Official contact with Manasseh was opened in 1650, soon after his book appeared. A mission to Holland headed by Oliver St. John, whose purpose was to negotiate an alliance with the Dutch, was authorized to treat with Manasseh on the side. St. John had several conversations with the Rabbi, with the result that Manasseh addressed a formal petition to the Council of State for readmission of the Jews to England.
Events were now hurrying to a climax. The proud and prosperous Dutch rejected the upstart English republic’s offer of union. Thereupon the Commonwealth, operating on the principle, if you can’t join them, lick them, promptly passed the Navigation Act, which excluded foreign ships from commerce with England and her colonies. This hit the Dutch where they lived, and war with England followed within a year. Anticipating it, Cromwell, on the day after passage of the Act, sent Manasseh ben Israel a passport to come to England to advocate his cause in person. The coincidence in time, as Cecil Roth has pointed out, is worth noting. Cromwell was anxious for the transfer of the Amsterdam Jewish merchants to London as a measure that would benefit England in the trade race with Holland.
Before Manasseh could come over, however, the Dutch war erupted, and while it lasted no further action on his proposal was taken. If it could have been taken up at this time, the results might have been startling, for in the year 1653, with the calling of the Barebone Parliament, the “remarkablest” of the modern world according to Carlyle, the peak of Hebraism was reached. The little band of stern, impassioned men hand-picked by Cromwell convened on July 4, 1653 with the set purpose of so remaking England’s constitution as to put into actual practice Mosaic law and the pristine principles of Jesus. On the Exchange, in the courts, in the markets, the Englishman was willy-nilly going to love his neighbor as himself. It was, says Lord Morley in his life of Cromwell, an attempt “to found a civil society on the literal words of Scripture … the high-water mark of the biblical politics of the time.”
Cromwell himself was inspired by the mood, and in his opening speech to the Little Parliament he seemed almost carried away by a vision of himself bringing, like Elijah, a nation back to God. “Truly you are called by God as Judah was to rule with Him and for Him,” he told the members as they sat rapt in a sense of high mission and a historic moment. “You are at the edge of the Promises and Prophecies,” he went on, and quoted the Sixty-eighth Psalm: “There it prophesies that ‘He shall bring His people again from the depths of the Sea’ as He once led Israel through the Red Sea. And it may be, as some think, God will bring the Jews home to their station, ‘from the isles of the sea’ and answer their expectations ‘as from the depths of the sea.’ “ And he rose in eloquence, quoting psalms and prophets in every other sentence and assuring his hearers that the triumph promised in the Sixty-eighth Psalm to God’s people of old would be realized by the Commonwealth, God’s people now on earth.
Had Manasseh ben Israel been in England to present his case to men thus exhorted, what might not have happened? But in the little space of six months they were finished. Their earnest, hopeless effort to put Scripture into practice was denounced as a “judaizing” of English law, and having clashed with property rights it went down to inevitable defeat. Cromwell himself, standing on the spot where he had said they were “on the edge of Prophecy,” summarily dismissed them. They have come down in history as an object of ridicule typified by the nickname taken from one of their members, Praisegod Barebone.
Although the peak of Biblical Puritanism was now passed, the issue of the Jews’ recall was not dropped. The Dutch war was over, but the Spanish war, another matter of trade rivalry, was in the offing. Cromwell still pressed for a decision on the Jews, whose mercantile connections with Spain and Portugal remained close. In 1654 Manasseh sent his brother-in-law, David Dormido, and his son to present his petition to the Council of State. Because of opposition among his own people, who cleaved to the orthodox Jews’ position and sternly disapproved any human efforts to hasten the Messiah’s coming, he felt obliged to lie low for a while. But when the Council, despite Cromwell’s request for “speedy consideration” and “all due satisfaction,” rejected Dormido’s petition, Manasseh decided, on Cromwell’s urging, to come over himself. Accompanied by three fellow rabbis he arrived with new arguments for his cause, ready written in a Humble Address to the Lord Protector. In it he gave the rabbinical weight of his authority to the argument that the Jews were scattered throughout the world “except onely in this considerable and mighty Island” and “that before the Messiah shall come and restore our Nation, that first we must have our seat here likewise.”
Next he took up “profit which is a most powerful motive” and pointed out how useful the Jews could be as channels of influence in trade vis-à-vis Holland, Spain, and Portugal. He stated the affection in which the Jews held the Commonwealth because it offered more toleration than monarchies. He answered familiar accusations with the remark that Christians themselves were accused of blood rituals by Roman emperors and pointed out the uncomfortable truth that “Men are very prone to hate and despise him that hath ill fortune.” Finally he specifically asked for protection by the government, a “free and publick” synagogue and cemetery, freedom to trade, civil jurisdiction by the Jews over their own community with final appeal to the English courts, and abolition of any existing laws that might disallow any of the foregoing.
Publication of the Humble Address provoked a tumult of controversy in which the pros were loudly outpamphleteered by the cons. All the old charges were revived and some new ones, including the charge that Cromwell was a Jew and that the Jews were going to buy St. Paul’s and the Bodleian Library. They were an ignoble race whom even God had constantly to chastise for their wickedness; their exile was divine punishment for the killing of Christ (and the Puritans would reap the same punishment for killing King Charles); if recalled to England they would vilify the Christian religion and cause a movement away from Christian principles and customs, falsify coinage, create unemployment, ruin English merchants, and destroy foreign trade. Advocates, on the other hand, maintained that the Jews were “the most honorable Nation of the world, a people chosen by God”; that the high priests only were responsible for the crucifixion, not the Jews as a nation; that their return to England would “bless” the country; that the Civil War had been God’s punishment on England for the expulsion of His people and that the recall would appease His wrath and bring peace; and that the Jews as merchants would lower prices and increase trade and prosperity, for it was well known that “those nations who treat the Jews best flourish most and abound in wealth and strength.” Chiefly, however, the advocates based their case on its weakest point: the argument that only by bringing the Jews to England could their conversion be accomplished. The opponents, led by the bitter, brilliant William Prynne, whose Short Demurrer is an archetype of the rest, ridiculed the idea of the Jews’ ever being converted, on which point, of course, they were right. The whole thesis of the Jews’ convertibility, which was to reappear so strongly in the nineteenth century, was totally unrealistic. Yet, ironically, it was the strongest of all the motives that conditioned England to promote the restoration of Israel.
Be that as it may, at Whitehall on December 10, 1655 Cromwell convened a special committee of judges, clergy, and merchants to consider Manasseh’s petition. In the following fourteen days’ debate the delegates, who were about evenly split pro and con, wrangled to a stalemate. But on one point at least a clear conclusion was reached. Cromwell had laid down the agenda: “Whether it be lawful to receive the Jews,” and “If it be lawful, then upon what terms is it meet to receive them?” On the first question Justices Glyn and Steel handed down the opinion that there was no legal bar to the readmission—a great point gained. But as to terms under which the Jews could take up residence in England there was, as Cromwell scolded, “a babel of discordances.” The clergy, most of whom favored readmission, argued that “The good people of England did generally more believe the promises of the calling of the Jews
and more earnestly pray for it than any other nation,” and should admit them in order to bring about this “calling” or conversion. Moreover England should atone for its past cruelties to the Jews, who had indeed been invited in by William I, the more so as “We are children of the same Father Abraham, they naturally after the flesh, we believers after the spirit.”
The merchants were adamant against it. Rumors of sinister results that would follow readmission had been spread both by Dutch and Spanish agents, who understood its purpose as aiding the Navigation Act, and by Royalist agents, who hoped to thwart it because “the Protector was earnestly set upon it.” Influenced by these rumors, the merchants predicted the direst results, insisting that Jewish trade would enrich foreigners and impoverish England. As for conversion, they said, the people were so prone nowadays to run after strange new doctrines that the Jews would probably make more converts to Judaism than the reverse. Finally the only agreement that could be reached was a resolution permitting the re-entry, but under such disabling trade and financial restrictions as would have made it useless to Cromwell.
The door was flung open. In stalked the Protector, disgusted once more with the inability of human weaklings to come to the point, to get action, to see what he wanted and let him have it. Was it not, he berated them, every Christian’s duty to receive the Jews into England, the only nation where religion was taught in its full purity, and “not to exclude them from the light and leave them among false teachers, Papists and idolaters”? This argument silenced objectors among the clergy. Then he poured his contempt upon the City men. “Can ye really be afraid that this mean and despised people should be able to prevail in trade over the merchants of England, the noblest and most esteemed merchants of the whole world?” “Thus he went on,” says an observer, “till he had silenced them too.… I never heard a man speak so well in his life.”
But Oliver had had enough, and he dismissed the shamefaced committee as he had dismissed the Long Parliament and the Little Parliament when they could not serve his purpose. Actually he had secured part of what he wanted in the judges’ decision, and he was probably not anxious to push the matter farther for fear of stirring up more agitation. Students of the episode agree that Oliver had probably made up his mind to accomplish his purpose more or less unofficially and to allow the re-entry, as a contemporary said, “by way of connivancy.” In fact, this was the impression at the time. “Now were the Jews admitted,” wrote the diarist John Evelyn on December 14, 1655, apparently in reference to the judges’ admission of no legal barrier.
Everyone was glad to be allowed to drop a prickly subject without a clear-cut decision—with one lone exception. To Manasseh ben Israel, who had put all his passion, his learning, his persuasiveness into the plan, all the ancient longing of his people plus a new urgency because of recent persecutions in Poland—to him a compromise was worthless. He went back to Holland, aged, penniless, defeated; and in little over a year, at the age of fifty-three, he was dead, perhaps of that elusive complaint, a broken heart.
The immediate consequences of Cromwell’s “connivancy” are no part of this story. Because of the indecisiveness of the result no large-scale immigration took place at the time; but in 1656, when England went to war with Spain, the Marranos were enabled to throw off their Spanish disguise and, despite renewed agitation, to win official permission for an open synagogue and limited rights as English residents. Manasseh’s nephew was admitted as a broker on the Royal Exchange in the same year in which his uncle died of despair. In fact, Cromwell’s compromise, a typical English solution, illogical but workable, was fortunate for the Jews when Commonwealth gave way to Restoration. There being no statute on the books for Charles II to cancel, he reasonably allowed things to go as they were, ignored petitions for re-expulsion of the Jews, and, since many Jewish families of monarchist sympathies had helped the Stuarts in exile, refused to consider any restrictions, and in short connived, like Cromwell, at a condition that was useful to him.
Gradually, over two centuries, the Sephardic community increased; and bit by bit, though always against new Prynnes and Demurrers, civil emancipation was won piecemeal.
These first stirrings in Puritan England of interest in the restoration of Israel were unquestionably religious in origin, born out of the Old Testament reign over the mind and faith of the party in power during the middle years of the seventeenth century. But religion was not enough. No practical results would have come out of the Puritans’ sense of ghostly brotherhood with the children of Israel or out of their ideals of toleration or out of their mystical hopes of hastening the millennium, had not political and economic expediency intervened. Cromwell’s interest in Manasseh’s proposal was dictated by the same factor that dictated Lloyd George’s interest in Chaim Weizmann’s proposal ten generations later: namely, the aid that each believed the Jews could render in a wartime situation. And from Cromwell’s time on, every future episode of British concern with Palestine depended on the twin presence of the profit motive, whether commercial, military, or imperial, and the religious motive inherited from the Bible. In the absence of either, as during the eighteenth century when the religious climate was distinctly cool, nothing happened.
CHAPTER VIII
ECLIPSE OF THE BIBLE:
The Reign of Mr. Worldly Wiseman
When the power of the Puritans was broken their earnestness and deadly seriousness went out of fashion, though not out of England. The dominant tone of Restoration and eighteenth century was set by the curled black wig, the cool intelligence, the casual shrug of Charles II. After nearly fifty years of being intense, England with a sigh of relief determined to be gay, to be good-humored — to be anything but serious.
But Puritanism, like a subterranean river, carried on among the Dissenters. Ejected from the re-Established Church, excluded from office, from the universities, from society, deprived even of civil rights until 1689, they still preserved a living tradition that was to emerge again in the nineteenth century. In the intervening period loosely called the eighteenth century Dissent lived in the shadows; aristocracy held the place in the sun. It was the age, says Trevelyan, of “aristocracy and liberty; the rule of law and absence of reform”; a “classic” age, orderly, mannerly, rational, and as un-Hebraic as possible.
The eighteenth century, if it is to have a coherent character, must be allowed to divest itself of strict chronological limits and wriggle itself into the period from 1660 to somewhere in the 1780’s; that is, from the Restoration to the decade when the American Revolution triumphed, the French Revolution began, and the Industrial Revolution got under way with Cartwright’s power loom and Watt’s steam engine. It was the age of reason and free thought. Science with its discovery of natural laws began to challenge the Bible. Not God but gravity, Isaac Newton discovered, brought the apple down on his head. The awful logic of John Locke opened new realms of uncertainty. Under the impact of these new thought processes the supreme authority of Scripture melted away like butter in the sun. Security of faith gave way to the insecurity of knowledge. Deism tried to supply a substitute for the Bible as Revelation. With youthful faith in the power of human reason to overcome religious controversy, the Deists offered a God whom all men of reason could believe in—a God whose existence was proved by all the wonders of the natural world and who needed no miracles, prophecies, or other supernatural revelations to show himself to mankind.
In reaction to “awful devout Puritanism” the Hellenic mood had returned. It left men clear-headed but uncomfortable with the craving for some omnipotent Authority unsatisfied. And the “moral depravity” that Arnold noted in the Renaissance returned too. While the tarnished silver of Restoration comedy held the stage, the government of England was left in the hands of the lordly and unprincipled Cabal. The Bloodless Revolution that unseated the Stuarts for good and brought in the Bill of Rights was an opposite tendency, but it slowly slid down to a nadir of political morality under the German Georges. Their time is memorable for its
South Sea Bubbles and rotten boroughs, its fortunes in slave trade and its ministers so busy jockeying for power under a half-crazy king as hardly to notice that they were losing an empire in America. Though called the Augustan Age by literary critics, it was also the gin-soaked age of Hogarth’s rakes and trollops. In a world of Yahoos, said Swift, the only angry voice of the time, “decency and comeliness are but conventions.”
In its official religion the age was High Church, polite, and satisfied to serve no other purpose than to offer its preferments as a refuge to the nobility’s younger sons and deserving relations. Gone was Independency. The order and legality of a state Church, however empty of fervor, was preferred to the anarchy of a dozen self-governing congregations, however sincere and devout. What chance had the Bible in a Church personified by Jane Austen’s immortal curate, Mr. Collins? The people of the Bible, New Testament as well as Old, were, like the Puritans, extremists. There is not a comfortable or complacent person among them. In eighteenth-century England the divine rage of the prophets could not penetrate what Gibbon called “the fat slumbers of the church.”
Yet a strong current of enthusiasm, of yearning for moral rectitude, ran underneath the urbane surface of the eighteenth century. The Wesley brothers’ Methodism and hymn singing were as much a product of the time, though of a different class, as Pope’s Rape of the Lock or Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son. And how can one generalize about a period that included at its beginning Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and at its end Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, two of the most remarkable books of any era? Gibbon represents the skeptic, the scientist, and the anti-Christian, Bunyan the believer, the enthusiast, the apostle of virtue. One is knowledge, the other faith, or, as Arnold would say, one is Hellenic, the other Hebraic. Pilgrim’s Progress is probably the most widely read book ever written in English after the Bible. Indeed, it was like a second Bible, in the cottage if not in the manor house. The educated class ignored it, but in the end it proved to be, in Macaulay’s words, “the only book about which the educated minority has come over to the opinion of the common people.” It is somewhat startling to find that this epitome of piety appeared in the same decade as Wycherley’s Country Wife and Plain Dealer, the epitome of profligacy. Although Bunyan belonged to the older Puritan generation, his book belongs to later generations who loved it and lived with it. He was both the heir of the Puritans and the predecessor of the Methodists—the bridge that carried Puritanism over to the Evangelical Revival of the nineteenth century.