Part 3

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.

Despite their obviously selfish motives, Cromwell received these petitions with significant graciousness. They were at once sent to the Council, with an endorsement, stating that “His Highnes is pleased in an especiall manner to recommend these two annexed papers to the speedy consideracion of the Councell, that the Peticion may receive all due satisfacion and withall convenient speed.” It is impossible not to be struck by the pressing nature of this recommendation, when it is considered that the chief petition dealt with a very large and important political question, and that its signatory was a man wholly unknown in England. Cromwell’s action can only be explained by the theory that he was, as I have suggested, the instigator of the whole movement. Whether the Council were aware of this or not is impossible to say. They had as yet no decided opinions on the subject, but they saw that it was a large and difficult question, that its bearings were imperfectly known, and that its decision, either one way or the other, involved a very serious responsibility at a time when the religious element wielded so much power in the country, and withal so capriciously. At the personal instigation of the Protector, however, they consented to appoint a committee to consider the petitions. A month later, taking advantage of a meeting at which Cromwell was not present, the committee verbally reported, and the Council resolved, that it “saw no excuse to make any order.”[57]

That Cromwell was disappointed by this result he speedily made clear. In regard to the Resettlement petition, he did not care to take the responsibility of giving a decision; but on the other petition he took immediate steps to afford satisfaction to Dormido, in spite of the refusal of the Council to have anything to do with it. He addressed an autograph letter to the King of Portugal, asking him as a personal favour to restore Dormido’s property, or to make him full compensation for his losses.[58] Seeing that Dormido was an alien, and had absolutely no claim on the British Government, this personal intervention by Cromwell on his behalf affords a further strong presumption of his privity to the Jewish mission. It is also not a little significant that a few months later the Protector granted a patent of denization to Antonio Fernandez Carvajal, the chief of the little Marrano community in London, and his two sons.[59]

The question was, however, not allowed to rest here. Cromwell wanted an authoritative decision, which would enable him to do more than merely protect individual Jews, and it was clear that this could not be obtained unless a more important person than Dormido were induced to take the matter in hand. The question had to be raised to a higher level, and for this purpose it was necessary that it should make some noise in the country. Only one European Jew had sufficient influence in England to stimulate the popular imagination, and to justify the Government in taking serious steps for the solution of the question. That man was the author of the “Hope of Israel.” In May 1655 it was decided to send Samuel ben Israel back to Amsterdam to lay the case before his father, and persuade him to come to London.[60] There is no mystery as to who suggested this step. Menasseh in his diplomatic way merely tells us he was informed that his “coming over would not be altogether unwelcome to His Highness the Lord Protector.”[61] There is, however, a letter extant from John Sadler to Richard Cromwell, written shortly after Oliver’s death, in which it is definitely stated that Menasseh was invited “by some letters of your late royall father.”[62] Sadler no doubt spoke from personal knowledge, for in 1654 he was acting as private secretary to the Protector, and the endorsement on Dormido’s petitions recommending them to the Council bears his signature.[63] Under these circumstances we can well understand that Menasseh was induced, as he says, to “conceive great hopes,” and that he resolved to undertake the journey. In October he arrived in London with the MS. of his famous “Humble Addresses” in his pocket.

During the five months that Menasseh was preparing for his journey, Cromwell was not idle. Colonial questions were occupying his mind very largely, and on these questions he was in the habit of receiving advice from one at least of the London Marranos, Simon de Caceres, a relative of Spinoza, and an eminent merchant who had large interests in the West Indies, and had enjoyed the special favour of the King of Denmark and the Queen of Sweden.[64] It was no doubt at the instigation of De Caceres that in April 1655 Cromwell sent a Jewish physician, Abraham de Mercado, with his son Raphael to Barbados.[65] Later in the year he was deep in consultation with De Caceres in regard to the defences of the newly acquired island of Jamaica, and a plan for the conquest of Chili.[66] The most important result of these confabulations was a scheme for colonising Surinam (which since 1650 had been a British colony) with the Jewish fugitives from Brazil, who had been obliged to leave Pernambuco and Recife through the Portuguese reoccupation of those towns. The idea was, no doubt, suggested by Dormido, himself one of the victims of the Portuguese conquest. In order to attract the Jews, they were granted a charter in which full liberty of conscience was secured to them, together with civil rights, a large measure of communal autonomy, and important land grants.[67]

Thus a beginning was made in the solution of the Jewish question by their admission as citizens to one of the colonial dependencies of Great Britain. This was the first important step achieved by Cromwell, and it illustrates at once his deep interest in the Jewish question, and the practical considerations which actuated him in seeking its solution.

IV. THE APPEAL TO THE NATION

On his arrival in London, Menasseh, with his retinue of three Rabbis,[68] was lodged with much ceremony in one of the houses opposite the New Exchange, in the then fashionable Strand, the Piccadilly of its day. These houses were frequented by distinguished strangers who desired to be near the centre of official life at Whitehall, and the fact that Menasseh with his slender purse took up his abode in one of them, instead of seeking hospitality with his brother-in-law or his Marrano co-religionists in the city, shows at once the importance with which his mission was invested.[69] He was the guest of the Protector, bidden to London to discuss high affairs of state, and as such it was obviously inadmissible that he should be hidden away in some obscure address in an East-End Alsatia.

His first task after he had settled down in his “study” in the Strand was to print his “Humble Addresses,” in which he appealed to the Protector and the Commonwealth to readmit the Jews, and stated the grounds of his petition. This tract was written and translated into English long before he left Amsterdam. It had probably been prepared three years before, when he first received his passes for England. That it was in existence at a time when his final mission was uncontemplated is proved by its mention in a list of his works he sent to Felgenhauer in February 1655 (N.S.).[70] The title is there given as _De Fidelitate et Utilitate Judaicæ Gentis_, and it is described as _Libellus Anglicus_. This was nine months before he arrived in London, and three and a half months before his brother-in-law sent for him. My impression is that the tract was prepared at the time of the St. John mission in 1651, and that Menasseh had drafted it in accordance with the advice of Thurloe, who had pointed out that the faithfulness and profitableness of the Jewish people were likely to weigh more with Cromwell than the relation of their dispersion to the Messianic Age.

At any rate, the style and matter of the pamphlet are in welcome contrast to the fantastical theories of the “Hope of Israel,” resembling more the matter-of-fact petition of Dormido. The Danielic prophecy is, it is true, still asserted, but only as an aside, the case for the Readmission being argued almost exclusively on grounds of political expediency. Incidentally certain floating calumnies against the Jews—such as their alleged usury, the slaying of infants for the Passover, and their conversion of Christians—are discussed and refuted. In regard to the conversion of Christians, Menasseh had completely changed his attitude since writing the “Hope of Israel,” for in that work he had boasted of the conversions made by the Jews in Spain.[71] The prudent restraints Menasseh had imposed upon himself in the composition of this pamphlet are the more marked, since we know that he had in no way modified his original views as expounded in the “Hope of Israel.” This is shown by a letter he wrote to Felgenhauer early in the year, thanking him for dedicating to him the _Bonum Nuncium Israeli_, one of the maddest rhapsodies ever written.[72] In this letter he reiterated all his former views, with the exception of his belief in the imminence of the Millennium. Nor had he adopted any idea of compromising the question of the Readmission to meet the prejudices or fears of the various political and religious factions in England. His demand was for absolute freedom of ingress and settlement for all Jews and the unfettered exercise of their religion, “whiles we expect with you the Hope of Israel to be revealed.” The necessity of such a privilege had been the more impressed upon him by the renewal of the persecutions of his co-religionists in Poland, which had sent a great wave of destitute Jews westward. It was primarily for them and for the Marranos of Spain and Portugal that he hoped to find an unrestricted asylum in England.[73]

Until the publication of the “Humble Addresses,” there are but scanty clues in the printed literature of the time to the frame of mind in which Menasseh’s mission found the English public. It would seem, from the silence of the printing-presses, that the nearer the people approached the Readmission question as a problem of practical politics, the less enthusiastic they became for its solution. This is not difficult to understand. The secular Tolerationists were unable to make headway against the dangers of unlimited sectarianism, to which their doctrines seemed calculated to open the door. Of their chief exponents, Roger Williams was in America, John Sadler was muzzled by the responsibilities of office, and Hugh Peters was without an influential following. Moreover, the prosecutions of James Naylor and Biddle were then prominently before the public as a lesson that Toleration had yet to triumph within the Christian pale. The Conversionists and Millenarians, who formed the great majority of the Judeophils, and who included all Menasseh’s own friends except Sadler, attached no importance to the terms on which the Jews might be admitted, and were quite willing to acquiesce in legislative restrictions provided only they were admitted. The Economists and Political Opportunists, represented by Cromwell, Thurloe, Blake, and Monk,[74] did not dare to confess their true motives, since their worldly aims would on the one hand have been condemned by all the religious partisans of the Readmission, and on the other, would have alarmed the merchants of London, who had no desire for the commercial competition of a privileged colony of Hebrew traders.

This discouraging state of affairs was aggravated by foreign and Royalist intrigues. From the moment Menasseh’s mission was thought of, the Embassies in London and the Royalist agents set to work to defeat it. The Embassies, especially that of Holland, opposed it on its true grounds, as a development of the policy of the Navigation Act.[75] The Royalists were anxious to defeat it because, as Whitelock says, “it was a business of much importance to the Commonwealth, and the Protector was earnestly set upon it.”[76] Moreover, they had hoped to attract the Jews to their own cause, and they had been encouraged in this hope by the substantial assistance already rendered to them by wealthy Hebrews, like the Da Costas and Coronels.[77] An intercepted letter from Sir Edward Nicholas, Secretary to the exiled King, shows that the highest Royalist circles took a profound interest in the Jewish question, and made it their business to be well informed as to its progress. Nicholas, indeed, seems to have known all about the negotiations which preceded Menasseh’s journey to England.[78]

As soon as Menasseh reached London, he found himself the object of a host of calumnious legends, clearly designed by the Royalists and foreign agents to disturb the public mind. The story that the Jews had offered to buy St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Bodleian Library, which had been circulated unheeded in 1649, was revived.[79] One of Menasseh’s retinue was accused of wishing to identify Cromwell as the Jewish Messiah, and it was circumstantially stated that he had investigated the Protector’s pedigree in order to prove his Davidic descent.[80] It was declared that Cromwell harboured a design to hand over to the Jews the farming of the customs.[81] At the same time their character was painted in the darkest colours.[82] One of the most insidious forms that this campaign took was an attempt to show that the hope of converting the Jews, by which the larger number of the friends of the Readmission were actuated, was illusory, and that so far from becoming Christians, the Jews would “stone Christ to death.” For this purpose the pen of a converted Jew, named Paul Isaiah, who had served as a trooper in Rupert’s Horse, was requisitioned.[83] It was a hazardous experiment to employ Isaiah, for he might easily have been hailed by the Conversionists as a proof of the convertibility of the Jews. It was, however, notorious that he had learnt the ethics of the wilder Cavalier swashbucklers only too well,[84] and he was consequently regarded rather as an “awful example” of the sort of Jew who might be expected to listen to the Gospel than as an encouragement to hope for the salvation of the whole people.

The publication of the “Humble Addresses” only aggravated these popular misgivings. While the clerical and commercial Anti-Semites disputed all the propositions of Menasseh’s pamphlet, the visionaries and friends of Israel strongly resented the “sinfulness” of its insistence on the profitableness of the Jews. The bias of public feeling, as revealed by the tracts to which the “Humble Addresses” gave rise, was distinctly less favourable than in 1649, and was overwhelmingly hostile to an unreserved acquiescence in the terms of the Jewish petition. In 1649 an honest attempt to understand Judaism was made, as we may see by the publication of Chilmead’s translation of Leo de Modena’s _Historia dei riti ebraici_. There is no trace of an appeal to this or any similarly authoritative work in 1655–56, except in a stray passage of an isolated protest against the calumnies heaped on the Jews.[85] On the contrary, the efforts of the new students of Judaism, like Alexander Ross, were devoted to proving that the Jews had nothing in common with Christians, and that their religion “is not founded on Moses and the Law, but on idle and foolish traditions of the Rabbins”—that it was, in fact, a sort of Paganism.[86] The historical attacks on the Jews were the most powerful that had yet been made, while the replies to them were few and by obscure writers.[87] What is most significant, however, is that the chief friends of the Jews—the men who had encouraged Menasseh six years before—were now either silent or openly in favour of restrictions which would have rendered the Readmission a barren privilege. Sadler did not reiterate the Judeophil teachings of his “Rights of the Kingdom”; there was no echo of Hugh Peters’s “Good Work for a Good Magistrate,” with its uncompromising demand for liberty of conscience; and the pseudonymous author of “An Apology for the Honourable Nation of Jews,” which had so strongly impressed the public in 1648, was dumb. John Dury, who had practically started the first agitation in favour of the Jews, was now studying Jewish disabilities at Cassel, with a view to their introduction into England;[88] and Henry Jessey, the author of “The Glory of Judah and Israel,” to the testimonies of which Menasseh confidently appealed in the closing paragraph of his “Humble Addresses,” had been won over to the necessity of restrictions.[89] Not a single influential voice was raised in England in support of Menasseh’s proposals, either on the ground of love for the Jews or religious liberty. The temper of the unlettered people, especially the mercantile classes, is sufficiently illustrated by the fact that only a few months before a Jewish beggar had been mobbed in the city, owing to the inflammatory conduct of a merchant, who had followed the poor stranger about the Poultry shouting, “Give him nothing; he is a cursed Jew.”[90]

Undeterred by the inhospitable attitude of the public, Menasseh formally opened his negotiations with the Government of the Commonwealth. His first step was to pay a visit to Whitehall, and present copies of his “Humble Addresses” to the Council of State. He was unfortunate in the day he selected for this visit, for it happened to be one of the rare occasions when Cromwell was not present at the Council’s deliberations. The result was that, as on the similar occasion of the consideration of the report on Dormido’s petition, the Council felt itself free to take no action. It contented itself with instructing its clerk, Mr. Jessop, “to go forth and receive the said books,” and then proceeded with other business.[91]

That the Council had no desire to assume the responsibility of deciding the thorny Jewish question soon became manifest. A fortnight after Menasseh’s abortive visit to Whitehall, Cromwell brought down to the Council a petition which had been handed to him by the Jewish Rabbi, in which were set forth categorically the several “graces and favours” by which it was proposed that the Readmission of the Jews should be effected.[92] The Protector evidently felt none of the misgivings of his advisers. It is probable, indeed, that in his masterful way he misunderstood the trend of public feeling. He had convinced himself that, as an act of policy, some concession to the Jews was desirable. His strong instinct for religious liberty inclined him favourably to the more academic aspects of the question, and his profound sympathy with persecuted peoples had been stirred by the accounts Menasseh had personally given him of the dire straits of the Jews in Poland, Sweden, and the Holy Land, and of the cruelties inflicted on them in Spain and Portugal.[93] Moreover, his patriotism revolted at the idea that Protestant England should be _particeps criminis_ in a policy of oppression which was so peculiarly identified with Papistical error. Thus impressed, he cared little for the outcries of the pamphleteers or the nervous scruples of his councillors, and he set himself to force on a prompt solution. At his instance a motion was made “That the Jews deserving it may be admitted into this nation to trade and traffic and dwell amongst us as Providence shall give occasion,”[94] and this, together with the petition of Menasseh and his “Humble Addresses,” was at once referred to a Committee. At the same time it was made clear to that body that the Protector expected an early report.[95]

So much is evident from the fact that the Committee met the same afternoon and reported the next morning. Its task was not an easy one. The feeling of the Council was by no means hostile to the Jews, but it had no enthusiasm for their cause, and it probably felt that an extension of official toleration beyond the limits of Christianity was a hazardous experiment. On the other hand, it was no longer possible for it to express this feeling in the same unceremonious fashion as had been done in the case of Dormido. The Jewish question had become the question of the day owing to Menasseh’s visit. Public feeling had been deeply stirred by it, and Cromwell had placed it in the forefront of his personal solicitude. Some action was necessary. The Committee seems to have discreetly resolved that the wisest course to pursue was one which would absolve it of responsibility, and leave Cromwell and the outside public to fight it out between them. Accordingly it reported that it felt itself incompetent to offer any advice to the Council, and it suggested that the views of the nation should be ascertained by the summoning of a Conference of representative Englishmen who might assist it in framing a report.

This resolution was duly reported to the Council on the following day, when Cromwell was again present. How little the Protector estimated the difficulties in his path is shown by the fact that the Committee’s recommendation was at once acted upon. John Lisle, Sir Charles Wolseley, and Sir Gilbert Pickering, three members of the Committee notoriously devoted to Cromwell, were instructed to meet the Lord President the same afternoon, and draw up a list of the personages to be summoned to the proposed Conference.[96] The list was duly presented to the Council on the following morning, and, under the vigilant eye of the Protector, approved. At the same time the terms of a circular convening the Conference were agreed upon, and the 4th December was fixed for the meeting.[97]

Nothing is more significant than the rapidity with which these steps were taken. On Tuesday the 13th November Menasseh’s petition was sprung on the reluctant Council. On the following Thursday summonses to a National Conference were being sent out from Whitehall, the Council having meanwhile held three meetings, at all of which the Jewish question was discussed, and a Committee specially charged with the question having held two further meetings. In all this we may clearly trace the personal insistence of the Protector.

Bruited abroad through the congregations of the divines and the constituents of the politicians and merchants to whom the summonses to the Conference had been addressed, the question of the Readmission of the Jews now came to the forefront of national politics. Amid considerable popular excitement, the Conference met in the Council Chamber at Whitehall[98] on the first Tuesday in December.