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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Until the publication of the “Humble Addresses,” there are but scanty clues in the printed literature of the time to the frame of mind in which Menasseh’s mission found the English public. It would seem, from the silence of the printing-presses, that the nearer the people approached the Readmission question as a problem of practical politics, the less enthusiastic they became for its solution. This is not difficult to understand. The secular Tolerationists were unable to make headway against the dangers of unlimited sectarianism, to which their doctrines seemed calculated to open the door. Of their chief exponents, Roger Williams was in America, John Sadler was muzzled by the responsibilities of office, and Hugh Peters was without an influential following. Moreover, the prosecutions of James Naylor and Biddle were then prominently before the public as a lesson that Toleration had yet to triumph within the Christian pale. The Conversionists and Millenarians, who formed the great majority of the Judeophils, and who included all Menasseh’s own friends except Sadler, attached no importance to the terms on which the Jews might be admitted, and were quite willing to acquiesce in legislative restrictions provided only they were admitted. The Economists and Political Opportunists, represented by Cromwell, Thurloe, Blake, and Monk,^[74] did not dare to confess their true motives, since their worldly aims would on the one hand have been condemned by all the religious partisans of the Readmission, and on the other, would have alarmed the merchants of London, who had no desire for the commercial competition of a privileged colony of Hebrew traders.