglo-Jewish history. The readmission came through the back-door, so to speak—not because of the petition by Menasseh ben Israel, or the efforts of Cromwell and parliamentarians, nor even because of the teachings of Hebraists and the aspirations of millenarians (although these always lurked in the background), but as the result of a single law case brought by a Marrano merchant born in Portugal. Having taken refuge in England, Antonio Robles sought noth-ing more than the return of his property, and he was granted it simply as a Jewish resident in England.
It was in this fashion, indirectly, often informally, always incrementally, that, in the course of the following centuries, English Jews attained the status they did, first as residents and then as citizens. It was also in this ambiguous manner that Hebraism and millenarianism, philosemitism and anti-Judaism played themselves out in public discourse and public policy, culminating in the acceptance of Jews as fully accredited Englishmen—and as fully accredited Jews.
II.
The Case for Toleration
It was with understandable trepidation that English Jews received the news of Cromwell’s death in 1658 and the restoration of the monarchy two years later. Yet Charles II proved to be surprisingly well disposed to the Jews, reaffirming (in the face of some anti-Jewish agitation) the Crow
n’s duty to protect them and their freedom of worship. In 1664, the Privy Council went one step further in establishing the legal residency of Jews. Responding to a petition by Jews, the Council assured them that they would enjoy “the same favor 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.”1
If Cromwell favored the Jews for religious as well as economic reasons, Charles, having little interest in religion, Christian or Jewish, simply found them an economic asset. James II continued that benign attitude, not out of any concern for Jews or the economy but rather in accord with the latitudinarian policy that was in the interests of Catholics. Shortly after his accession to the throne, confronted with a proposal that would have penalized Jews for not attending church, James issued an Order in Council reasserting the right of Jews to “quietly enjoy the free exercise of their religion, whilst they behave themselves dutifully and obediently to his government.”2 The Jewish community—or communities, the Ashkenazi and Sephardi often going their separate ways, a total of six hundred or so individuals at the time of the Restoration—grew and prospered, and even enjoyed, in some circles, a kind of exotic appeal. The synagogue in London became so much a tourist attraction—Pepys visited it at least twice, in 1662 and 1663—that the congregation had to limit visitors in order to maintain the decorum of the service.j
The “Glorious Revolution” of 1688—a title assigned to it at the time—may be seen as even more glorious in retrospect, for it ushered in a century of remarkable tranquility and stability, certainly compared with the turbulent times that preceded it. It brought to England a monarch who was even better disposed to Jews than his predecessors, perhaps because Dutch Jews had helped finance William’s campaign. It also brought back to England her preeminent philosopher, whose writings were to have a pacifying effect upon the country as a whole and an especially salutary one upon the Jewish community.
The People of the Book Page 3