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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From this calamity England and the Jews were saved by the restricted character of the compromise of 1656. When the Commonwealth fell to pieces the Jewish community of London consisted only of some forty or fifty families of wealthy and enterprising merchants, scarcely distinguishable in their bearing and mode of life from the best kinds of merchant-strangers hailing from Amsterdam, Bordeaux, Lisbon, Cadiz, and Leghorn.

Nevertheless, efforts to procure their expulsion were not wanting. Royalists who recognised in them a relic of the hated Commonwealth, merchants whose restricted economic science resented their activity and success, and informers who imagined that their toleration was a violation of English law, set to work early to denounce them. These manœuvres began, indeed, as soon as the breath was out of Cromwell’s body. Only a few weeks after the Protector’s death a petition was presented to Richard Cromwell demanding the expulsion of the Jews and the confiscation of their property.^[167] At the same time, Thomas Violet, the notorious informer and pamphleteer, made a collection of documents bearing on the illegality of the Jewish settlement, which he submitted to Mr. Justice Tyril, together with an application that the law should be set in motion against the intrusive community. The worthy Justice shrewdly suggested to Mr. Violet that in the then confused political situation he would do well to take no action. It would, he opined, be only prudent to await the establishment of a stable Government before moving in so serious a matter.