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

70 страница из 72

Jewish emancipation in England was, in short, the work of the English democracy—almost of the same democracy which in the thirteenth century had spued the Hebrews forth, when their kingly protectors had made their residence in the land conditional on their acting as the usurious instruments of the Royal Exchequer, and which in the seventeenth had resented their readmission under the influence of deeply rooted prejudices, inherited from that dark age. It was no mere homage to the abstract principle of Religious Liberty like the emancipations on the Continent which, in the name of the Rights of Man, suddenly called forth the oppressed Jews from their Ghettos and bade them take up a new life, from which they were sundered by centuries of mediæval seclusion. Religious Liberty in England broadened on more cautious lines. Dissenters, Roman Catholics, and Jews have each been taken into the bosom of the nation by separate legislative action, and as the result of practical demonstrations of the futility, nay, the disadvantage, of their exclusion. The gradual emancipation of the English Jews, first socially and then in the municipalities, enabled them to show that their civic qualities entitled them to the fullest rights of citizenship; and it was the realisation of this fact—not by statesmen or philosophers, but by their neighbours and fellow-citizens themselves—that eventually gave them the position they now enjoy.