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The first point in Menasseh’s story which needs elucidation is his statement that he was originally induced to move in the question of the resettlement of the Jews by the assurances of “some eminent persons of England,” that “the minds of men stood very well affected towards us.” How had this philo-Semitic sentiment arisen, and who were the men who had communicated it to the Amsterdam Rabbi?

The evolution of English thought which rendered Menasseh ben Israel’s enterprise possible is of considerable complexity, but its main features are easily distinguishable. The idea of Religious Liberty in England was due, in its broader aspects, to the struggle between the Baptists and the Calvinists. The Reformation established only a restricted form of Religious Liberty, and it was not until the Baptists found themselves persecuted as the Reformers had been before them, that the cry arose for a liberty of conscience which would embrace all religions. In the Separatist Churches, founded by English refugees in Amsterdam and Geneva, the idea grew and strengthened. The earliest noteworthy tract on the subject—Leonard Busher’s “Religious Peace, or a Plea for Liberty of Conscience,” published in 1614—was written under the influence of these exiles, and it is noteworthy that already in that work the extension of religious liberty to Jews was specifically demanded.^[16] Amsterdam was at that time the seat of a flourishing Jewish community, some of whose members came into contact with the philo-Jewish refugees. In this way they probably learnt to understand the political significance of the successive rise of the Puritans and Independents, for at the very beginning of the Civil War the Royalist spies in Holland noted that the Jews sympathised with the Republicans, and even alleged that they had offered them “considerable sums of money to carry on their designs.”^[17]

The progress of Religious Liberty in the seventeenth century reached its highest point, when in 1645 the Independents captured the Army under the scheme known as the “New Model.” Meanwhile Roger Williams, the famous Baptist, who had already founded in America a community based on unrestricted liberty of conscience, had published his “Bloudy Tenent of Persecution,” in which he generously pleaded for the Jews.^[18] In 1646 a reprint of Leonard Busher’s pamphlet was published in London, much to the joy of the Separatists in Amsterdam,^[19] and a year later Hugh Peters, one of Cromwell’s Army Chaplains, wrote his “Word for the Army and Two Words for the Kingdom,” in which he proposed that “strangers, even Jews [be] admitted to trade and live with us.”^[20] The question of the readmission of the Jews was, however, still far from taking practical shape. Although frequently referred to, it had only been raised incidentally as an illustration of the advanced tendencies of the advocates of Religious Liberty.

In December 1648, the Independents contrived the famous “Pride’s Purge,” which put an end to the Presbyterian domination of Parliament. The hopes of the advocates of Religious Liberty ran high, and the Jewish question at once came to the front. The Council of Mechanics, meeting at Whitehall, marked their sense of the meaning of the coup d’état by immediately voting “a toleration of all religions whatsoever, not excepting Turkes, nor Papists, nor Jewes.”^[21] To this the Council of Army Officers responded with a resolution, the text of which has, unfortunately, not been preserved, in which they favoured the widest scheme of Religious Liberty. It was, indeed, rumoured at the time that the Jews were specifically mentioned in the resolution.^[22] However that may be, it is certain that in the following month two Baptists of Amsterdam, Johanna Cartwright and her son Ebenezer, were encouraged to present a petition to Lord Fairfax and the General Council of Officers, in which they asked that “the statute of banishment” against the Jews might be repealed. The petition, we are told, was “favourably received, with a promise to take it into speedy consideration when the present more public affairs are dispatched.”^[23]

Unfortunately, the “more public affairs” obstructed the triumph of Religious Liberty, and with it the Jewish cause, for a good many years. In the same month that Mrs. Cartwright’s petition was considered, Charles I. was beheaded, and the chiefs of the Revolution, with a great work of reconstruction before them, felt that they must proceed cautiously. Toleration of the Jews meant unrestricted liberty of conscience, and this was held by the extreme Independents to imply not only the abolition of an Established Church, but a licence to the multitude of sects—many of them of the maddest and most blasphemous tendencies—which had been hatched by Laudian persecution and the reaction of the Civil War. Cromwell and his advisers were resolved to pursue a more conservative policy, and the toleration plans of the Independents were accordingly shelved. For a hundred years—until, indeed, Pelham’s “Jew Bill” in 1753—they were not heard of in this purely secular shape again.

The cause of Religious Liberty was, however, not the only force which was working in the country for the readmission of the Jews. The religious fervour of the nation had been stirred to a high pitch, and there were few men whose minds had not become influenced by Messianic and other mystical beliefs. It is curious indeed to note that this current of thought ran parallel with the evolution of the secular idea of Toleration. Seven years after the first publication of Leonard Busher’s famous Toleration pamphlet, Mr. Sergeant Finch wrote anonymously a book entitled “The Calling of the Jewes” (1621), with a prefatory epistle in Hebrew, in which he invited the children of Israel to realise the prophecies by asserting their national existence in Palestine. At the same time he called upon all Christian princes to do homage to the Jewish nation. This early manifestation of Zionism did not meet with much sympathy in high places, for James I. was so incensed at it that he clapped its publisher into jail.^[24] The book, however, was a symptom, and the movement it represented only derived strength from persecution. The gloomier the lot of the sectaries, the more intense became their reliance on the Messianic prophecies. Even after the triumph of the Puritan cause, the sanest Independents held to them firmly side by side with their belief in Religious Liberty; and in the Cartwright petition we find both views expounded. Extremists like the Fifth Monarchy Men made them the pivots for fresh outbursts of Sectarianism. Judaical sects arose, the members of which endeavoured to live according to the Levitical Law, even practising circumcision. Prosecutions for such practices may be traced back to 1624.^[25] Some of the saints, like Everard the Leveller, publicly called themselves Jews;^[26] others went to Amsterdam, and were formally received into the synagogue.^[27] Colchester was the headquarters of one of these Judaical sects, but there were others in London and in Wales.^[28] The practical effect of this movement was not only the production of a very widespread philo-Semitism, but a strong conviction that, inasmuch as the conversion of the Jews was an indispensable preliminary of the Millennium, their admission to England, where they might meet the godliest people in the world, was urgently necessary.

It was this feeling which, on the collapse of the Toleration movement in 1649, began to make itself most loudly heard. Edward Nicholas, John Sadler, John Dury, Henry Jessey, Roger Williams, and even Thomas Fuller, who was far from being a mystic, urged this view on the public, and an agitation for the Readmission of the Jews, as a religious duty outside the problem of Religious Liberty, was set on foot. This mystical agitation found a response in what to us must at first sight appear a strangely inappropriate quarter. It brought forth from Amsterdam a Latin pamphlet, entitled “Spes Israelis,” with a prefatory address “To the Parliament, the Supreme Court of England,” the author of which was Menasseh ben Israel, one of the Rabbis of the congregation. This pamphlet illustrates the inception of the enterprise for the Resettlement of the Jews in England, which its author endeavoured to carry out six years later.

Menasseh ben Israel was the son of a Marrano of Lisbon, who had suffered at the hands of the Inquisition, and had, as a result, taken up his abode in Amsterdam. Menasseh was educated under the care of Rabbi Isaac Uziel, and, at the age of eighteen, was ordained a Rabbi. He was an indefatigable student, became a mine of learning, an accomplished linguist, a fluent writer, and a voluble preacher. His attainments made considerable noise in the world, at a time when public attention was riveted on Biblical prophecy, and the question of its fulfilment through the Jews. His voluminous writings obtained for him a high reputation as a scholar, and the readiness with which he afforded information to all who corresponded with him made him many influential friends, who spread his fame far and wide. The secret of the distinction Menasseh secured for himself, in spite of the weaknesses of his character and the eccentricity of his mental tendency, lies in the fact that the world in which he lived was very largely given over to philo-Semitism, and to the special form of mysticism to which he had yielded himself. His alliance with a scion of the Abarbanel family, in whose tradition of Davidic descent he was a firm believer, inspired him with the idea that he was destined to promote the coming of the Messiah; and hence the wild dreams of the English Millenarians appealed to him with something of a personal force. It was not, however, until the triumph of the Republican cause in England that he resolved to throw in his lot with the Puritan mystics, and even then he had some difficulty, as we may readily believe, in adopting an attitude which would at once conciliate the English Conversionists, and harmonise with his allegiance to the synagogue.^[29]

At first his sympathies, like those of most of the leading members of the Amsterdam community, seem to have been Royalist, for in 1642 we find him extolling the queen of Charles I. in an oration.^[30] In 1647 he was still far from recognising in the Puritan revolt a movement calling for his Messianic sympathy; for, writing to an English friend in that year, he described the Civil War, not, as he afterwards believed it to be, as a struggle of the godly against the ungodly, but as a Divine punishment for the expulsion of his co-religionists from Britain in the thirteenth century.^[31] This letter is interesting as showing that his mind was then already beginning to be exercised by the Resettlement question; but he evidently had as yet no definite idea of taking any practical action. In the autumn of 1649 a method of action was suggested to him by a letter he received from the well-known English Puritan, John Dury, whose acquaintance he had made in Amsterdam five years previously.

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.