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 first point in Menasseh’s story which needs elucidation is his statement that he was originally induced to move in the question of the resettlement of the Jews by the assurances of “some eminent persons of England,” that “the minds of men stood very well affected towards us.” How had this philo-Semitic sentiment arisen, and who were the men who had communicated it to the Amsterdam Rabbi?

The evolution of English thought which rendered Menasseh ben Israel’s enterprise possible is of considerable complexity, but its main features are easily distinguishable. The idea of Religious Liberty in England was due, in its broader aspects, to the struggle between the Baptists and the Calvinists. The Reformation established only a restricted form of Religious Liberty, and it was not until the Baptists found themselves persecuted as the Reformers had been before them, that the cry arose for a liberty of conscience which would embrace all religions. In the Separatist Churches, founded by English refugees in Amsterdam and Geneva, the idea grew and strengthened. The earliest noteworthy tract on the subject—Leonard Busher’s “Religious Peace, or a Plea for Liberty of Conscience,” published in 1614—was written under the influence of these exiles, and it is noteworthy that already in that work the extension of religious liberty to Jews was specifically demanded.^[16] Amsterdam was at that time the seat of a flourishing Jewish community, some of whose members came into contact with the philo-Jewish refugees. In this way they probably learnt to understand the political significance of the successive rise of the Puritans and Independents, for at the very beginning of the Civil War the Royalist spies in Holland noted that the Jews sympathised with the Republicans, and even alleged that they had offered them “considerable sums of money to carry on their designs.”^[17]