Mikveh Israel / The Hope of Israel מקוה ישראל
Written on the deposition of the traveller Antonio de Montezinos, who met Indians in the Andes reciting Shema Yisrael. It appeared in Spanish and Latin at Amsterdam in 1650 and in English at London the same year.
In 1644 Montezinos deposed before the Amsterdam rabbinate that he had met people in the Andes who said Shema Yisrael and called themselves descendants of Reuben. Menasseh ben Israel took the deposition seriously and built an argument on it: prophecy speaks of a dispersion "from one end of the earth unto the other" (Deut. 28:64), and by a medieval gloss *ketzeh ha-aretz* is England, whence the Jews had been expelled in 1290. If the tribes are already in America, one link is missing.
Hence the journey. His petition to Cromwell was for him not only a matter of relief for the persecuted but a reckoning about the completeness of the dispersion before the redemption. Moses Wall's English translation appeared at London in the same year 1650 and was reprinted in 1651 and 1652; the book was read by Puritan millenarians who had designs of their own on the same prophecy.
It should be read together with Simone Luzzatto's Discorso: one supplies the argument from utility, the other the argument from prophecy, and Menasseh used both.
On the timeline
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Esperança de Israel / Spes Israelis, Amsterdam 1650 — the Montezinos deposition and the argument from the completeness of the dispersion
Documents of the period
- The Hope of Israel, trans. Moses Wall, London 1650 — the book's English reading among Puritan millenarians
Scholarship
- D. Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England 1603–1655, Oxford — the messianic reckoning and the English ground it fell on
Basis: documents and evidence.