Menasseh ben Israel before Cromwell: the conference that decided nothing

The design was messianic by calculation. In 1644 the traveller Antonio de Montezinos deposed before the Amsterdam rabbinate that he had met Indians in the Andes saying Shema Yisrael. Menasseh ben Israel built Esperança de Israel (1650) on it: if the Lost Tribes are already in America, the dispersion is nearly complete, and the missing link is England, the "end of the earth" of Deuteronomy 28:64, whence the Jews had been expelled in 1290.

In the autumn of 1655 he came to London and presented Cromwell with The Humble Addresses. The Whitehall Conference sat on 4, 7, 12 and 18 December: members of the Council, the Chief Justices Sir John Glynne and William Steele, City merchants and some sixteen divines. The best eyewitness account is Henry Jessey's A Narrative of the Late Proceeds at White-Hall (London, 1656).

The judges ruled that the expulsion of 1290 had rested on royal prerogative and not on statute, and that therefore "there was no law which forbad the Jews' return into England." That is the only positive result. The merchants objected, fearing competition, the divines on grounds of their own, and William Prynne's A Short Demurrer to the Jewes inflamed opinion. Cromwell closed the proceedings on 18 December rather than accept a restrictive resolution.

Toleration came sideways, through a private case. In the spring of 1656 the goods of the merchant Antonio Rodrigues Robles were seized as Spanish enemy property; he petitioned as a Portuguese Jew, and in May the Council of State restored them — thereby conceding in practice that Jews were not enemy aliens. A modest petition of 24 March that year, for private worship and a burial ground, Cromwell endorsed, but no written grant survives. A synagogue was fitted up in Creechurch Lane (the parish accounts of 1656–57 mention "building the Jewes Synagogue"), and Antonio Fernandez Carvajal and Simon de Caceres leased the Mile End burial ground in February 1657.

The correction is simple and important: there was no "readmission of the Jews to England" in 1655–56. No act of parliament, no charter, no proclamation, no decision by any body. The judges' finding was negative in form — "no law forbids," not "we admit." The community that formed in London was the existing Marrano merchant colony coming into the open, not exiles recalled. Menasseh himself thought the mission a failure: Cromwell gave him twenty-five pounds and then a pension of a hundred, paid irregularly, and he left England broken and bereaved.