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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Meanwhile, the long-feared war broke out, and negotiations were perforce suspended. From 1652 to 1654 the popular agitation for the Readmission of the Jews spluttered weakly in pamphlets and broadsheets. In 1653 there was a debate in Parliament on the subject, but no conclusion was arrived at.^[53] In the following year, shortly after the conclusion of peace, a new element was introduced into the question by the appearance on the scene of a fresh petitioner from Holland, one Manuel Martinez Dormido, a brother-in-law of Menasseh ben Israel, and afterwards well known in England as David Abarbanel Dormido.

The mission of Dormido was clearly a continuation of Menasseh’s enterprise, and it was probably undertaken on the direct invitation of the Protector. With the restoration of peace on terms which rendered persistence in the policy of the Navigation Act indispensable, Cromwell must have been anxious to take the Jewish question seriously in hand. The negotiations opened by Thurloe with Menasseh in 1651 were probably resumed, and an intimation was conveyed to the Jewish Rabbi that the time was ripe for him to come to England and lay his long-contemplated prayer before the Government of the Commonwealth. Menasseh’s reasons for not accepting the invitation in person are not difficult to understand. He doubtless refers to them in the passage from the Vindiciæ I have already quoted, where he says he was entreated by his kindred and friends, “considering the chequered and interwoven vicissitudes and turns of things here below, not to part from them.”^[54] His kindred and friends were wise. Owing to his quarrels with his colleagues in the Amsterdam Rabbinate his situation had become precarious, and it might have become hopelessly and disastrously compromised had he, in the then incensed state of Dutch feeling against England—a feeling in which the leading Jews of the Netherlands participated—undertaken a mission to the Protector. Hence the delegation of the work to his brother-in-law. An indication of Menasseh’s interest in the new mission is afforded by the fact that his only surviving son, Samuel ben Israel, was associated with Dormido, and accompanied him to London.