Tercentenaries are in fashion. Hardly had the excitement of the American Jewish Tercentennial celebration died away, when Anglo-Jewry began its own more modest program, which is now reaching its climax. There is of course no question of imitation. We over here had begun to think of ours perhaps as soon as you decided to embark on yours: and the older among us recall how fifty years ago, too, our respective Two Hundred and Fiftieth commemorations ran neck and neck. At that time, we in England knew precisely where we stood, historically speaking, just as you in America did. The first group of Jews arrived in what is now the United States in September 1654, establishing what is now the world’s greatest Jewish community. In England we were equally sure of ourselves.

The Jews had been expelled from England by Edward I in 1290. For upwards of three and a half centuries, the country had been, with certain reservations, Judenrein. Then, when the Puritan Revolution had engendered a new spirit here, a self-sacrificing Dutch rabbi named Menasseh ben Israel had come to England on a mission to Oliver Cromwell and secured his sympathy for his dramatic plan for the apocalyptic Readmission of the Jews. Although the Whitehall Conference which met to consider the question in December 1655 was divided in its views, Cromwell himself decided to grant Menasseh’s petition on his own authority, giving him a favorable reply by word of mouth some time between the 14th and 28th of January 1656 (1655 in the “Old Style” calendar). In the early years of this century, certain enthusiastic antiquaries in Anglo-Jewry went so far as to institute a minor annual Yom Tov about this time of year, calling it “Resettlement Day.”

This is still more or less the story which is generally believed and repeated, notwithstanding the work done during the last half-century by various historians and the fundamental corrections which they have made to the accepted story. Generally speaking, such corrections are of merely academic importance. In this case, on the other hand, they are absolutely fundamental to the position of Anglo-Jewry, and indeed of the Jews in the English-speaking world as a whole. For it is near enough to the truth to say that the Jews were never “re-admitted” to England: and the fact that they were not readmitted, but gradually resettled, had a profound influence on the subsequent course of Anglo- and American Jewish history.

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One may say indeed, veering to the other extreme, that the Jews (or at least Jews) were never absent from England, and that, notwithstanding Edward I’s edict of expulsion, the country was never Judenrein: so that the traditional picture has to be drastically revised in this respect as well. Jewry, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and during the entire period between 1290 and 1656 there was almost perpetually some Jewish element which maintained its association with England. Even before the Expulsion, a Home for Converted Jews (Domus Conversorum)had been established in London, and when the Jews were ejected from the country in 1290 they left behind them in it a goodly number of erstwhile co-religionists.

The remarkable thing was, that although the Home continued into existence until the 17th century, it was never empty. Always, there were at the worst a handful (and sometimes more than a handful) of inmates. Sometimes, they were foreign converts who somehow or other turned up in England; sometimes, down to a full half-century after the Expulsion, they were English Jews who somehow or other had managed to evade the Edict of Expulsion, or perhaps had filtered back afterwards, and now yielded to force of circumstances; sometimes, Jews from abroad heard of this beneficent institution and the pension of three halfpence daily which it conferred on all its inmates, and came over expressly to become converted and enjoy its benefits. Among the latter, there was one picturesque adventurer who cut something of a figure in English history in the troubled period of the Wars of the Roses—a Portuguese Jew of dubious birth who after knifing a man in a quarrel came to England, was converted and took the name of Edward Brampton in honor of his godfather, the King of England, used the opportunity to obtain court patronage, became a soldier of fortune, married two wealthy heiresses in succession, was knighted and became governor of the Island of Guernsey, was the eminence grise who incited Perkin Warbeck to make his bid for the throne, and spent his last years back in his native Portugal as an honored English exile.

But besides these apostates there were numerous professing Jews who arrived from time to time: men like Master Elias the physician, who came from Flanders in 1309, apparently in the hopes of getting his coreligionists readmitted; Rabbi Saul Levi (later, as Paul de Santa Maria, to be bishop of his native Burgos and one of the most influential ecclesiastics in Spain), who spent a lonely Purim in London in 1389, when he was sent there by the King of Castile as a hostage; or Elias Sabot, the eminent and ubiquitous Italian physician, who arrived with a retinue of ten persons (obviously, he wanted to have a formal quorum or minyan for religious services) in order to attend on the ailing Henry IV in 1410. And every now and again the records reveal the presence of similar adventurers, scoundrels, or scholars.

These are of course mere collector’s pieces with little serious application. On the other hand, in the 16th century a new atmosphere prevailed. The fresh facet of Anglo-Jewish history associated with this period is of really great historical significance, by no means restricted to Anglo-Jewish antiquarians. And indeed the story of the discovery of this new page is itself of considerable interest. Seventy years ago, Sir Sidney Lee (himself of Jewish birth, and later editor of the Dictionary of National Biography) was beginning his Shakespearean researches, and was very greatly intrigued by one problem: could Shakespeare ever have seen a Jew, and could the delineation of Shylock in the Merchant of Venice bear the slightest relation to actuality? Making a detailed study of the contemporary English literary and historical sources, Lee was able to find quite a remarkable number of references to the Jews, and he published a couple of articles on Jews in Shakespeare’s England. At almost the same time, Lucien Wolf, perhaps the most gifted amateur ever to dabble in Jewish history, supplemented and absorbed these data in his own monograph on what he termed the “Middle Period” of Anglo-Jewish history, between the Expulsion and the Readmission. As a result of these two studies, it became plain that in Tudor England, and especially under Elizabeth, a number of Jews and Marranos made an appearance of longer or shorter duration in England, the most important being Dr. Roderigo. Lopes, Elizabeth’s physician, who was executed for treason against her in 1594.

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This remained the state of our knowledge for something like fifty years. In the period following World War I, a couple of younger historians (I myself being one) came to the fore in England and began to make mild secondary contributions to the period which Wolf had hitherto regarded as his own preserve. He did not resent this, but goaded by it he resolved to put us in our place, which he did very effectively. He now produced in rapid succession two monumental papers on the Jews in Tudor and Elizabethan England, mainly based on manuscript materials from the Inquisitional Archives which he had long been assembling. These entirely revolutionized the accepted picture of Anglo-Jewish history at this period. And their significance was not by any means confined to this insular sphere. I hardly know any other articles or publications of recent years which have made quite so great a difference to our general picture of modern. Jewish history. I may mention, as one of the mere by-products of Wolf’s work, the hitherto unknown personality of Don Solomon Abenaes (formerly Alvaro Mendes) Duke of Mytilene—the romantic heir to the position of the Duke of Naxos and to his colonizing interest in Palestine, who has now been accepted by Israeli historians as one of the pioneers of Zionism.

Briefly, Wolf’s great contribution to history was this. Formerly, the impression had been that the Marranos of Spain and Portugal had infiltrated in the generation or so after the Expulsion from those countries only into the various Mediterranean lands. Then, at the end of the 16th century, there began the massive Marrano emigration which was responsible for the establishment of the great Sephardi community of Amsterdam, which opened an entirely new chapter in European Jewish history; this being followed within the next half-century or so by the sister communities of Hamburg, London, the West Indies, and indeed New York.

The alternative picture presented by Wolf, which has now entered into Jewish historiography, was utterly different from this. Within a generation of the Forced Conversion in Portugal in 1497 (for that, rather than the Expulsion, was what ended the history of the declared Jewish communities in that country), New Christian (i.e. Marrano) immigrants began to infiltrate into all the seaports and commercial centers of Northern Europe, attracted not only, or not so much, by the opportunities to practice their religion there with a somewhat greater degree of safety, but also by the economic opportunities that these places offered in a period of rapidly expanding international commerce. They now began to observe Jewish practices, if they felt like it, with fewer qualms. But what first attracted most of them was the prospect of profitable livelihoods.

Of course, there were some whose main motivation was religious. There were others who emigrated from religious and economic motives combined. Very many removed themselves in due course to the Mediterranean lands and declared their Judaism openly. But the Jewish colonies in the Atlantic seaports were not composed entirely of the stuff of which martyrs were made. In due course, some of these colonies (such as that of Rouen) were uprooted; others (like Bordeau and Bayonne in France) continued for generations living a life of subterfuge; others (like Amsterdam) ultimately threw off their disguise and established open Jewish communities. But this was no sudden, dramatic episode as represented by older chroniclers, but the culmination of a process extending over the best part of a century, and linked with developments on a wider stage.

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One of the most important Atlantic seaports and commercial centers was, of course, London, and here too the same process occurred as in the other places to which reference has been made. As the result of Wolf’s researches, now supplemented in a minor degree by those of one or two scholars both Jewish and Gentile (the latter still attracted by the hypothetical Shakespearean associations of the subject), we now know that almost from the beginning of the 16th century, and almost continuously for a period of one hundred and fifty years, there was a Marrano colony in London with a subsidiary one for a time in Bristol. It varied from generation to generation in size, in importance, and in Jewish enthusiasms. But at one time or another it seems to have comprised a number of figures who were to play a part of great importance in subsequent Jewish history, including Joseph Nasi and several of the famous Marrano physicians who shed luster on the 16th century.

There was a time at the close of the reign of Henry VIII when the London colony was of great significance in the mechanism of the Marrano Diaspora. We know that normally religious ceremonies were observed at home; sometimes, as it seems, there was a fully constituted secret synagogue. A large number of members of the group subsequently turn up on the Continent or in the Levant as fervent professing Jews. Lucien Wolf imagined that at the close of the reign of Henry VIII the colony was broken up, but the present writer found that this was based on a misinterpretation or rather double reading of the documents. On the other hand, he himself asserted on the basis of records in the Italian archives that there was a formal expulsion of the Marrano groups in 1609, but he in turn has been proved incorrect, as many of their members stayed on, and were indeed reinforced from abroad. In fact, what deterred the Marranos at certain periods from settling in England and induced the emigration of those already there was commercial stagnation more than anything else. The group was therefore sometimes larger and sometimes smaller, sometimes more fervent and sometimes less. But from the reign of Henry VIII onwards, such a colony was a perpetual part of the London scene. And it was part of the London scene when in 1655 Menasseh ben Israel arrived from Holland with his grandiloquent, pretentious scheme for securing the formal “Recall” of the Jews to England and the setting up under official auspices of a new, officially recognized community—with himself as presiding genius and rabbi.¹

There is no need to give any details here of Menasseh’s mission and his vicissitudes. Briefly: he waited on Oliver Cromwell, and secured his sympathy. But the all-powerful Lord Protector was unwilling to risk unpopularity by acceding to the petition on his own authority, and tried unsuccessfully time after time to get some other body to pronounce in favor of the proposals. All that happened was that, at the Whitehall Conference which he summoned to meet in December 1655 to consider the question, the judges present pronounced that there was no law which excluded the Jews from England. This itself was, from one point of view, a disappointment to Menasseh, who had hoped for the dramatic repeal of what turned out to be a non-existent Act of Parliament! A great deal of interest was aroused. There was a flurry of publications, pro and contra. There were some notable expressions of sympathy. But nothing tangible resulted.

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As may well be imagined, Menasseh’s self-imposed mission was regarded with anything but sympathy by the group of Marranos already living in London. They were happy enough as they were—living undisturbed, carrying on their trade with Amsterdam and Lisbon, observing Jewish rites in their homes or coming together for service much as they pleased without fear of disturbance. They required nothing more. They were uninterested in Menasseh’s quasi-Messianic schemes, bound up with the problem of the Lost Ten Tribes and the hope of national regeneration. Indeed, they were unwilling to have attention called to their existence, which (so far as they were concerned) could not do much good, and might do a great deal of harm. For the most part, they would very much have preferred it if Menasseh had stayed at home. And indeed they had the experience of history on their side. None of the great Sephardi groups of Western Europe which were now beginning to play so important a role had come into existence as the result of a melodramatic gesture such as Menasseh was now proposing: all had been the result of a gradual evolution. It was a dispute not unlike that two and a half centuries later, between those Zionist leaders who favored political, and those who favored practical, work for asserting the Jewish claims in Palestine.

In the spring of 1656, circumstances forced the two sides temporarily together. The outbreak of war with Spain endangered the position of the members of the Marrano colony, most of them of Spanish birth; and alarmed by the opening of proceedings against one of the group, Antonio Rodrigues Robles, they decided to declare themselves openly as Jews. They now therefore joined Menasseh in presenting a new and far more modest petition to Oliver Cromwell, this time simply asking for permission to perform divine service in their private houses without molestation and to acquire a burial ground for the interment of their dead. Once again, Cromwell tried to devolve the responsibility on the members of his Council and, failing in this, did nothing at all except (as it seems) to inform the petitioners in private that, while he would not formally grant their petition, he had no objection to their acting as though he had done so. This must have been in the early summer of 1656, and from this episode the Tercentenary of British Jewry has been reckoned. Within a few months of this, as a matter of fact, the first London synagogue was consecrated.²

All this was a bitter disappointment for Menasseh, who had been hoping, petitioning, and working for something very different and far more ambitious—a formal action readmitting the Jews or, at the very least, even at the last desperate stage, authorizing the practice of Judaism. He was so disillusioned that, as a recently discovered document shows, he even went so far as to return to the community of Amsterdam the scroll of the Torah which had been given him as a symbolic gift to the new community; in his opinion no new community (at least in the sense in which he conceived it) had been founded. He retired to Holland, abandoned by his fellow Jews but fortified by a gift from the Lord Protector, to die a broken man, his dearest wish unfulfilled. There can be no doubt that his efforts had been responsible for the creation of a new and more favorable atmosphere in England, and also for the declaration that there was no law excluding the Jews from the country; but that was all. Otherwise, he left the Marrano community much as he had found it, only more assured of its position and venturing a little more courageously out into the open.

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But in the long run it turned out that what had happened was providential. Within a couple of years, Charles II had been triumphantly restored to his throne, and the legislation of the Commonwealth was automatically reversed. There cannot be the slightest doubt that, had Menasseh been what he would have considered successful in 1655/6, and had Cromwell or his Council admitted the Jews formally to the country, this would now have been canceled, and Jews who had come to settle in England would have been chased out—together with the Marranos already established in England. Obviously, the latter’s fears had not been exaggerated. Now, since nothing had been done, there was nothing to undo. Under Charles II, after a little initial nervousness, the incipient community reverted to the process of slow, unostentatious consolidation, being able to insure themselves before long of the “Merry Monarch’s” good-natured sympathy. There were one or two attempts made to disturb them, but by the end of his reign their position was solidly established and could be considered reasonably safe. The ultimate factor was not propaganda, not Messianism, not legislation, but something entirely different.

It may be said that with the Restoration the British people resolved to reconcile itself after certain hesitations and disruptions to a state of religious pluralism, subject to the recognition of the overriding rights of the national church. A country that desired to assert its dominant position in international trade could hardly decide otherwise. In such circumstances, there was room for all forms of religious divergence, and even for Judaism. Indeed, though Judaism might be more alien than other forms, it was not more obnoxious, for it is notorious that intimate divergences always engender the greatest bitterness. What people dreaded was the possibility of Catholic dominance, with its political implications, or of a recurrence of Puritan dominance, with its restrictions on individual liberty. Whether or not there was a synagogue in London hardly mattered when such threats had to be faced.

One thing that is very significant is the part played in all this by the Judiciary. It was the two judges present at the Whitehall Conference, Glynne and Steele, who were responsible for the all-important declaration that there was no law which forbade the residence of Jews in England. Later on, during the disturbed period which followed Cromwell’s death, rabble-raisers applied more than once in the courts for action to be taken against the Jews: the applications were in both cases dismissed, almost contemptuously. If there was nothing illegal in the residence of the Jews in England, then facilities must be given to them to carry on normal activities: and the” courts recognized that they should be allowed to take an oath in a form conformable with their consciences (not the degrading Continental Jewish oath) and should not be compelled to appear on the Sabbath. Marriages contracted according to Jewish religious forms were recognized as legal and binding by the English courts. The process of the Resettlement, then, though not recognized by statute, grew up under the protection of the Judiciary and the Common Law.

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Hence, from 1660 onwards, there developed in London not a Jewish community based on Menasseh ben Israel’s theories, but one based on Marrano realities. This was the all-important factor which henceforth shaped Anglo-Jewish history and profoundly influenced the development of Jewish life in all the English-speaking lands. Menasseh had wanted an authorized community, admitted under conditions, and therefore subject to certain regulations such as existed at this time in many places on the Continent. He envisaged the appointment of an officer to control the immigration and supervise the conduct of Jews, the payment of a special tribute, limitations of number, and settlement only in certain specified places. He would certainly have been prepared to acquiesce in restriction of occupation and of area of residence, probably a ghetto, perhaps even the Badge of Shame. But he failed, and the informal community which developed out of the Marrano colony in consequence of his failure knew nothing of all this. Not being authorized, the colony could not be regulated, and not being regulated, it knew hardly any restrictions other than those shared with other members of dissenting faiths. From the moment of the Resettlement the Jews thus enjoyed a degree of freedom in England paralleled in no other country of the Western world—not even Holland.

They could live wherever they pleased—in any city of the realm, and in any street or area of the place of their choice—nothing being imposed in the nature of a ghetto. They could dress as they pleased, in the height of fashion or in complete disregard of it, nothing in the nature of the Jewish Badge being required. They could engage in any industry or occupation they pleased, and in very nearly every profession. They could have Christian servants in their houses. They could set up factories and employ as many hands as they wished for the manufacture of whatever commodities they desired. They could appear in courts of law and carry on litigation without the necessity of submitting to a degrading form of oath. Though there was some idea that Jews could not own freeholds, owing to a recently unearthed medieval “statute,” they could nevertheless acquire property on 999-year leases at nominal rent, and within a generation of the Return we find them setting up as country gentlemen—and being accepted as such by their neighbors. They mixed with Gentile society—landed, scientific, literary—on their own merits. They became from an early date members of the august Royal Society, and Jewish physicians attended on the highest in the land. They accumulated fortunes, and did not have to fear that they would not be able to enjoy them, for they were subject to no special taxation or tribute. It was precisely on the basis of the negative outcome of the negotiations of 1655/6, the Tercentenary of which is now being celebrated, that Anglo-Jewry was able to plant such sure foundations.

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I have retold the traditional story here in exaggeratedly simple terms, even at the risk of creating a false impression. Of course, Menasseh ben Israel’s mission was not useless. Of course, his petitions and his propaganda and his personal advocacy and the Whitehall Conference played a great part in smoothing the way for the Resettlement. But, in effect, all this did no more than accelerate the process, or if you please lubricate the engine. The Marrano community would in any case have come out into the open within a few years in much the same way as it did, even if Menasseh had never come to England and Cromwell never read the Bible. Unless the English religious scene or economic outlook had radically changed, the Resettlement would have taken place in much the same way quite apart from these dramatic accidents. It was the fruit of circumstances, not of propaganda.

We must always remember this in considering the history of the English-speaking peoples, and the same is true, I think, of the Jewish communities of the English-speaking world, perhaps particularly so of the mother country. We hate declarations of principle. We always prefer to face problems as they arise, and deal with them practically and pragmatically, rather than consider hypothetical circumstances. If thereafter our political or legal theorists manage to discern a philosophical coherence in our expedients and subterfuges, they are welcome, but this will not affect the way in which we face our next problem and difficulty. In 1648, an attempt was made to extend religious toleration in England, to all persons of whatever religious belief, and in terms which would have included the Jews (echoing the principles which Roger Williams had envisaged for the colony of Rhode Island). But it failed, to some persons’ intense disappointment. Similarly, when in 1655 Menasseh ben Israel petitioned for the “Recall” of the Jews to England, he was heart-broken at the negative result. The English genius preferred to wait until it was faced with the fact of the presence of Jews in England, and then determine how they should be enabled to adjust themselves in English society. It was distressingly un-Messianic. It was hopelessly illogical. But it worked.

In brief: not despite, but because of, Menasseh ben Israel’s failure to secure the formal Recall of the Jews to England in 1655/6, the Jewish colony, which even before this had already begun to establish itself informally in the country, were able to live, within certain limitations, normal English lives—and these limitations, it is important to note, were for the most part shared by Christian non-conformists of various denominations. Inevitably, the same applied (as I tried to show in an article in the February 1954 number of Commentary, at the time of the American Tercentennial celebrations) in the English colonies beyond the Atlantic—to a somewhat greater degree, indeed, in view of the greater ease and informality of life in these. Thus, what happened in England during the discussions of 1655/6 inevitably affected, for the good, American Jewish history as well. It is as certain, I think, as any historical hypothesis can be that, had Menasseh ben Israel succeeded in his mission, the development of American Jewish life would have been less genial and easy than was in fact the case.

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¹ The only detailed work which takes all this into account is my History of the Jews in England (Oxford University Press, second edition, 1949) to which the reader is referred for further details to supplement the present wide generalizations.

² Since this article was written, Dr. Roth has made what he considers the most important historical discovery of his career, which fundamentally affects what historians (including himself) have formerly believed about the circumstances of the Resettlement of the Jews in England. Briefly, he has found evidence which shows conclusively that in spite of what was formerly stated, the petition of Menasseh ben Israel and his associates asking for permission to practice Judaism in England (and by inference in the American colonies as well) was considered and actually granted by the Council of State on June 25, 1656. Subsequently the minute recording this decision was for some mysterious reason removed from the Order Book and destroyed. This startling discovery does not, however, invalidate the substance and conclusions of the present article.—Ed.

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