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This chapter reexamines the controversy over readmission of the Jews in light of both the idea that England was Israel and the challenge of radical religion. The tense relation between Jewish messianism, Christian millenarianism, and conservative Protestantism appears in the controversy surrounding the Whitehall Conference Cromwell called in 1655. Controversy centered on the question of Jewish conversion, and disagreement about what Paul meant when he said ‘all Israel’ would be saved. The chapter analyzes writings by Menasseh ben Israel, Henry Jessey, John Dury, Arise Evans, Roger Williams, and Prynne. Presbyterians opposed readmission, believing religious radicalism had already contaminated England with ‘Judaism.’ Support for the Jews came from religious radicals (especially Quakers), who did not identify Israel with the nation. Margaret Fell wrote pamphlets to the Jews, hoping to convert them, yet others like George Fox and Dury expressed sharply anti–Jewish attitudes, showing the limits of toleration.

This chapter considers the seventeenth-century debates over the readmission of Jews, when the English shifted from telling stories about Jewish houses to contemplating the accommodated Jew in earnest. During this period the link between Jews and materiality acquired new urgency in England, as the participants in Oliver Cromwell's Whitehall Conference pondered making a place, literally, for Jews on the island. This chapter examines both the appearance in England of a climate amenable to readmission and the resistance to such possibility, focusing on Amsterdam rabbi Menasseh ben Israel's campaign for readmission through both polemical writings and his own prominent residence on the Strand, as well as Protestant polemicist William Prynne's collection of evidence favoring keeping Jews out of England. The chapter concludes by analyzing John Milton's position on readmission which he expressed in his 1671 play Samson Agonistes, with particular emphasis on his use of architectural figures to address issues of tolerance, Christianity, and Judaism. Instead of the house, however, Milton's preferred metaphor is Solomon's Temple.

This chapter traces the life of Jacob Sasportas prior to Sabbatianism. It places Sasportas in a series of different contexts: a member of a leading Sephardic family in Spanish Oran, a corrector in the printing house of Menasseh ben Israel in Amsterdam, and a minister to the fledgling congregation of Portuguese Jews in London. In each of these contexts, Sasportas emerges as “a man against,” challenging truisms and opposing received opinions, even as he sought patronage from wealthy Jews whom he scorned. Sasportas's response to the different centers in the western Sephardic Diaspora—Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, and Livorno—was conditioned by the fact that he experienced them as an outsider. Much of this was a rhetorical posture. Sasportas repeatedly placed himself on the margins of the places in which he lived, even as the Jews in these cities provided him and his family with material support. However, his marginality was not only rhetorical; or perhaps the rhetoric itself bears close scrutiny. What few accounts remain indicate that Sasportas was perceived by others, particularly other Jews, as an outsider as well. Occasionally, this led to comity and a meeting of the minds. More often, though, this posture of the outsider led to conflict, and these conflicts frequently left a long paper trail—a paper trail that offers a perspective, however partial, on the Sephardic Diaspora in western Europe in the seventeenth century.

Early seventeenth-century Amsterdam Jewish community life was marked by specific concerns about the consistency of the biblical text. In his Conciliador (1632–1651) Menasseh ben Israel tried to solve anomalies, for example those relating to the chronology of the reigns of the kingdoms Israel and Judah. Menasseh conducted his studies in a country dominated by Reformed Christianity, in which religious diversification and developments in both natural philosophy and chronology led to concerns about the infallibility of scriptural authority. This background explains Menasseh’s exceptional sensitivity to issues that his rabbinic predecessors had broached more casually. He explicitly took his distance from medieval solutions, which were not rigorous enough for his taste, and ostensibly set out to employ a systematic, mathematical method to solve the problems.

This chapter examines the history of the resettlement of Jews in England during the period from 1656 to 1700 after they were expelled by Edward I in 1290. The first Englishmen to propose the readmission of Jews were radical Puritans who eagerly awaited the coming of the millennium and were convinced that Protestant England had an active role to play in bringing it about. This chapter suggests that Menasseh ben Israel's interest in Jewish resettlement in England had a further dimension. Being a messianist, Menasseh believed that the return of Jews to England would accelerate the coming of the messianic age.

Rabbinical texts kept preexistence alive in the Jewish tradition (largely through the concept of the guf, or soul-treasury. Authorities like Peter Lombard and Aquinas declared against it. Neoplatonism and the cosmology of Timaeus persisted in works by Bernard Silvester, Hildegard von Bingen, and Julian of Norwich. Kabbalah serves as a conduit for the idea to later Christians. Menasseh ben Israel and Jacob Boehme are important in this regard.

Focusing on the second half of the seventeenth century, this chapter begins with the Cartwright petition, the first historical example of Christian Zionism. William Laud’s effort to contain the millenarian fervour of the time was undermined by the breakdown of parliamentary censorship and the subsequent popularization of millenarian politics, including the Fifth Monarchy Men. After exploring the influential ideas of Menasseh ben-Israel, including his speculation on the Lost Tribes and his possible influence on Oliver Cromwell, the chapter turns to the development of British, as opposed to English identity.

In his rabbinic scholarship and especially in De Jure, John Selden sets down ideas regarding the nature of Judaism and its attitude toward Gentiles that are far more charitable than those circulating in other contemporary works addressed to Christian audiences. His comments on contemporary Jews in Table Talk are also uncommonly generous, especially those under the heading ‘Salvation’. Selden did not live to see Cromwell’s Whitehall Conference, and he died before Menasseh ben Israel set foot on English soil, so one can never be certain that his reverence for ancient Jewish learning and toleration of contemporary Jews would have extended so far as activity on behalf of readmission. However, it is clear that his writings had a positive influence on both the readmission question, in a treatise by Thomas Barlow, and, in the next century, on the Jewish Naturalization Act or Jew Bill of 1753, in an essay by William Bowyer.

This chapter explores how the Judeo-centric tradition of prophecy interpretation informed negotiations of ‘American’ identity among English subjects in the New World, specifically the Puritan settlers in New England. Presuming intellectual continuity between the settlers and their English home context, the chapter shows that the Puritan colonists inherited and refined for their context the apocalyptic tradition of Judeo-centric prophecy interpretation, including that tradition’s anti-Catholic and anti-Islamic elements. Special attention is given to speculation about the location of the New Jerusalem in the thought of Samuel Sewall and Cotton Mather, as well as to the place of civil millennialism in the thought of Jonathan Edwards.