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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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]