A friend of John Dury, one Thomas Thorowgood, was deeply interested in the missionary labours of the famous evangelist, John Eliot, among the American Indians; and in order to prevail upon the philo-Jewish public to provide money for the support of the mission, had compiled a treatise showing that the American Indians were the Lost Tribes. This work was largely founded on the conjectures of the early Spanish missionaries, who had up to that time a monopoly of this solution of the Ten Tribes problem. It was written in 1648, and dedicated to the King, but the renewal of the Civil War in that year prevented its publication.[[32]] Thorowgood thereupon sent the proofs of the first part of the work to John Dury to read. It happened that Dury, while at the Hague in 1644, had heard some stories about the Ten Tribes which had very much interested him. One was to the effect that a Jew, named Antonio de Montezinos, or Aaron Levy, had, while travelling in South America, met a race of savages in the Cordilleras, who recited the Shema,[[33]] practised Jewish ceremonies, and were, in short, Israelites of the Tribe of Reuben. Montezinos had related his story to Menasseh ben Israel, and had even embodied it in an affidavit executed under oath before the chiefs of the Amsterdam Synagogue. As soon as Dury received Thorowgood’s treatise, he remembered this story, and at once wrote to Menasseh ben Israel for a copy of the affidavit. The courteous Rabbi sent it to him by return of post,[[34]] and it was printed for the first time as an appendix to an instalment of Thorowgood’s treatise, which, at Dury’s instance, was published in January 1650.[[35]]
This incident, coupled with some letters he received from the notorious Millenarian, Nathaniel Holmes, came as a ray of light to Menasseh. For five years he had had Montezinos’s narrative by him, and had not regarded it as of sufficient importance to publish. He had, perhaps, doubted the wisdom of publishing it, seeing that it tended to substantiate a theory of purely Jesuitical origin, for which no sanction could be found in Jewish records or legend. Moreover, he had no strong views on the prophetical bearing of the question, as we may see by a letter he addressed to Holmes as late as the previous summer, in which he stated that he had grave doubts as to the time and manner of the coming of the Messiah.[[36]] Now, however, the question began to grow clear to him, and it dawned upon him that the long-neglected narrative of Montezinos might be used for a better purpose than the support of Christian missions in New England. The story was, if true, a proof of the increasing dispersion of Israel. Daniel had foretold that the scattering of the Holy People would be the forerunner of their Restoration, and a verse in Deuteronomy had explained that the scattering would be “from one end of the earth even to the other end of the earth.” It was clear from Montezinos and other travellers that they had already reached one end of the earth. Let them enter England and the other end would be attained. Thus the promises of the Almighty would be fulfilled, and the Golden Age would dawn. “I knew not,” he wrote later on, “but that the Lord who often works by naturall meanes, might have design’d, and made choice of me, for bringing about this work.”[[37]] In this hope he wrote the famous מקוה ישראל which in 1650 burst on the British public under the title of the “Hope of Israel.”
The central idea of this booklet did not occur to Menasseh immediately on receiving John Dury’s letter. His first intention, as he explained in a letter dated November 25, 1649, was to write a treatise on the Dispersion of the Ten Tribes for the information of Dury and his friends. The volume, however, grew under his pen, and a week later he announced to Dury his larger plan. His letter gives a complete synopsis of the work, and he finishes up by informing Dury that “I prove at large that the day of the promised Messiah unto us doth draw near.”[[38]] Thus he had already made up his mind on a question which, only a few months before, he had assured Holmes was “uncertain,” and was intended to be uncertain. Holmes was at the time unaware of his conversion, for, on December 24, he wrote to him an expostulatory letter, in which, curiously enough, he advised him to study the Danielic Prophecies.[[39]] Still, Menasseh does not seem to have fully grasped the application of his treatise to the Resettlement question, for neither in the body of the work nor in the Spanish edition does he refer to it. It was only when he composed the Latin edition that his scheme reached maturity. To that edition he prefixed a dedication to the English Parliament, eulogising its stupendous achievements, and supplicating “your favour and good-will to our nation now scattered almost all over the earth.”
The tract produced a profound impression throughout England. That an eminent Jewish Rabbi should bless the new Republican Government, and should bear testimony to its having “done great things valiantly,” was peculiarly gratifying to the whole body of Puritans. To the Millenarians and other sectaries it was a source of still deeper satisfaction, for their wild faith now received the sanction of one of the Chosen People, a sage of Israel, of the Seed of the Messiah. Besides the Latin edition which Dury distributed among all the leading Puritans, and which was probably read in Parliament, two English editions issued anonymously by Moses Wall were rapidly sold. Nevertheless, its effect proved transitory. Sober politicians, who still recognised that the new-fledged Republic had, as Fairfax said, “more public affairs” to despatch than the Jewish question, had begun to fear lest their hands might be forced by Menasseh’s coup. This feeling was strikingly reflected in a tract by Sir Edward Spencer, one of the members of Parliament for Middlesex. Addressing himself with feline affection “to my deare brother, Menasseh ben Israel, the Hebrewe Philosopher,” he expressed his readiness to agree to the admission of the Jews on twelve conditions artfully designed to strengthen the hands of the sectaries who believed that, besides the dispersion of the Jews, their conversion was also a necessary condition of the Millennium.[[40]] Spencer’s tract was the signal for a revulsion of feeling. Sadler, afterwards one of Menasseh’s firmest friends, threw doubts on the authenticity of Montezinos’s story,[[41]] and Fuller did not scruple to criticise the Zionist theory on practical grounds.[[42]] Even the faithful Jessey held his peace in tacit sympathy with Spencer’s scheme. As for Menasseh, he showed no disposition to acquiesce in Spencer’s proposals. The result was that the sensation gradually died away, though a few stalwart Tolerationists like Hugh Peters still clamoured for unconditional Readmission.[[43]]
Thus both the Toleration and Messianic movements proved unavailing for the purposes of the Jewish Restoration. There remained a third view of the question which made less noise in the world, but which was destined to bring about gradually and silently a real and lasting solution—the view of Political Expediency.
III. Cromwell’s Policy
The statesmen of the Commonwealth, who knew so well how to conjure with human enthusiasm, were essentially practical men. To imagine that they were the slaves of the great religious revival which had enabled them to overcome the loyalist inspiration of the cavaliers is entirely to misconceive their character and aims. The logical outcome of that revival, and of the triumph of the Puritan arms, would have been the Kingdom of Saints, but Cromwell’s ambition aimed at something much more conventional. Imperial expansion and trade ascendency filled a larger place in his mind than the Other-worldly inspirations which had carried him to power.
With the unrestricted Toleration principles of the Baptists he had no sympathy, and still less with the Messianic phantasies of the Fifth Monarchy Men which Menasseh ben Israel had virtually embraced. His ideas on Religious Liberty were certainly large and far in advance of his times,[[44]] but they were essentially the ideas of a churchman. Their limits are illustrated by his ostentatious patronage in 1652 of Owens’ scheme of a Toleration confined to Christians.[[45]] Still he was not the slave of these limits. The ingenious distinction he drew between the Papistry of France and that of Spain, when it became necessary for him to choose between them, and his complete disregard of the same principles in the case of the Portuguese alliance, show how readily he subordinated his strongest religious prejudices to political exigencies. As for the mystics and ultra-democrats, his views were set forth very clearly in his speech to the new Parliament in September 1651, when he opposed the Millenarians, the Judaisers, and the Levellers by name.[[46]] It is impossible for any one reading this speech side by side with Menasseh ben Israel’s tracts to believe that the author of it had any sympathy with the wilder motives actuating the Jewish Rabbi.
What was it, then, that brought these two different characters so closely together? That the Readmission of the Jews to England was one of Cromwell’s own schemes—part and parcel of that dream of Imperial expansion which filled his latter days with its stupendous adumbration and vanished so tragically with his early death—it is impossible to doubt. We have no record of his views on the subject, beyond a short and ambiguous abstract of his speech at the Whitehall Conferences, but there is ample evidence that he was the mainspring of the whole movement, and that Menasseh was but a puppet in his hands. His main motives are not difficult to guess. Cromwell’s statecraft was, as I have said, not entirely or even essentially governed by religious policy. He desired to make England great and prosperous, as well as pious and free, and for these purposes he had to consider the utility of his subjects even before he weighed their orthodoxy. Now the Jews could not but appeal to him as very desirable instruments of his colonial and commercial policy. They controlled the Spanish and Portuguese trade; they had the Levant trade largely in their hands; they had helped to found the Hamburg Bank, and they were deeply interested in the Dutch East and West Indian companies. Their command of bullion, too, was enormous, and their interest in shipping was considerable.[[47]] Moreover, he knew something personally of the Jews, for he was acquainted with some of the members of the community of Marranos then established in London, and they had proved exceedingly useful to him as contractors and intelligencers.[[48]] There is, indeed, reason to believe that some of these Marranos had been brought into the country by the Parliamentary Government as early as 1643 with the specific object of supplying the pecuniary necessities of the new administration.[[49]]
Until the end of 1651 the Readmission question presented no elements of urgency, because there was a chance of its favourable solution without its being made the object of a special effort on the part of the Government or the legislature. By the treaty of coalition proposed to the Netherlands by the St. John mission early in 1651, the Jewish question would have solved itself, for the Hebrew merchants of Amsterdam would have ipso facto acquired in England the same rights as they enjoyed in Holland. That proposal, however, broke down, and as a result the famous Navigation Act was passed. The object of that measure was to exclude foreign nations from the colonial trade, and to dethrone the Dutch from their supremacy in the carrying and distributing traffic of Europe. Consequently it supplied a strong inducement to Jewish merchants—especially those of Amsterdam who were then trading with Jamaica and Barbados—to transfer their counting-houses to London. As such an immigration would have well served the policy embodied in the Navigation Act, it became desirable that some means of legalising Jewish residence in England should be found, and hence the question of Readmission was brought within the field of practical politics. This was the new form in which it presented itself. It was no longer a question of Religious Toleration or of the hastening of the Millennium, but purely a question of political expediency.