The resettlement of the Jews in England was an informal arrangement during the Commonwealth of England in the mid-1650s, which allowed Jews to practise their faith openly. It forms a prominent part of the history of the Jews in England. It happened directly after two events. Firstly a prominent rabbi Menasseh ben Israel came to the country from the Netherlands to make the case for Jewish resettlement, and secondly a Spanish New Christian (a supposedly converted Jew, who secretly practised his religion) merchant Antonio Robles requested that he be classified as a Jew rather than Spaniard during the war between England and Spain.
Historians have disagreed about the reasons behind the resettlement, particularly regarding Oliver Cromwell’s motives, but the move is generally seen as a part of a current of religious and intellectual thought moving towards liberty of conscience, encompassing philosemitic millenarianism and Hebraicism, as well as political and trade interests favouring Jewish presence in England. The schools of thought that led to the resettlement of the Jews in England is the most heavily studied subject of Anglo-Jewish history in the period before the eighteenth century.
Background
In 1290, King Edward I of England had issued an edict expelling all Jews from England. However the English Reformation, which started in the 1530s, brought a number of changes that benefited Jews in the long term. Doctrines and rituals of the Roman Catholic church that insulted Jews were eliminated, especially those that emphasised their role in the death of Jesus. Further anti-Catholicism, with the Pope as antichrist, came to replace antisemitism. The period of the English Civil Wars and Interregnum, were marked by both widespread millennial beliefs and a beginning of religious toleration. Significantly, millenarianism in England often had a strong Hebraist character, that emphasised the study of Hebrew and Judaism. This was sometimes extended by certain individuals to claim the English as the descendants of the Ten lost tribes of Israel, with Cromwell himself numbering amongst the supporters of this idea.
After both the Alhambra Decree of 1492, which expelled Jews from Spain in 1492, and similar measures in Portugal in 1496, some converso traders (Jewish converts to Christianity, who often practised Judaism in secret, sometimes also known as New Christians or derogatively as Marranos) settled in London and Bristol. The small community was largely linked by trade to Antwerp, and was expelled altogether in 1609. It was with London’s growing importance as a trading city that Jews from the Netherlands began to settle in the country once more from the 1630s. It is from this first that the current Jewish population of the UK has grown.
Religious toleration and liberty of conscience
The 1640s and 1650s in England were marked by intense debates about religious tolerance, marked by speeches and tracts by radical puritans and dissenters who called for liberty of conscience. This extreme diversity of opinion about religious toleration was sorted into 12 schools of thought in the seminal study of the period by W.K. Jordan. John Coffey uses a simpler three-point schema: anti-tolerationists, conservative tolerationists, and radical tolerationists, pointing out that although the latter were in a minority, they formed an important part of the debate. Nonetheless it is important to remember that although figures such as William Walwyn, Henry Vane, John Milton, and others made powerful apologia for religious toleration, their frame of reference was theological, rather than secular in nature and they were not calling for religious pluralism as is understood today. The early and mid Seventeenth century was also marked by a rise in Hebraism, the study of Jewish scriptures, which were often used to discuss political issues such as the existence of a monarchy or republic, and religious toleration. This debate used Jewish sources to justify its conclusions. The most prominent scholar in the field was the MP and jurist John Selden, whose thought was influenced by Thomas Erastus and Grotius. Selden proposed minimal government intervention on matters of religion, a view he modelled on the Hebrew Commonwealth. He in turn influenced similar approaches in John Milton (whose plea for freedom of the press, the Areopagitica (1644), directly named him), Thomas Hobbes and James Harrington (the latter of whom proposed settling Jews in Ireland in his book The Commonwealth of Oceana).