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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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and the General Council of Officers, in which they asked that “the statute of banishment” against the Jews might be repealed.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]