Set free, by the liberality of Abraham and Isaac Pereira, from the pressure of everyday cares, Manasseh again devoted himself to his books, and turned out a succession of treatises. History, Philosophy, Theology, he attacked them all in turn, and there is, perhaps, something besides rapidity of execution which suggests an idea of manufacture in most of these works. A treatise which he published about 1650, and which attracted very wide notice, significantly illustrated his rather fatal facility for ready writing. The treatise was entitled The Hope of Israel, and sought to prove no less than that some aborigines in America, whose very existence was doubtful, were lineal descendants of the lost ten tribes. The Hope itself seems to have rested on no more solid foundation than a traveller’s tale of savages met with in the wilds, who included something that sounded like the עמש (Shemang[17]) in their vernacular. The story was quickly translated into several languages, but it was almost as quickly disproved, and Manasseh’s deductions from it were subsequently rather roughly criticised. Truth to say, the accumulated stores of his mind were ground down and sifted and sown broadcast in somewhat careless and indigestible masses, and their general character gives an uncomfortable impression of machine-work rather than of hand-work. And the proportion of what he wrote was as nothing compared to what he contemplated writing. Perhaps those never-written books of his would have proved the most readable; he might have shown us himself, his wise, tolerant, enthusiastic self, in them. But instead, we possess, in his shelves on shelves of published compilations of dead men’s minds, only duly labelled and catalogued selections from learned mummies.
The dream of Manasseh was to compose a ‘Heroic History,’ a significant title which shadows forth the worthy record he would have delighted in compiling from Jewish annals. It is as well, perhaps, that the title is all we have of the work, for he was too good an idealist to prove a good historian. He cared too much, and he knew too much, to write a reliable or a readable history of his people. To him, as to many of us, Robert Browning’s words might be applied—
‘So you saw yourself as you wished you were—
As you might have been, as you cannot be—
Earth here rebuked by Olympus there,
And grew content in your poor degree.’[18]
He, at any rate, had good reason to grow content in his degree, for he was destined to make an epoch in the ‘Heroic History,’ instead of being, as he ‘wished he were,’ the reciter, and probably the prosy reciter, of several. Certain it is that, great scholar, successful preacher, and voluminous writer as was Manasseh ben Israel, it was not till he was fifty years old that he found his real vocation. He had felt at it for years, his books were more or less blind gropings after it, his friendships with the eminent and highly placed personages of his time were all unconscious means to a conscious end, and his very character was a factor in his gradually formed purpose. His whole life had been an upholding of the ‘standard’; publicists who sneered at the ostentatious rich Jew, priests who railed at the degraded poor Jew, were each bound to recognise in Manasseh ben Israel a Jew of another type: one poor yet self-respecting, sought after yet unostentatious, conservative yet cosmopolitan, learned yet undogmatic. They might question if this Amsterdam Rabbi were sui generis, but they were at least willing to find out if he were in essentials what he claimed to be, fairly representative of the fairly treated members of his race. So the ‘way was prepared’ by the ‘standard’ being raised. Which, of the many long-closed ‘gates,’ was to open for the people to pass through?
Manasseh looked around on Europe. He sought a safe and secure resting-place for the tribe of wandering foot and weary heart, where, no longer weary and wandering, they might cease to be ‘tribal.’ He sought a place where ‘protection’ should not be given as a sordid bribe, nor conferred as a fickle favour, but claimed as an inalienable right, and shared in common with all law-abiding citizens. His thoughts turned for a while on Sweden, and there was some correspondence to that end with the young Queen Christina, but this failing, or falling through, his hopes were almost at once definitely directed towards England. It was a wise selection and a happy one, and the course of events, and the time and the temper of the people, seemed all upon his side. The faithless Stuart king had but lately expiated his hateful, harmful weakness on the scaffold, and sentiment was far as yet from setting the nimbus of saint and martyr on that handsome, treacherous head. The echoes of John Hampden’s brave voice seemed still vibrating in the air, and Englishmen, but freshly reminded of their rights, were growing keen and eager in the scenting out of wrongs; quick to discover, and fierce to redress evils which had long lain rooted and rotting, and unheeded. The pompous insouciance of the first Stuart king, the frivolous insouciance of the second, were now being resented in inevitable reaction. The court no longer led the fashion; the people had come to the front and were growing grimly, even grotesquely, in earnest. The very fashion of speaking seems to have changed with the new need for strong, terse expression. Men greeted each other with old-fashioned Bible greetings; they named their children after those ‘great ones gone,’ or with even quainter effect in some simple selected Bible phrase; the very tones of the Prophets seemed to resound in Whitehall, and Englishmen to have become, in a wide, unsensational sense, not men only of the sword, or of the plough, but men of the Book, and that Book the Bible. Liberty of conscience, equality before the law for all religious denominations, had been the unconditional demand of that wonderful army of Independents, and although the Catholics were the immediate cause and object of this appeal, yet Manasseh, watching events from the calm standpoint of a keenly interested onlooker, thought he discerned in the listening attitude of the English Parliament, a favourable omen of the attention he desired to claim for his clients, since it was not alone for political, but for religious, rights that he meant to plead.
He did not, however, actually come to England till 1655, when the way for personal intercession had been already prepared by correspondence and petition. His Hope of Israel had been forwarded to Cromwell so early as 1650; petitions praying for the readmission of Jews to England with full rights of worship, of burial, and of commerce secured to them, had been laid before the Long and the Rump Parliament, and Manasseh had now in hand, and approaching completion, a less elaborate and more impassioned composition than usual, entitled, Vindiciæ Judæorum. A powerful and unexpected advocate of Jewish claims presently came forward in the person of Edward Nicholas, the clerk to the Council. This large-minded and enlightened gentleman had the courage to publish an elaborate appeal for, and defence of, the Jews, ‘the most honourable people in the world,’ as he styled them, ‘a people chosen by God and protected by God.’ The pamphlet was headed, Apology for the Honourable Nation of the Jews and all the Sons of Israel, and Nicholas’s arguments aroused no small amount of attention and discussion. It was even whispered that Cromwell had had a share in the authorship; but if this had been so, undoubtedly he who ‘stood bare, not cased in euphemistic coat of mail,’ but who ‘grappled like a giant, face to face, heart to heart, with the naked truth of things,’[19] would have unhesitatingly avowed it. His was not the sort of nature to shirk responsibilities nor to lack the courage of his opinions. There can be no doubt that, from first to last, Cromwell was strongly in favour of Jewish claims being allowed, but just as little doubt is there that there was never any tinge or taint of ‘secret favouring’ about his sayings or his doings on the subject. The part, and all things considered the very unpopular part, he took in the subsequent debates, had, of course, to be accounted for by minds not quick to understand such simple motive power as justice, generosity, or sympathy, and both now and later the wildest accusations were levelled against the Protector. That he was, unsuspected, himself of Jewish descent, and had designs on the long vacant Messiahship of his interesting kinsfolk, was not the most malignant, though it was perhaps among the most absurd, of these tales. ‘The man is without a soul,’ writes Carlyle, ‘that can look into the great soul of a man, radiant with the splendours of very heaven, and see nothing there but the shadow of his own mean darkness.’[20] There must have been, if this view be correct, a good many particularly materialistic bodies going about at that epoch in English history when the Protector of England took upon himself the unpopular burden of being also the Protector of the Jews.
There had been some opposition on the part of the family to overcome, some tender timid forebodings, which events subsequently justified, to dispel, before Manasseh was free to set out for England; but in the late autumn of 1655[21] we find him with two or three companions safely settled in lodgings in the Strand. An address to the Protector was personally presented by Manasseh, whilst a more detailed declaration to the Commonwealth was simultaneously published. Very remarkable are both these documents. Neither in the personal petition to Cromwell, nor in the more elaborate argument addressed to the Parliament, is there the slightest approach to the ad misericordiam style. The whole case for the Jews is stated with dignity, and pleaded without passion, and throughout justice rather than favour forms the staple of the demand. The ‘clemency’ and ‘high-mindedness’ of Cromwell are certainly taken for granted, but equally is assumed the worthiness of the clients who appeal to these qualities. Manasseh makes also a strong point of the ‘Profit,’ which the Jews are likely to prove to their hosts, naïvely recognising the fact that ‘Profit is a most powerful motive which all the world prefers above all other things’; and ‘therefore dealing with that point first.’ He dwells on the ‘ability,’ and ‘industry,’ and ‘natural instinct’ of the Jews for ‘merchandising,’ and for ‘contributing new inventions,’ which extra aptitude, in a somewhat optimistic spirit, he moralises, may have been given to them for their ‘protection in their wanderings,’ since ‘wheresoever they go to dwell, there presently the traficq begins to flourish.’
Read in the light of some recent literature, one or two of Manasseh’s arguments might almost be termed prophetic. Far-sighted, however, and wide-seeing as was our Amsterdam Rabbi, he could certainly not have foretold that more than two hundred years later his race would be taunted in the same breath for being a ‘wandering’ and ‘homeless tribe,’ and for remaining a ‘settled’ and ‘parasitic’ people in their adopted countries; yet are not such ingenious, and ungenerous, and inconsistent taunts answered by anticipation in the following paragraph?—
‘The love that men ordinarily bear to their own country, and the desire they have to end their lives where they had their beginning, is the cause that most strangers, having gotten riches where they are in a foreign land, are commonly taken in a desire to return to their native soil, and there peaceably to enjoy their estate; so that as they were a help to the places where they lived and negotiated while they remained there, so when they depart from thence, they carry all away and spoile them of their wealth; transporting all into their own native country: but with the Jews, the case is farre different, for where the Jews are once kindly receaved, they make a firm resolution never to depart from thence, seeing they have no proper place of their own; and so they are always with their goods in the cities where they live, a perpetual benefitt to all payments.’[22]
Manasseh goes on to quote Holy Writ, to show that to ‘seek for the peace,’ and to ‘pray for the peace of the city whither ye are led captive,’[23] was from remote times a loyal duty enjoined on Jews; and so he makes perhaps another point against that thorough-going historian of our day, who would have disposed of the People and the Book, the Jews and the Old Testament together, in the course of a magazine article. To prove that uncompromising loyalty has among the Jews the added force of a religious obligation, Manasseh mentions the fact that the ruling dynasty is always prayed for by upstanding congregations in every Jewish place of worship, and he makes history give its evidence to show that this is no mere lip loyalty, but that the obligation enjoined has been over and over again faithfully fulfilled. He quotes numerous instances in proof of this; beginning from the time, 900 years B.C., when the Jerusalem Jews, High Priest at their head, went forth to defy Alexander, and to own staunch allegiance to discrowned Darius, till those recent civil wars in Spain, when the Jews of Burgos manfully held that city against the conqueror, Henry of Trastamare, in defence of their conquered, but liege lord, Pedro.[24]