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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The Vindiciæ Judæorum was a fitting prelude to the dénouement that followed. With this certificate in their hands the Marranos felt that they might risk claiming their legal rights as Jews, and thus at once repudiate their Spanish nationality and challenge a settlement of their status in the country. The decision was a bold one, but there was shrewd method in its apparent rashness. If the Marranos were technically Spanish subjects, they were in reality testimonies to the intolerance of Spain which made that country, in Cromwell’s words, “the natural, the providential enemy of England,”^[145] and which was one of the grounds of the war. Like the Protestant traders whose liberty of conscience had been trampled on in Spain they also had been persecuted, though in a worse form. They were fugitives from the Inquisition, and consequently had a peculiar claim on the indulgence and consistency of the English people, who at that moment were filled with righteous horror at the religious policy of the “Popish enemy.”