Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel רבי מנשה בן ישראל

Born in 1604 to a family in flight from Lisbon after the auto-da-fé of 3 August 1603; the birthplace is disputed — La Rochelle, Lisbon or Madeira. He grew up in Amsterdam, studied under R. Isaac Uziel at Neve Shalom, and in 1620, aged sixteen or eighteen, took his teacher's place as hakham. He died at Middelburg in November 1657, on the way home, carrying his son's body.

In 1626 he opened a press under the motto Emet me-Erets Titsmah — the first in Amsterdam owned by a Jew; its first imprint, a Sephardi prayer book, is dated 1 January 1627. In two decades it issued over sixty works. From it came two centuries of Amsterdam's fame in Hebrew printing.

In 1644 the traveller Antonio de Montezinos deposed before him that he had met Hebrew-speaking Indians in the Andes. On this Menasseh built Esperança de Israel (1650): if the Lost Tribes were already in America, the dispersion was nearly complete, and the missing link was England, the "end of the earth" of Deuteronomy 28:64. His mission to Cromwell was therefore a matter of messianic reckoning, not only of relief for refugees.

In the autumn of 1655 he was in London. The Whitehall Conference sat on 4, 7, 12 and 18 December; 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 was the entire positive result: the conference reached no decision and Cromwell closed it. Toleration arrived sideways — through the case of the merchant Antonio Rodrigues Robles, whose goods were seized in the spring of 1656 as Spanish and restored in May on his petition as a Portuguese Jew. 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 and the Mile End burial ground leased in February 1657.

Three corrections. There was no "readmission of the Jews to England" in 1655–56: no act of parliament, no charter, no proclamation. Menasseh himself thought the mission a failure. He was not chief rabbi of Amsterdam: third in seniority after Morteira and Aboab, poorer than either, and in 1640 briefly suspended by the ma'amad. And "the first Hebrew press in Holland" needs qualifying: Hebrew type had been cut and printed in the Netherlands by Christians before him; his priority is that of Jewish ownership.