Menasseh ben Israel

Amsterdam rabbi who founded the city's first Hebrew press and wrote for Jewish and Christian readers alike. His mission to Oliver Cromwell in 1655 paved the way for Jews to live openly in England.

Who was Menasseh ben Israel?

Hakham Menasseh ben Israel was a rabbi, scholar, printer and diplomat of the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam, and one of the best-known Jews of seventeenth-century Europe. He founded the first Hebrew printing press in Amsterdam, wrote books read by Jews and Christians alike, and in 1655 traveled to London to ask Oliver Cromwell to allow Jews to return to England, from which they had been expelled in 1290. His mission opened the way for the Jewish community of England.

A child of conversos

Menasseh ben Israel was born in 1604 to a converso family. Sources disagree on where: La Rochelle in France, Lisbon and the island of Madeira have all been proposed. He was baptized Manoel Dias Soeiro. His father had suffered at the hands of the Portuguese Inquisition, and the family fled, settling in Amsterdam around 1610, where they returned openly to Judaism and took Hebrew names.

He studied with Hakham Isaac Uziel, a rabbi from Fez who led one of Amsterdam’s congregations, and showed remarkable gifts. By the age of eighteen he had been appointed a rabbi and teacher of the Neve Shalom congregation, and later of the united community, where he taught alongside Hakham Saul Levi Morteira and Hakham Isaac Aboab da Fonseca.

The printer

In 1626 Menasseh founded the first Hebrew press in Amsterdam. Over the following decades it printed prayer books, Bibles, Mishnah editions and works for the returning conversos in Spanish and Portuguese, helping to make Amsterdam one of the great centers of Hebrew printing in Europe.

The author

His books were written in Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese and Latin, and many were aimed at both Jewish and Christian readers. El Conciliador, published from 1632, reconciled apparent contradictions between verses of the Bible, drawing on the whole range of rabbinic literature, and made his name among Christian scholars. Nishmat Hayyim discussed the immortality of the soul.

His most famous book, Mikveh Yisrael, published in Spanish as Esperança de Israel and in English as The Hope of Israel in 1650, discussed the report of a traveler, Antonio de Montezinos, who claimed to have found descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes in South America. Menasseh argued that the Jewish people’s dispersion to the ends of the earth was nearly complete, and that the redemption would come once Jews lived in every land, including England.

He was a friend of many Christian scholars of his day. The painter Rembrandt, who lived near the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, made etchings for one of his books, Piedra Gloriosa, in 1655.

The mission to Cromwell

Jews had been banned from England since 1290. In the 1650s, under the Puritan government of Oliver Cromwell, many English Protestants were interested in the Jews and in the coming of the messianic age, and some English merchants saw the value of the Amsterdam Jews’ trading networks. Menasseh saw an opportunity.

In 1655 he traveled to London and presented Cromwell with his Humble Addresses, asking that Jews be readmitted with the right to worship and trade freely. Cromwell called a conference at Whitehall in December 1655 to discuss the question. It reached no formal decision, as merchants and clergy raised objections, but Cromwell made clear that the Jews would not be expelled. In 1656 the small community of conversos already living secretly in London was able to declare itself openly, and soon rented a house for a synagogue and land for a cemetery. In the same year Menasseh published Vindiciae Judaeorum, a reply to the accusations made against Jews, including the blood libel.

The mission cost him dearly. He had spent his own money, his son Samuel, who accompanied him, died in England in 1657, and Menasseh set out to bring his son’s body home for burial.

Death

He died on the way, in Middelburg in the Netherlands, in November 1657, and was buried in the Portuguese Jewish cemetery at Ouderkerk aan de Amstel, near Amsterdam.

Menasseh ben Israel’s legacy for Sephardim

The community that Menasseh helped bring into the open became the Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation of London, whose Bevis Marks Synagogue, opened in 1701, is the oldest synagogue in Britain still in use. From that community came the Montefiores, the Mocattas and generations of English Jews, and from England Jewish life spread across the British Empire.

Menasseh represents the best of the Western Sephardi world: a man raised as a Catholic who became a rabbi, a scholar at home in the Torah and in the learning of Europe, and a Jew who spoke to kings and scholars with dignity on behalf of his people. Every Jewish community in the English-speaking world owes something to his journey to London.

Sephardic connection

Son of Portuguese conversos who became a leading representative of Amsterdam’s restored Western Sephardic community