When the prophet of the Hebrews, some six-and-twenty hundred years ago, thundered forth his stirring ‘Go through! go through the gates! prepare a way, lift up a standard for the people!’ it may, without irreverence, be doubted if he foresaw how literally his charge would be fulfilled by one of his own race in the seventeenth century of the Christian era. The story of how it was done may perhaps be worth retelling, since many subjects of lesser moment have found more chroniclers.

It was in 1290 that gates, which in England had long been ominously creaking on their hinges, were deliberately swung-to, and bolted and barred by Church and State on the unhappy Jews, who on that bleak November day stood shivering along the coast. ‘Thy waves and thy billows have passed over me’ must have lost in tender allegory and gained some added force of literalness that wintry afternoon. Scarce any of the descendants of that exodus can have had share in the return. Of such of the refugees as reached the opposite ports few found foothold, and fewer still asylum. The most, and perhaps they were the most fortunate of the fifteen thousand, were quick in gaining foreign graves. Those who made for the nearest neighbouring shores of France, forgetful, or perhaps ignorant, of the recent experiences of their French brethren under Philip Augustus, lived on to earn a like knowledge for themselves, and to undergo, a few years later, another expulsion under Philip the Fair. Those who went farther fared worse, for over the German States the Imperial eagle of Rome no longer brooded, now to protect and now to prey on its victims; the struggle between the free cities and the multitudinous petty princelings was working to its climax, and whether at bitter strife, or whether pausing for a brief while to recruit their powers, landgrave and burgher, on one subject, were always of one mind. To plunder at need or to persecute at leisure, Jews were held to be handy and fair game for either side.

Far northward or far southward that ragged English mob were hardly fit to travel. Some remnant, perhaps, made effort to reach the semi-barbarous settlements in Russia and Poland, but few can have been sanguine enough to set out for distant Spain in hope of a welcome but rarely accorded to such very poor relations. And even in the Peninsula the security which Jews had hitherto experienced had by this date received several severe shocks. Two centuries later and the tide of civilisation had rolled definitely and drearily back on the soil which Jews had largely helped to cultivate, and left it bare, and yet a little longer, Portugal, become a province of Spain, had followed the cruel fashions of its suzerain.

By the close of the sixteenth century a settlement of the dispossessed Spanish and Portuguese Jews had been formed in Holland, and Amsterdam was growing into a strange Dutch likeness of a new Jerusalem, for Holland alone among the nations at this period gave a welcome to all citizens in the spirit of Virgil’s famous line, ‘Tros Rutulusve fuat, nullo discrimine habebo.’ And the refugees, who at this date claimed the hospitality of the States, were of a sort to make the Dutch in love with their own unfashionable virtue of religious tolerance. Under Moorish sway, for centuries, commerce had been but one of the pursuits open to the Jews and followed by the Jews of the Peninsula, and thus it was a crowd, not of financiers and traders only or chiefly, but of cultivated scholars, physicians, statesmen, and land-owners, whom Catholic bigotry had exiled. The thin disguise of new Christians was soon thrown off by these Jews, and they became to real Christians, to such men as Vossius and Caspar BarlÆus, who welcomed them and made friends of them, a revelation of Judaism.

It was after the great auto-da-fÉ of January 1605, that Joseph ben Israel, with a host of other Jews, broken in health and broken in fortune, left the land which bigotry and persecution had made hideous to them, and joined the peaceful and prosperous settlement in Amsterdam. The youngest of Ben Israel’s transplanted family was the year-old Manasseh, who had been born in Lisbon a few months before their flight. He seems to have been from the first a promising and intelligent lad, and his tutor, one Isaac Uziel, who was a minister of the congregation, and a somewhat famous mathematician and physician to boot, formed a high opinion of the boy’s abilities. He did not, however, live to see them verified; when Manasseh was but eighteen the Rabbi died, and his clever pupil was thought worthy to be appointed to the vacated office. It was an honoured and an honourable, but scarcely a lucrative, post to which Manasseh thus succeeded, and the problem of living soon became further complicated by an early marriage and a young family. Manasseh had to cast about him for supplementary means of support, and he presently found it in the establishment of a printing press. Whether the type gave impetus to the pen, or whether the pen had inspired the idea of the press, is hard to decide; but it is, at least, certain that before he was twenty-five, Manasseh had found congenial work and plenty of it. He taught and he preached, and both in the school-room and in the pulpit he was useful and effective, but it was in his library that he felt really happy and at home. Manasseh was a born scholar and an omnivorous reader, bound to develop into a prolific, if not a profound, writer. The work which first established his fame bears traces of this, and is, in point of fact, less of a composition than a compilation. The first part of this book, The Conciliator, was published in 1632, after five years’ labour had been expended on it, and it is computed to contain quotations from, or references to, over 200 Hebrew, and 50 Latin and Greek authors. Its object was to harmonise (conciliador) conflicting passages in the Pentateuch, and it was written in Spanish, although it could have been composed with equal facility in any one of half-a-dozen other languages, for Manasseh was a most accomplished linguist.

Although not the first book which was issued from his press, for a completely edited prayer-book and a Hebrew grammar had been published in 1627, The Conciliator was the first work that attracted the attention of the learned world to the Amsterdam Rabbi. Manasseh had the advantage of literary connections of his own, through his wife, who was a great-granddaughter of Abarbanel—that same Isaac Abarbanel, the scholar and patriot, who in 1490 headed the deputation to Ferdinand and Isabella, which was so dramatically cut short by Torquemada.

Like The Conciliator, all Manasseh’s subsequent literary ventures met with ready appreciation, but with more appreciation, it would seem, than solid result, for his means appear to have been always insufficient for his modest wants, and in 1640 we find him seriously contemplating emigration to Brazil on a trading venture. Two members of his congregation, which, as a body, does not seem to have acted liberally towards him, came forward, however, at this crisis in his affairs, and conferred a benefit all round by establishing a college and appointing Manasseh the principal, with an adequate salary. This ready use of some portion of their wealth has made the brothers Pereira more distinguished than for its possession. Still, it must not be inferred that Manasseh had been, up to this date, a friendless, if a somewhat impecunious, student, only that, as is rather perhaps the wont of poor prophets in their own country, his admirers had had to come from the outer before they reached the inner circle. He had certainly achieved a European celebrity in the Republic of letters before his friends at Amsterdam had discovered much more than the fact that he printed very superior prayer-books. He had won over, amongst others, the prejudiced author of the Law of Nations, to own him, a Jew, for a familiar friend, before some of the wealthier heads of his own congregation had claimed a like privilege; and Grotius, then Swedish ambassador at Paris, was actually writing to him, and proffering friendly services, at the very time that the Amsterdam congregation were calmly receiving his enforced farewells. There was something, perhaps, of irony in the situation, but Manasseh, like Maimonides, had no littleness of disposition, no inflammable self-love quick to take fire; he loved his people truly enough to understand them and to make allowances, had even, perhaps, some humorous perception of the national obtuseness to native talent when unarrayed in purple and fine linen, or until duly recognised by the wearers of such.

Set free, by the liberality of Abraham and Isaac Pereira, from the pressure of everyday cares, Manasseh again devoted himself to his books, and turned out a succession of treatises. History, Philosophy, Theology, he attacked them all in turn, and there is, perhaps, something besides rapidity of execution which suggests an idea of manufacture in most of these works. A treatise which he published about 1650, and which attracted very wide notice, significantly illustrated his rather fatal facility for ready writing. The treatise was entitled The Hope of Israel, and sought to prove no less than that some aborigines in America, whose very existence was doubtful, were lineal descendants of the lost ten tribes. The Hope itself seems to have rested on no more solid foundation than a traveller’s tale of savages met with in the wilds, who included something that sounded like the ??? (Shemang[17]) in their vernacular. The story was quickly translated into several languages, but it was almost as quickly disproved, and Manasseh’s deductions from it were subsequently rather roughly criticised. Truth to say, the accumulated stores of his mind were ground down and sifted and sown broadcast in somewhat careless and indigestible masses, and their general character gives an uncomfortable impression of machine-work rather than of hand-work. And the proportion of what he wrote was as nothing compared to what he contemplated writing. Perhaps those never-written books of his would have proved the most readable; he might have shown us himself, his wise, tolerant, enthusiastic self, in them. But instead, we possess, in his shelves on shelves of published compilations of dead men’s minds, only duly labelled and catalogued selections from learned mummies.

The dream of Manasseh was to compose a ‘Heroic History,’ a significant title which shadows forth the worthy record he would have delighted in compiling from Jewish annals. It is as well, perhaps, that the title is all we have of the work, for he was too good an idealist to prove a good historian. He cared too much, and he knew too much, to write a reliable or a readable history of his people. To him, as to many of us, Robert Browning’s words might be applied—

He, at any rate, had good reason to grow content in his degree, for he was destined to make an epoch in the ‘Heroic History,’ instead of being, as he ‘wished he were,’ the reciter, and probably the prosy reciter, of several. Certain it is that, great scholar, successful preacher, and voluminous writer as was Manasseh ben Israel, it was not till he was fifty years old that he found his real vocation. He had felt at it for years, his books were more or less blind gropings after it, his friendships with the eminent and highly placed personages of his time were all unconscious means to a conscious end, and his very character was a factor in his gradually formed purpose. His whole life had been an upholding of the ‘standard’; publicists who sneered at the ostentatious rich Jew, priests who railed at the degraded poor Jew, were each bound to recognise in Manasseh ben Israel a Jew of another type: one poor yet self-respecting, sought after yet unostentatious, conservative yet cosmopolitan, learned yet undogmatic. They might question if this Amsterdam Rabbi were sui generis, but they were at least willing to find out if he were in essentials what he claimed to be, fairly representative of the fairly treated members of his race. So the ‘way was prepared’ by the ‘standard’ being raised. Which, of the many long-closed ‘gates,’ was to open for the people to pass through?

Manasseh looked around on Europe. He sought a safe and secure resting-place for the tribe of wandering foot and weary heart, where, no longer weary and wandering, they might cease to be ‘tribal.’ He sought a place where ‘protection’ should not be given as a sordid bribe, nor conferred as a fickle favour, but claimed as an inalienable right, and shared in common with all law-abiding citizens. His thoughts turned for a while on Sweden, and there was some correspondence to that end with the young Queen Christina, but this failing, or falling through, his hopes were almost at once definitely directed towards England. It was a wise selection and a happy one, and the course of events, and the time and the temper of the people, seemed all upon his side. The faithless Stuart king had but lately expiated his hateful, harmful weakness on the scaffold, and sentiment was far as yet from setting the nimbus of saint and martyr on that handsome, treacherous head. The echoes of John Hampden’s brave voice seemed still vibrating in the air, and Englishmen, but freshly reminded of their rights, were growing keen and eager in the scenting out of wrongs; quick to discover, and fierce to redress evils which had long lain rooted and rotting, and unheeded. The pompous insouciance of the first Stuart king, the frivolous insouciance of the second, were now being resented in inevitable reaction. The court no longer led the fashion; the people had come to the front and were growing grimly, even grotesquely, in earnest. The very fashion of speaking seems to have changed with the new need for strong, terse expression. Men greeted each other with old-fashioned Bible greetings; they named their children after those ‘great ones gone,’ or with even quainter effect in some simple selected Bible phrase; the very tones of the Prophets seemed to resound in Whitehall, and Englishmen to have become, in a wide, unsensational sense, not men only of the sword, or of the plough, but men of the Book, and that Book the Bible. Liberty of conscience, equality before the law for all religious denominations, had been the unconditional demand of that wonderful army of Independents, and although the Catholics were the immediate cause and object of this appeal, yet Manasseh, watching events from the calm standpoint of a keenly interested onlooker, thought he discerned in the listening attitude of the English Parliament, a favourable omen of the attention he desired to claim for his clients, since it was not alone for political, but for religious, rights that he meant to plead.

He did not, however, actually come to England till 1655, when the way for personal intercession had been already prepared by correspondence and petition. His Hope of Israel had been forwarded to Cromwell so early as 1650; petitions praying for the readmission of Jews to England with full rights of worship, of burial, and of commerce secured to them, had been laid before the Long and the Rump Parliament, and Manasseh had now in hand, and approaching completion, a less elaborate and more impassioned composition than usual, entitled, VindiciÆ JudÆorum. A powerful and unexpected advocate of Jewish claims presently came forward in the person of Edward Nicholas, the clerk to the Council. This large-minded and enlightened gentleman had the courage to publish an elaborate appeal for, and defence of, the Jews, ‘the most honourable people in the world,’ as he styled them, ‘a people chosen by God and protected by God.’ The pamphlet was headed, Apology for the Honourable Nation of the Jews and all the Sons of Israel, and Nicholas’s arguments aroused no small amount of attention and discussion. It was even whispered that Cromwell had had a share in the authorship; but if this had been so, undoubtedly he who ‘stood bare, not cased in euphemistic coat of mail,’ but who ‘grappled like a giant, face to face, heart to heart, with the naked truth of things,’[19] would have unhesitatingly avowed it. His was not the sort of nature to shirk responsibilities nor to lack the courage of his opinions. There can be no doubt that, from first to last, Cromwell was strongly in favour of Jewish claims being allowed, but just as little doubt is there that there was never any tinge or taint of ‘secret favouring’ about his sayings or his doings on the subject. The part, and all things considered the very unpopular part, he took in the subsequent debates, had, of course, to be accounted for by minds not quick to understand such simple motive power as justice, generosity, or sympathy, and both now and later the wildest accusations were levelled against the Protector. That he was, unsuspected, himself of Jewish descent, and had designs on the long vacant Messiahship of his interesting kinsfolk, was not the most malignant, though it was perhaps among the most absurd, of these tales. ‘The man is without a soul,’ writes Carlyle, ‘that can look into the great soul of a man, radiant with the splendours of very heaven, and see nothing there but the shadow of his own mean darkness.’[20] There must have been, if this view be correct, a good many particularly materialistic bodies going about at that epoch in English history when the Protector of England took upon himself the unpopular burden of being also the Protector of the Jews.

There had been some opposition on the part of the family to overcome, some tender timid forebodings, which events subsequently justified, to dispel, before Manasseh was free to set out for England; but in the late autumn of 1655[21] we find him with two or three companions safely settled in lodgings in the Strand. An address to the Protector was personally presented by Manasseh, whilst a more detailed declaration to the Commonwealth was simultaneously published. Very remarkable are both these documents. Neither in the personal petition to Cromwell, nor in the more elaborate argument addressed to the Parliament, is there the slightest approach to the ad misericordiam style. The whole case for the Jews is stated with dignity, and pleaded without passion, and throughout justice rather than favour forms the staple of the demand. The ‘clemency’ and ‘high-mindedness’ of Cromwell are certainly taken for granted, but equally is assumed the worthiness of the clients who appeal to these qualities. Manasseh makes also a strong point of the ‘Profit,’ which the Jews are likely to prove to their hosts, naÏvely recognising the fact that ‘Profit is a most powerful motive which all the world prefers above all other things’; and ‘therefore dealing with that point first.’ He dwells on the ‘ability,’ and ‘industry,’ and ‘natural instinct’ of the Jews for ‘merchandising,’ and for ‘contributing new inventions,’ which extra aptitude, in a somewhat optimistic spirit, he moralises, may have been given to them for their ‘protection in their wanderings,’ since ‘wheresoever they go to dwell, there presently the traficq begins to flourish.’

Read in the light of some recent literature, one or two of Manasseh’s arguments might almost be termed prophetic. Far-sighted, however, and wide-seeing as was our Amsterdam Rabbi, he could certainly not have foretold that more than two hundred years later his race would be taunted in the same breath for being a ‘wandering’ and ‘homeless tribe,’ and for remaining a ‘settled’ and ‘parasitic’ people in their adopted countries; yet are not such ingenious, and ungenerous, and inconsistent taunts answered by anticipation in the following paragraph?—

Manasseh goes on to quote Holy Writ, to show that to ‘seek for the peace,’ and to ‘pray for the peace of the city whither ye are led captive,’[23] was from remote times a loyal duty enjoined on Jews; and so he makes perhaps another point against that thorough-going historian of our day, who would have disposed of the People and the Book, the Jews and the Old Testament together, in the course of a magazine article. To prove that uncompromising loyalty has among the Jews the added force of a religious obligation, Manasseh mentions the fact that the ruling dynasty is always prayed for by upstanding congregations in every Jewish place of worship, and he makes history give its evidence to show that this is no mere lip loyalty, but that the obligation enjoined has been over and over again faithfully fulfilled. He quotes numerous instances in proof of this; beginning from the time, 900 years B.C., when the Jerusalem Jews, High Priest at their head, went forth to defy Alexander, and to own staunch allegiance to discrowned Darius, till those recent civil wars in Spain, when the Jews of Burgos manfully held that city against the conqueror, Henry of Trastamare, in defence of their conquered, but liege lord, Pedro.[24]

Of all the simply silly slanders from which his people had suffered, such, for instance, as the kneading Passover biscuits with the blood of Christian children, Manasseh disposes shortly, with brief and distinct denial; pertinently reminding Englishmen, however, that like absurd accusations crop up in the early history of the Church, when the ‘very same ancient scandalls was cast of old upon the innocent Christians.’

With the more serious, because less absolutely untruthful, charge of ‘usury,’ Manasseh deals as boldly, urging even no extenuating plea, but frankly admitting the practice to be ‘infamous.’ But characteristically, he proceeds to express an opinion, that ‘inasmuch as no man is bound to give his goods to another, so is he not bound to let it out but for his own occasions and profit,’ ‘only,’ and this he adds emphatically—

The Appeal made, as it could scarcely fail to do, a profound impression—an impression which was helped not a little by the presence and character of the pleader. And presently the whole question of the return of the Jews to England was submitted to the nation for its decision.

The clergy were dead against the measure, and, it is said, ‘raged like fanatics against the Jews as an accursed nation.’ And then it was that Cromwell, true to his highest convictions, stood up to speak in their defence. On the ground of policy, he temperately urged the desirability of adding thrifty, law-respecting, and enterprising citizens to the national stock; and on the higher ground of duty, he passionately pleaded the unpopular cause of religious and social toleration. He deprecated the principle that, the claims of morality being satisfied, any men or any body of men, on the score of race, of origin, or of religion (‘tribal mark’ had not at that date been suggested), should be excluded from full fellowship with other men. ‘I have never heard a man speak so splendidly in my life,’ is the recorded opinion of one of the audience, and it is a matter of intense regret that this famous speech of Cromwell’s has not been preserved. Its eloquence, however, failed of effect, so far as its whole and immediate object was concerned. The gates were no more than shaken on their rusting hinges—not quite yet were the people free to ‘go through.’

The decision of the Council of State was deferred, and some authorities even allege that it was presently pronounced against the readmission of the Jews to England. The known and avowed favour of the Protector sufficed, nevertheless, to induce the few Jews who had come with, or in the train of, Manasseh to remain, and others gradually, and by degrees, and without any especial notice being taken of them, ventured to follow. The creaking old gates were certainly ajar, and wider and wider they opened, and fainter and fainter, from friction of unrestrained intercourse, grew each dull rust and stain of prejudice, till that good day, within living memories, when the barriers were definitely and altogether flung down. And on their ruins a new and healthy human growth sprang quickly up, ‘taking root downwards, and fruit upwards,’ spreading wide enough in its vigorous luxuriance to cover up all the old bad past. And by this time it has happily grown impervious to any wanton unfriendly touch which would thrust its kindly shade aside and once again lay those ugly ruins bare.

Manasseh, however, like so many of us, had to be content to sow seed which he was destined never to see ripen. His petitions to the Commonwealth were presented in 1655, his VindiciÆ JudÆorum was completed and handed in some time in 1656, and in the early winter of 1657, on his journey homewards, he died. His mission had not fulfilled itself in the complete triumphant way he had hoped, but ‘life fulfils itself in many ways,’ and one part at any rate, perhaps the most important part, of the Hebrew prophet’s charge, had been both poetically and prosaically carried out by this seventeenth century Dutch Jew. He had ‘lifted up a standard for his people.’