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

50 страница из 72

The new year had scarcely dawned when the indefatigable pen of Prynne was again at work on an enlarged edition of his “Demurrer.” In this work he especially devoted himself to the legal question, amplifying by some twenty pages his argument that the expulsion by Edward I. remained valid, and could only be reversed by an Act of Parliament. In February he published Part II. of the “Demurrer,” containing a further instalment of documents relating to the history of the Jews in England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The object of this work, which is a monument of research, and which until a generation ago was the chief printed source of our knowledge of the mediæval history of the English Jews, was to show that the Jews had never lived in England except under severe disabilities, and that they were a people of phenomenal viciousness, clippers of coin, crucifiers of children, and the blaspheming devotees of a ghastly blood cultus. Less learned, but not less virulent, was Alexander Ross, whose calumnious “View of the Jewish Religion” was published about the same time. Several anonymous pamphleteers followed suit. The campaign does not seem to have excited much agitation, but it probably had the effect of deciding Cromwell not to attempt a public solution of the question in the sense of his own private wishes and of Menasseh’s petition.