History of the Jews (50 page)

Manasseh perceived that the defeat of the English royalists and the execution of the king in 1649 offered a unique opportunity for the Jews to gain entry to England. The king’s Puritan opponents, now effectively running the country, had always represented the philosemitic tradition there. The Bible was their guide to current events. They invoked the Prophet Amos to condemn Star Chamber. They adduced the case of Naboth’s Vineyard as a prefiguration of Ship Money. The Puritan common lawyer, Sir Henry Finch, had published in 1621
The World’s Great Restauration, or Calling of the Jews
—a work the crown had condemned for
lèse-majésté
.
⁶⁸
Many believed that the Second Coming was imminent. But both Deuteronomy 28:64 and Daniel 12:7 suggested this could not happen until the scattering of the Jews was complete, ‘from the one end of the earth even unto the other’. Hence, until Jews were scattered in England too, the millenium would be delayed. This was a notion Manasseh shared with English fundamentalists, since Kezeh ha-Arez, the ‘end of the earth’, was the medieval Hebrew term for England, and he believed the acceptance of Jews in England would hasten the Messiah’s coming. He opened his campaign in the winter of 1648-9 with a book entitled
An Apology for the Honourable Nation of the Jews
, which he signed ‘Edward Nicholas’. He followed this in 1650 with a far more important work,
Spes Israelis
, translated as
The Hope of Israel
, in which he advanced the millenarian argument. The first Anglo-Dutch War postponed more practical measures, but in September 1655 Manasseh came to London himself. He presented a petition to Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector, requesting that the laws forbidding the Jews entry be repealed and that they be granted admission on terms to be laid down by the government.
⁶⁹

What followed was a characteristic English muddle, which is worth examining in detail because it proved of such critical importance in the whole of Jewish history. Cromwell received Manasseh’s petition favourably and referred it to the Council. On 12 November 1655 the Council appointed a sub-committee to examine the matter and seek expert legal advice. On 4 December a conference was held in Whitehall attended by twenty-five lawyers, including the Chief Justice, Sir John Glynne, and the Chief Baron of the Exchequer, William Steele. To the surprise of the politicians they announced that there was no law whatever which prevented Jews coming to England. Edward’s 1290 expulsion was an act of royal prerogative which affected only the individuals concerned. Somewhat illogically, the sub-committee then got down to discussing the conditions on which Jews were to be admitted. But it could not agree. The Jews had enemies among the Commonwealth men, as well as friends. After four sessions, Cromwell dismissed it on 18 December. Manasseh, bitterly disappointed, went back to Amsterdam the following year, believing he had failed.

But he had, in fact, misunderstood the way the English did things. They preferred a pragmatic to a clear-cut ideological solution. If an agreement had been drawn up, giving a special legal status to Jewish immigrants, they would necessarily have been branded as second-class citizens. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, Charles
II
would quite possibly have repudiated the deal, or renegotiated it with harsher terms. In either case the Jewish question would have become a public issue, raising anti-Semitic hackles. As it was, the matter was resolved pragmatically, without a specific treaty. While Manasseh was still in London, a man called Antonio Rodrigues Robles, a
marrano
legally, though in fact a Jew, was being proceeded against in court as a Spanish alien, England and Spain being at war. Some twenty
marrano
families decided, in March 1656, to resolve the matter by openly confessing their Judaism, declaring themselves refugees from the Spanish Inquisition, and petitioning the Council for the right to practise their religion in private. On 16 May the Council ordered the proceedings against Robles quashed, and at a further meeting on 25 June it seemingly granted the petition, though the minutes for that day were later mysteriously removed. At any rate, on 4 August there arrived from Amsterdam ‘a scroll of the Law of fine parchment, with its binder and mantle of yellow velvet, a red damask cloth for the reading desk and a spice-box lined with red taffeta’, and the London Jews went ahead with leasing a building in Creechurch Lane for their first synagogue.

Hence, by a sort of tacit conspiracy, the question of the special
status for the Jews was dropped. As there was no statute stopping them from coming, they came. As the Council said they could practise their religion, they practised it. When the Conventical Act, aimed at Nonconformists, was passed in 1664, the Jews, led by their new rabbi, Jacob Sasportas, took their anxieties to Charles
II
, who told them, ‘laughing and spitting’, not to worry; and later the Privy Council put it in writing that Jews could ‘promise themselves the effects of the same favour as formerly they have had, so long as they demean themselves peaceably and quietly, with due obedience to His Majesty’s laws and without scandal to his government’.

Thus the English Jews, by an act of omission, as it were, became full citizens, subject to no more disabilities than those inherent in their own unwillingness, like Catholics and Nonconformists, to belong to the Church of England or, in their particular case, to swear Christian oaths. Over the next generation, various judicial rulings established the right of Jews to plead and give evidence in the courts, and to have their religious susceptibilities recognized for this purpose. It is true that, like other non-Anglicans, they were barred from many offices and from parliament. But there were no legal restraints, as such, on their economic activities. Indeed discrimination arose chiefly within the Jewish community. Its dominant Sephardi element still felt insecure and deplored any influx of poor Ashkenazi Jews, especially if the community had to support them. It ruled in 1678-9 that German Jews could not be allowed to hold office, vote at meetings or read the scrolls. But this ruling was found to be against Jewish law and had to be modified. So far as the English courts were concerned, the Jews seem to have received justice and protection from the start, English judges in general being well disposed to hard-working, law-abiding citizens who did not disturb the king’s peace. Indeed in 1732 a judgment gave Jews, in effect, legal protection against generic libels which might endanger life. Hence almost by accident England became the first place in which it was possible for a modern Jewish community to emerge.

The consequences in America were still more important. In 1654 the French privateer
St Catherine
brought twenty-three Jewish refugees from Recife in Brazil to the Dutch colonial town of New Amsterdam. As in Amsterdam itself, the position of Jews under Dutch colonial rule was uncertain: Calvinists, though better disposed than Lutherans, could also be oppressive and anti-Semitic. The Governor of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, protested to the Dutch West India Company against this settlement of what he termed ‘a deceitful race’ whose ‘abominable religion’ worshipped ‘the feet of Mammon’. The
Jews were allowed to stay but they were not accorded any rights and company and governor united to forbid them to build a synagogue. But any ambiguities were resolved in 1664 when the town fell to the English and became New York. Thereafter the Jews enjoyed not only the advantages of English citizenship but the additional religious freedoms the colonists in the New World had taken for themselves.

Richard Nicholls, New York’s first English governor, stressed the right to freedom of worship when he proclaimed in 1665: ‘No person shall be molested, fined or imprisoned for differing in judgment in matters of religion, who profess Christianity.’ The omission of any reference to Judaism seems to have been an oversight. The English wanted colonists, especially those with mercantile skills and good trading contacts. The next governor, Edmund Andros, made no reference to Christianity when he promised equal treatment and protection to law-abiding persons ‘of what religion soever’. As in England, the issue of Jewishness was not raised. Jews simply came, built houses, enjoyed equal rights and, it seems, voted in the earliest elections; they held offices too.
⁷⁰

They began to settle in other areas, notably the Delaware Valley and Rhode Island, which Roger Williams had founded as a libertarian colony where no religious bars whatever applied. Some difficulties arose when Jews wished to have their own cemetery in New York. But in 1677 one was opened in Newport,
RI
—later the subject of one of Longfellow’s finest poems—and New York got its own five years later. In 1730 the Shearith Israel Congregation in New York consecrated its first synagogue, and a particularly fine new one was built at Newport in 1763, today a national shrine. Under the English Navigation Acts, trade within colonies and the mother country was limited to English citizens; and when the imperial parliament enacted the Naturalization Act for the North American colonies, the Jews were allowed to acquire citizenship on a par with Christian settlers, two provisions being dropped to allow for Jewish scruples. Hence the Swede Peter Kalm, visiting New York in 1740, recorded that Jews ‘enjoy all the privileges common to the other inhabitants of this town and province’.
⁷¹
It was the same in Philadelphia, where an important Jewish colony began to grow up from the 1730s onwards.

Thus was born American Jewry. It was, from the start, unlike any Jewry elsewhere. In Europe and Afro-Asia, where religious barriers were universal in some form, the Jews always had to negotiate or have imposed upon them a special status. This obliged them to form specific and usually legally defined communities, wherever they settled. To a greater or lesser extent, all these Jewish communities were self-
governing, even though the actual condition of the Jews might be miserable and perilous. In Poland, under the monarchy, the Jews enjoyed a kind of home rule, governing themselves through the Councils of the Lands, which their wealthier members elected. They were taxed more heavily than the surrounding Poles and had no real right of self-defence, but otherwise they ran their own affairs. To a less pronounced extent this was true of every Jewish settlement in Continental Europe. The Jews always ran their own schools, courts, hospitals and social services. They appointed and paid their own officials, rabbis, judges, slaughterers, circumcisers, schoolteachers, bakers and cleaners. They had their own shops. Wherever they were, the Jews formed tiny states within states. This was the ghetto system, and it applied even in places like Amsterdam where no legal ghettoing existed.

In North America it was quite different, even before the United States attained independence. With the virtual absence of religious-determined law, there was no reason why Jews should operate a separate legal system, except on matters which could be seen as merely internal religious discipline. Since all religious groups had virtually equal rights, there was no point in any constituting itself into a separate community. All could participate in a common society. Hence from the start, the Jews in America were not organized on communal but on congregational lines, like the other churches. In Europe, the synagogue was merely one organ of the all-embracing Jewish community. In North America it was the only governing body in Jewish life. American Jews did not belong to ‘the Jewish community’, as they did in Europe. They belonged to a particular synagogue. It might be Sephardi or Ashkenazi; or, of the latter, it might be German, English, Holland, Polish, all of them differing on small ritual points. Protestant groups were divided on comparable lines. Hence a Jew went to ‘his’ synagogue, just as a Protestant went to ‘his’ church. In other respects, both Jew and Protestant were part of the general citizenry, in which they merged as secular units. Thus for the first time Jews, without in any way renouncing their religion, began to achieve integration.

This was of enormous long-term consequence when the Jewish population of North America began to expand rapidly.
⁷²
For it meant that Jewry was no longer a dualism: Erez Israel and the diaspora. The Jewish presence in the world formed, rather, a tripod of forces: Israel, the diaspora, American Jewry, which was quite different in kind to any other diaspora settlement and proved, in the end, the Third Force which enabled the Zionist state to come into existence.

This was in the future, but even in the early modern period the acceptance of the Jews in the Anglo-Saxon area of power began to have a growing impact on the role Jews played in the economy, giving it a permanency and stability it had never possessed before. At various times, in antiquity, in the Dark and early Middle Ages, in the seventeenth century, the Jews had been brilliant traders and entrepreneurs, and often extremely successful ones. But Jewish economic power was ultra-vulnerable, with little security in law. In both Christendom and Islam Jewish fortunes were liable to arbitrary seizure at any time. One might say that the Nazi assault on Jewish business, 1933-9, or the confiscations of Jewish property by Arab states in 1948-50, were merely the last and most comprehensive of such economic attacks on the Jews. As a result, during the period up to the mid-seventeenth century, Jewish fortunes were transitory or at best migratory, and the Jewish contribution to the growth of an international, entrepreneurial economy was correspondingly restricted. The Jews had always been skilful at using and transferring capital. But once they were established in Anglo-Saxon society, the security they then enjoyed in law enabled them to accumulate it too. Confidence in their rights led Jews to expand the scope of their activities. Trading, especially in articles of small volume and high value, such as jewels, easily concealed and whisked from place to place, no longer constituted almost the sole economic occupation in which Jews found it safe to engage.