Читать книгу 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 онлайн

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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.