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ABSTRACT
Menasseh ben-Israel petitioned to re-admit Jews to England in 1655. Historians have been aware that Menasseh utilized the ideas employed by Simone Luzzatto in Luzzatto’s efforts to avoid the expulsion of the Jews from Venice. Luzzatto employed the humanist language of reason of state, while Menasseh’s writings were all exegetical in nature prior to 1655. How did Menasseh, a messianist whose writings focused on explaining Jewish thought, who had shown no interest in humanist political discourse, come to employ the humanist ideas of reason of state popular in the mid-seventeenth century? Furthermore, Luzzatto’s petition is a meek request to allow Jews to continue to reside in the Venetian ghetto, while Menasseh addresses Cromwell as an ambassador of one nation to the leader of another boldly requesting to be admitted to England without disabilities. How can we explain this dramatic change in tone? This paper traces the links, as well as the crucial differences, between these two petitions by examining several other petitions on behalf of Atlantic Jewry as well as the international developments in the intervening period. This paper argues that these factors were critical in the development of Menasseh’s thought as well as his choice of language and tone.
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Notes
1 Lucien Wolf, ed., 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 (Project Gutenberg. Web), 13, 160–84.
2 Simone Luzzatto, Discourse on the State of the Jews: Bilingual Edition, ed., trans. and comment. Giuseppe Veltri and Anna Lissa (Berlin: De Grutyer, 2019), 2–241.
3 Ibid., 1.
4 Cecil Roth and Geoffrey Wigoder, ed., Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 1972), s.v. ‘Menasseh Ben Israel’.
5 David S. Katz, ‘Menasseh ben Israel’s Mission to Queen Christina of Sweden, 1651–1655’, Jewish Social Studies 45, no. 1 (Winter 1983): 58 and Asa Kasher, ‘How Important was Menasseh ben Israel’, in Menasseh ben Israel and his World, ed. Yosef Kaplan, Henry Méchoulan, and Richard H. Popkin (Leiden: Brill, 1989).
6 Encyclopaedia Judaica, s.v. ‘Menasseh Ben Israel’.
7 Katz, ‘Mission to Queen Christina’, 58.
8 For Menasseh’s friendship with Grotius, see Phyllis S. Lachs, ‘Hugo Grotius’ Use of Jewish Sources in On the Law of War and Peace’, Renaissance Quarterly 30, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 183 and Katz, ‘Mission to Queen Christina’, 59–60.
9 Wolf, Mission to Cromwell, 225. The etching and a portrait can be seen in Wolf, Mission to Cromwell, 3 and 185.
10 Sina Rauschenbach, ‘Mediating Jewish Knowledge: Menasseh ben Israel and the Christian Respublica litteraria’, The Jewish Quarterly Review 102, no. 4 (Fall 2012): 561–88.
11 Wolf, Mission to Cromwell, 221–2.
12 List of ‘The Authors of other Nations, which are quoted in this Treatise’ in Hope of Israel in Wolf, Mission to Cromwell, 71–5.
13 Benjamin Ravid, ‘“How Profitable the Nation of the Jewes Are:” The Humble Addresses of Menasseh ben Israel and the Discorso of Simone Luzzatto’, in Mystics, Philosophers and Politicians, ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Daniel Swetschinski (Durham: Duke UP, 1982), 159–80.
14 Achsah Guiborry, Chrisitan Identity, Jews, and Israel in 17th-Century England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010), 224.
15 Wolf, Mission to Cromwell, 136.
16 Guiborry, Christian Identity, 224; Wolf, Mission to Cromwell, 20.
17 Wolf, Mission to Cromwell, 18.
18 Johanna Cartwright and Ebenezer Cartwright, The Petition of the Jewes for the Repealing of the Act of Parliament for Their Banishment Out of England: Presented to His Excellency and the Generall Councell of Officers on Fryday Jan. 5. 1648. With Their Favourable Acceptance Thereof. Also a Petition of Divers Commanmanders [sic], Prisoners in the Kings Bench, for the Releasing of All Prisoners for Debt, According to the Custome of Other Countries (London: Printed for George Roberts, 1649. Early English Books Online. Web) and Ismar Schorsch, ‘From Messianism to Realpolitik: Menasseh Ben Israel and the Readmission of the Jews to England’, Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 45 (1978): 187–208.
19 Wolf, Mission to Cromwell, 64.
20 Ibid., 219.
21 Ibid., 160–84.
22 Ibid., 164.
23 Ibid., 22–5.
24 Wolf, Mission to Cromwell, 22; for a similar point of view, see Nathan Osterman, ‘The Controversy over the Proposed Readmission of the Jews to England (1655)’, Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 3 (July 1941): 320–1.
25 Gilbert Burnet, Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Time. Vol. I. From the Restoration of King Charles II. To the Settlement of King William and Mary at the Revolution: To Which is Prefix’d a Summary Recapitulation of Affairs in Church and State from King James I. to the Restoration in the Year 1660 ([The Hague?]: Eighteenth Century Collections Online, 1724, Web), 78.
26 Wolf, Mission to Cromwell, 164.
27 Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 31–64.
28 Ravid, ‘How Profitable’, 161.
29 Wolf, Mission to Cromwell, 162.
30 Ravid, ‘How Profitable’, 170.
31 Wolf, Mission to Cromwell, 38.
32 Benjamin Ravid, ‘The Venetian Context of the Discourse’, in Discourse on the State of the Jews: Bilingual Edition, ed., trans. and comment. Giuseppe Veltri and Anna Lissa (Berlin: De Grutyer, 2019), 246.
33 Ibid., 243.
34 Simone Luzzatto, Socrates, or on Human Knowledge, ed., trans. and comment. Giuseppe Veltri and Michela Torbidoni (Berlin: De Grutyer, 2019).
35 Ibid., 3–5.
36 Luzzatto, Discourse, v.
37 See Luzzatto, Discourse, 47 and note 53 showing similar text in the Discourses.
38 Anna Lissa, ‘Jews on Trial and Their Sceptical Attorney: Philosophic Scepticism and Political Thought in Simone Luzzatto’s Italian Works’, in Discourse on the State of the Jews: Bilingual Edition, ed., trans. and comment. Giuseppe Veltri and Anna Lissa (Berlin: De Grutyer, 2019), 324–5.
39 Abraham Melamed, Wisdom’s Little Sister: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Jewish Political Thought (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012), 308.
40 Ibid., 307–8; Vasileios Syros, ‘Simone Luzzatto’s Image of the Ideal Prince and The Italian Tradition of Reason of State’, Redescriptions. Yearbook of Political Thought and Conceptual History 9 (2005): 157–82.
41 Luzzatto, Discourse, 109.
42 Lissa, ‘Jews on Trial’, 327.
43 Interestingly, in a letter written to ‘the Hebrew nation living in Asia and in Europe’ announcing his plans to sail to England to negotiate with Cromwell, Menasseh refers to Cromwell’s ‘prudent council’. See Cecil Roth, ‘New Light on the Resettlement’, Transactions (Jewish Historical Society of England), 11 (1924-1927): 116.
44 Wolf, Mission to Cromwell, 107, 108, 131.
45 Giovanni Botero, The Reason of State, ed. Robert Bireley (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 6.
46 Luzzatto, Discourse, 33.
47 Botero, The Reason of State, 137–9.
48 Luzzatto, Discourse, 17–21.
49 Ibid., 33.
50 Ibid., 39.
51 Wolf, Mission to Cromwell, 165.
52 Ibid., 167–8.
53 Luzzatto, Discourse, 17.
54 Ravid, ‘How Profitable’, 180.
55 Luzzatto, Discourse, 17–19.
56 Wolf, Mission to Cromwell, 166–7.
57 See footnote 20 in Luzzatto, Discourse, 19.
58 Luzzatto, Discourse, 129.
59 Melamed, Wisdom’s Little Sister, 316.
60 Wolf, Mission to Cromwell, 215.
61 Hugo Grotius, The Freedom of the Seas or the Right to Take Part in the East Indian Trade, trans. Ralph Van Deman Magoffin and ed. James Brown Scott (New York: Oxford UP, 1916), 7.
62 Wolf, Mission to Cromwell, 162.
63 Luzzatto, Discourse, 241.
64 The reference is to Zechariah 2:8.
65 Wolf, Mission to Cromwell, 183.
66 Jonathan Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews and the World of Maritime Empires (1540–1740) (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 355–63.
67 Ibid., 368–9.
68 I. S. Emmanuel, ‘New Light on Early American Jewry’, American Jewish Archives (January 1955): 40.
69 Ibid., 43.
70 Ibid., 44.
71 Cecil Roth, A Life of Menasseh Ben Israel: Rabbi, Printer, and Diplomat (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1934), 67.
72 Ibid., 69.
73 Katz, ‘Mission to Queen Christina’, 60.
74 Wolf, Mission to Cromwell, 28.
75 Israel, Diasporas, 391–2.
76 Ibid., 377.
77 Ibid., 379–82.
78 Lucien Wolf, ‘American Elements in the Re-Settlement’, Transactions (Jewish Historical Society of England) 3 (1896–8): 89.
79 Ibid., 90.
80 Katz, ‘Mission to Queen Christina’, 60.
81 Samuel Oppenheim, ‘The Early History of the Jews in New York, 1654–1664. Some New Matter on the Subject’, Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, no. 18 (1909): 9–12.
82 Ibid., 10.
83 Ibid., 10–11.
84 Ibid., 11.
85 Ibid., 10.
86 Israel, Diasporas, 393.
87 Wolf, ‘American Elements’, 84.
88 James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), ix.
89 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 137–41.
90 Harrington, Oceana, 1 and 6.
91 Abraham Melamed speculates that Harrington, who was deeply impressed by his visit to Venice in the late 1630s, could have met Luzzatto. Regardless of whether they met both argued for the toleration of Jews based on their economic utility deriving from the same underlying logic of reason of state. See Melamed, Wisdom’s Little Sister, 335–54.
92 Harrington, Oceana, ix.
93 Wolf, Mission to Cromwell, 37–40.
94 Roth, A Life, 66.
95 Katz, ‘Mission to Queen Christina’, 65–6.
96 Roth, A Life, 35–6.
97 Wolf, Mission to Cromwell, 131. Wolf speculates that Menasseh was attracted to the idea of promoting the coming of the Messiah as, traditionally, the Messiah would be a scion of the House of David, Ibid., 18.
98 Ibid., 49.
99 Wolf, ‘The Jewry of Restoration. 1660–1164’, Transactions (Jewish Historical Society of England), 5 (1902–1905): 25.