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

by Manasseh ben Israel

PORTRAITS OF MENASSEH BEN ISRAEL

(Frontispiece, and pp. [1] and [105])

Pocock, in his biographical introduction to the English translation of Menasseh ben Israel’s “De Termino Vitæ” (Lond., 1700), gives the following pen-picture of the author derived from the recollections of English Jews who remembered the days of the Whitehall Conferences:—

“He was of middle stature and inclining to fatness. He always used his own hair, which (many years before his death) was very grey; so that his complexion being pretty fresh, his demeanour graceful and comely, his habit plain and decent, he commanded an awful reverence which was partly due to so venerable a deportment. In short, he was un homme sans passion, sans legiereté, mais hélas! sans opulence” (p. viii).

This description agrees with the portraits of Menasseh. Three of these portraits are extant. Two of them are by Rembrandt, and one is by a Jewish line-engraver, Salom Italia. Curiously enough, although far inferior in artistic merit to the Rembrandts as a portrait, Menasseh prized the Italia engraving highest. He sent a copy to the Silesian mystic Frankenberg in 1643, and he writes in the Bonum Nuncium Israeli:—

“Abr. à Frankenberg ... effigiem meam, aeri incisam misissem, ubi ad symbolum meum Perigrinando Quærimus, cui ab uno latere Hominis Peregrinantis, ab altero candelæ emblema adscriptum cum hoc dicterio נר לרגלי דברך sic praefatur” (p. [92]).

The shield in the left-hand corner of this portrait was used by Menasseh as a trade-mark in his printing-office. It has for this reason been reproduced on the title-page of the present work. Salom Italia’s portrait is often found bound up with the first Latin version of the “Hope of Israel,” and was roughly copied in the Spanish edition published at Madrid in 1881.

Rembrandt belonged to the distinguished circle of Menasseh’s personal friends. He illustrated the Piedra Gloriosa published by Menasseh in 1655, and he etched one portrait of the Rabbi, and painted another. The etching, of which a mezzotinted reproduction is presented on the frontispiece of the present work, was produced in 1636 when Menasseh was thirty-two years old. The painted portrait which is in the Hermitage at St. Petersburg is of doubtful authenticity as relating to Menasseh, but I am inclined to regard it as genuine. It represents the Rabbi at a much more advanced age than the etching. The grey hair agrees with Pocock’s description of his appearance in 1656, while the sorrowful expression and full beard may be accounted for by his troubled experiences in London, and especially by the death of his son. When he returned to Middleburg in 1657, he was mourning for his son, and hence his beard would be unshaved. It is not at all improbable that Rembrandt, his old friend of twenty years, saw him at this tragical moment, and that the portrait is a reminiscence of the prematurely aged and broken-hearted Rabbi, then tottering on the verge of the grave.