Bible and Sword

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Williams wrote from a brave new world across the Atlantic. In England only the wild, schismatic, fanatic sects, what Bishop Hall earlier called “the cobblers, tailors, felt-makers and such-like trash,” really believed that such ideas could be put in practice. A “Council of Mechanics” in 1648, during the heady months following Pride’s Purge and the victory of the Independents, voted a resolution in favor of “toleration of all religions whatsoever not excepting Turkes, nor Papists, nor Jewes.” But idealism once again bowed to practical politics. The plea for religious liberty was lost in the throes of Cromwell’s struggle with the Puritan extremists. For fear of encouraging the lunatic fringe, sects that were demanding his own overthrow to make way for the millennium and the kingdom of the saints, he dared not enact in legislation the brave principles of toleration. “I would rather Mahometanism were permitted amongst us than that one of God’s children be persecuted,” the Protector once said; but the Levelers and the Fifth Monarchy Men were too much for him.

  Meantime certain Puritan theorists evolved the scheme of recalling the Jews to England in order that their conversion under the proper auspices might proceed as soon as possible. What could be more stunning proof to the world at large of the righteousness of the Puritan cause than the accomplishment of this long-delayed event? “Our desires and hopes of the Jews conversion to Christ” would have to be given up, was an argument that Roger Williams used in making his case against an enforced state religion. That the restoration of Israel would follow conversion was part of accepted theology. As early as 1621 there had appeared a treatise called The World’s Great Restauration or Calling of the Jews and with them of all Nations and Kingdoms of the Earth to the Faith of Christ. Its author was Sir Henry Finch, a sergeant-at-law or legal officer of the king, who predicted the restoration in the near future of temporal dominion to the Jews and the establishment by them of a world-wide empire. It remains the first of all English projects for the restoration of Israel. According to Finch’s contemporary, Tom Fuller, the book was interpreted as implying that “all Christian princes should surrender their power as homagers to the temporall supreme Empire of the Jewish nation.” In view of James I’s sensitivity on the royal prerogative it is no surprise that Finch was promptly arrested, tried for treason, and eventually released only after disavowing any passages that might be considered derogatory to the King’s sovereignty.

  What influence the book had, if any, cannot be determined. Its suppression may have prevented any spread of its ideas; on the other hand, the fact of suppression and the author’s trial may have stimulated interest. In any event the idea did not die. During the next generation the Independents—that is, the left wing of Puritanism, which eventually came to power under Cromwell—were growing each year more numerous, influential, and infuriated. As the movement grew the Hebraic invasion spread. The more surely they felt themselves the reincarnated chosen people called to do God’s work among the Philistines, the more Hebraic they became in speech and habit. A wave of Old Testament nomenclature broke over the heads of England’s infants. Guy, Miles, Peter, and John gave way to Enoch, Amos, Obadiah, Job, Seth, and Eli. Mary and Maud and Margaret and Anne lost out to Sarah, Rebecca, Deborah, and Esther. A Chauncy family of Hertfordshire is recorded whose six children were named Isaac, Ichabod, Sarah, Barnabas, Nathaniel, and Israel. The Bible was ransacked from beginning to end; there seems to have been a particular liking for the more obscure or outlandish examples, like Zerrubabel or Habbakuk and even Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. The playwright Cowley, satirizing the fashion, has a character named Cutter in one of his plays who turns Puritan and announces: “I must not be called Cutter any more … my name is now Abednego. I had a vision which whispered to me through a key-hole, ‘Go, call thyself Abednego.’ “ Especially names of wicked and suffering characters had a great vogue, presumably as a form of self-punishment. Children were named for Tamar, who was raped by her brother, Jael, who drove the nail through Sisera’s head while he slept in her tent, and Job, the man of affliction.

  Old Testament fervor did not stop at the baptismal font. Biblical scholarship and exegesis became the chief intellectual activity of the age and Hebrew one of the three holy tongues necessary to the theological study that now choked the universities. An ordinance of 1644 required candidates for the ministry to be examined in reading the Scriptures in Hebrew and Greek. Hebrew even invaded the grammar schools. A contemporary play satirizes the schoolmistress of the time who “teaches to knit in Chaldee and works Hebrew samplers.” Milton began his study of Hebrew as a schoolboy, and in his essay On Education recommends its teaching to grammar school pupils, “that the Scripture may be read in the original.” That invaluable gossip, John Aubrey, says of Milton that after he became blind he had a man read aloud to him on his first waking up and that “the first thing he read was the Hebrew bible … then he contemplated.”

  The scholar Matthew Poole used to rise at three or four in the morning, eat a raw egg, and study till evening while preparing his Synopsis Criticorum Bibliorum. This monolith when finally published filled five folio volumes of over five thousand double-columned pages. Following the lead of the King James translators, the next generation of scholars delved deeper into ancient languages and folklore. Like hounds on a scent they scurried, nose to ground, through fields of Syriac, Chaldee, and Arabic texts. Archbishop Ussher from his study of the ancients worked out a scheme of universal chronology. John Selden tracked down every idol deity mentioned in the Old Testament to produce an exhaustive work on heathen faiths. Edward Leigh in 1646 published the Critica Sacra, the most complete Hebrew dictionary that had yet appeared. In the next decade appeared the great Polyglot Bible, a massive multiauthored achievement using altogether nine different ancient tongues including Samaritan, Ethiopic, and Persian.

  One of the Polyglot compilers was Edward Pococke, who had been chaplain for the Levant Company at Aleppo in 1630–35. Pococke’s profound learning won him appointment to both the professorship of Hebrew and the first chair of Arabic at Oxford. His pioneer history of the Arab world, Specimen Historiae Arabum, and his edition of Maimonides’ commentary on the Mishna were the first works printed by the Oxford University Press to use Arabic and Hebrew type respectively. Like living fragments from the days of Solomon, a fig tree and cedars that Pococke planted from cones he brought back from Syria were still flourishing in Christ Church garden at Oxford three hundred years after his death.

  All this vast erudition was not kept the private preserve of scholars: it was spread among the people through epitomes, treatises, concordances, lectures, and such a din of sermons by clergy, lay preachers, or anyone who felt the spirit move him as has never been heard before or since. Adults and children knew long passages of the Bible by heart and lived their daily lives according to its ordinances. It was open to all, it needed no priestly intervener to interpret its meaning, it transfigured moral life.

  The psalm-singing, Bible-carrying habits of the Roundhead soldiers are well known. Sir Charles Firth in his book on Cromwell’s army quotes a contemporary account of “good sermons and prayers morning and evening under the roof of heaven to which the drums did call for bells.” Morning and evening from the tents came “the sound of some singing psalms, some praying and some reading scripture.” At Marston Moor a company of Royalists fleeing in confusion almost flung themselves into the arms of the Roundheads, but “by their singing of psalms perceiving who they were, they all most fiercely fled back again.” Soldiers and officers alike were so given to preaching each his own theology that the chaplains constantly complained, especially when officers preached from horseback, but they were answered: “If they have not leave to preach they will not fight.”

  Cromwell and his officers, on drawing up a plan of battle, literally consulted Scripture for guidance and precedent. A council of war included prayers and Bible reading. The battle cry was “Lord God of Hosts!” and victory was celebrated on the field by a halt for psalms in praise of God. Cromwell himself, as we
know from his speeches, was a great quoter of psalms and prophets, and his talk, as Scott wrote, “had a marvelous twang of doctrine about it.” Indeed, the Cromwell whom Scott put into his novel Woodstock is probably not too exaggerated. He speaks of himself as “a man who is called to work great things in Israel,” of the Stuarts as having “troubled Israel for fifty years,” of “the whole Sanhedrin of Presbytery,” of England as “our British Israel” and “our English Zion.” He orders his soldiers to march in silence “as Gideon marched when he went down against the Midianites.” He rages against a Cavalier family who hid and protected Charles as having “aided Sisera in his flight when Israel might have been delivered of his trouble forever.” He is called “England’s son of Jesse” by his soldiers, constantly likened to David in faith and strength and wisdom. Likewise the soldiers call the Royalists “Baalists,” rush into battle crying “Perish Babylon!” and refer to extremists on their own side as “dissenting Rabbis.”

  Scott’s vivid picture of the era in Woodstock is not contemporary evidence, but it has a wonderfully true ring. This intense familiarity of the Puritans with the names, the lives, and the personal histories of the people of the Old Testament made them acquainted with the history and traditions of the Jews that focused on the perennial hope: “Next year in Jerusalem.” Among the Jews themselves at this time there was a prevailing sense that the time was imminent. It was widely believed in England and other Protestant countries that the year 1666 was going to be decisive in the fate of the Jews, either by their conversion or by the restoration of their temporal kingdom, which would be the signal for the downfall of the Pope.

  This excitement communicated itself to the Jews, and it accounts for their susceptibility to the false Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, who in fact chose the year 1666 to lead his benighted brethren on their tragic fools’ journey to the East. Previously, in 1650, the Jews of Europe had held a great council in Hungary to discuss the expected coming of the Messiah. An English observer who was present, one Samuel Brett, wrote a report of the council on the assumption that it presaged the conversion of the Jews. Even the Pope, aroused by the ferment, sent six Catholic priests to “advise” the council in their discussion of whether the Messiah of prophecy had come or was yet to come. They were allowed to expound their doctrine, reports Brett, but the assembly would have none of it. Nor were the Jews able to reach any conclusion among themselves; they disbanded on the eighth day, agreeing only to meet again three years later. Mr. Brett’s chief point in his report to the English public is that Rome “is the greatest enemy of the Jews’ conversion,” because it is an idolatrous church with woman gods and graven images, but that Protestantism could yet effect the conversion.

  The Cartwrights, in Amsterdam, had already determined on a practical step toward this goal. Their “Petition of the Jews for Repealing the Act of Parliament for their Banishment out of England” was presented to Lord Fairfax and the Council of War in January 1649. It was lost sight of in the agony and turmoil over the King’s execution, which took place that month. But in the new stage now reached in England’s affairs, new factors began to operate toward the consummation that the Cartwrights wished. Now for the first time a Jew entered the picture, and his efforts, fitting neatly into certain circumstances of the time, combined to reopen England to Jewish settlers.

  Manasseh ben Israel, a learned rabbi of Amsterdam, touched perhaps by a tinge of the Messiah complex or at least by the conviction that he was called to hasten the coming of the Messiah, published in 1650 a remarkable book entitled Spes Israeli—in the English edition The Hope of Israel. What Manasseh had in mind was the extension of the Jewish diaspora to England in order to complete the world-wide dispersion that was necessary before the ingathering of the exiles could begin. As he explained in a letter of later date, it had been foretold in Deuteronomy (28:64) how “the Lord shall scatter thee among all people from one end of the earth even unto the other,” and he added: “I conceived that by the ‘end of the earth’ might be understood this Island,” meaning England.

  Manasseh’s messianic expectations had been aroused by the narrative of a Jewish traveler, Antonio de Montezinos, whom he had met in 1644 and who had told him a tale of Indian tribes in the West Indies who practiced the rituals of Judaism, recited the Shema, and though somewhat “scorched by the sun” were indubitably Hebrews. These Indians, Montezinos persuaded his listener, were none other than the tribe of Reuben, one of the ten lost tribes of Israel. For some time Spanish missionaries in South America had been propounding the theory that the American Indians were indeed the Ten Lost Tribes who had somehow made their way westward across Asia to China and thence to America. (Present-day anthropologists defend the thesis that the American Indians were in fact originally Mongolians who crossed over by the Bering Strait.) Montezinos, no doubt acquainted with such talk, selected himself, like the character in The Mikado, to add “corroborative detail and artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.” Names, places, dates, and details of local color adorn his story of an Indian guide secretly revealing himself to be a fellow Israelite; of a week’s journey across jungle, rivers, and mountains to a meeting with a bearded community of Hebrew-speaking Indians. On the request of the Amsterdam synagogue Montezinos even signed on oath an affidavit as to the truth of his eyewitness report.

  This tale, which soon spread among the Amsterdam Puritans, especially excited the members of the Millenarian sect, who were confidently awaiting the Kingdom of the Saints. According to their prevailing interpretation of Biblical prophecy the return out of exile must include the Ten Lost Tribes, who had seceded in the tenth century B.C. Only when they were reunited with the sons of Judah, as they had been under David and Solomon, could the Messiah, the son of David, appear on earth.

  Montezinos’ marvellous find was seized on by Manasseh as proof that the dispersion had indeed been accomplished “among all peoples” and thus as a signal that the time for the reunion of the Twelve Tribes under the Messiah was approaching. Was it not written in the Book of Daniel, “And when the dispersion of the Holy People shall be completed in all places, then shall all these things be finished”? Such was the thesis of Spes Israeli as Manasseh first wrote it in Spanish. But there was still one portion of the earth empty of Jews. The idea of using his thesis to secure the recall of the Jews to England evolved from Manasseh’s conversations with his Puritan friends. He rewrote his book in Latin, adding a dedication to “The Parliament, the Supreme Court of England, and to the Right Honourable, the Councell of State.” In it he asked for their “favor and good will,” so that “all those things which God has pleased to have foretold by the Prophets do and shall obtain their accomplishment … so that Israel at last being brought back to his owne place, the Peace which is promised under the Messiah, may be restored to the world.”

  Encouraged in their hope of the approaching millennium, Manasseh’s English disciples had his book translated into English and printed in England, where two editions were rapidly sold out. It came at an opportune time. Cromwell was then engaged in a war with Portugal, the first in a long series of trade wars with Continental powers that the Commonwealth undertook to restore British maritime supremacy and repair broken trade ties with the colonies. During the prolonged struggles of the Civil War England had fallen ‘way behind in the powers’ competition for foreign trade. The business and commercial class, almost exclusively Puritan, was particularly jealous of the Dutch, who had seized the opportunity to push into first place in the Levant and Far Eastern trades and in the carrying trade with the European colonies in the Americas as well. Dutch success was aided by the Jewish merchants, shipowners, and brokers of Amsterdam, who brought in business through their Hispanic and Levantine connections. Their value was not lost on Cromwell, particularly as there were several Marrano families in England who had already been of use to him.

  The Marranos or crypto-Jews were refugees from the Inquisition who had settled in other countries, where they lived publicl
y as Spanish nationals practicing Catholicism in the embassy chapels while privately practicing Judaism in their homes. Traces of such families in London and Bristol can be found as early as the years immediately following the expulsion from Spain in 1492. In Cromwell’s time several prosperous Marranos were active in the City, of whom the most prominent were Simon de Caceres and Antonio de Carvajal. The latter was grain contractor for Cromwell during the Civil War and controlled most of the import of gold bullion from Spanish sources. His ships were expressly exempted from seizure during England’s war with Portugal and in fact were granted special facilities by the Council of State to continue their commerce abroad. Cromwell, plagued by “ship money” as much as Charles I had ever been, needed capital, which he hoped to get from the Jews. Also he believed that they could be useful to him as “intelligencers” whose connections, threading across Europe, would bring him information on trade policies of rival countries and on royalist conspiracies abroad.

  Official contact with Manasseh was opened in 1650, soon after his book appeared. A mission to Holland headed by Oliver St. John, whose purpose was to negotiate an alliance with the Dutch, was authorized to treat with Manasseh on the side. St. John had several conversations with the Rabbi, with the result that Manasseh addressed a formal petition to the Council of State for readmission of the Jews to England.