On Jewry In Britain "1656 and all that"

1656 and all that
Eliane Glaser and Stephen Massil debate what did – or did not – happen when Cromwell ‘readmitted’ the Jews
Eliane Glaser and Stephen Massil | Summer 2006 - Number 202


Dr Eliane Glaser: This year, Britain’s Jewish community is celebrating the 350th anniversary of Oliver Cromwell’s readmission of the Jews to England. The problem is, Oliver Cromwell didn’t readmit the Jews to England in 1656. To be sure, Menasseh ben Israel, the prominent Amsterdam rabbi, came to visit Cromwell in 1655 to try to persuade him to readmit them, and the Whitehall Conference was called in December of that year to discuss the issue. But the conference ended without reaching a verdict. In March 1656, six members of London’s Jewish community submitted a petition to Cromwell requesting permission to hold services in private without being disturbed by the authorities, and to establish a Jewish cemetery. Cromwell referred this petition to his Council of State, but it was ignored.

Nevertheless, it has long been argued that Cromwell himself was favourably inclined towards the Jews, and granted the terms of the community’s petition verbally. But despite exhaustive efforts by generations of Anglo-Jewish historians, no proof of this verbal assurance has ever been found. There is no evidence to indicate the nature of Cromwell’s own attitude towards the Jews.

It’s true that, at the end of 1656, members of the Jewish community acquired a floor of a building in Creechurch Lane, in the City, and services were held there in subsequent years. But these services were held discreetly – as they had been, crucially, before 1656. A plot of land in East London was bought in February 1657 and used as a cemetery, but only four people were buried there in the following three years. And the community paid 20 times over the odds for the land – no benign dispensation from the authorities there.

Many historians have claimed that, in 1656, the authorities became aware, for the first time, of a Jewish presence in England. But the Jews who were living in England prior to Menasseh’s arrival in 1655 were also known about. The royalist writer and spy James Howell wrote a letter to a friend in Amsterdam in 1653 in which he commented, ‘Touching Judaism, some corners of our city smell as rank of it as doth yours there.’

A Jewish community was gradually established in the second half of the seventeenth century, but the few hundred or so who arrived were a small trickle compared to the more than 50,000 Huguenot immigrants of the same period. It was in fact Charles II, not Cromwell, who was the first to declare that the Jewish community could remain in England without suffering harassment; in recognition of this, the community used to celebrate Charles’s tolerance towards the Jews, rather than Cromwell’s. They knew what today’s Anglo-Jewish community has forgotten: that whatever happened in 1656 cannot accurately be described as a ‘readmission’.

Stephen Massil: Dr Glaser rightly points out that there were Jews in London prior to 1655. She is right, too, that we cannot know Cromwell’s private thinking and that there was no public proclamation, statute or lapidary statement of a decision from the Whitehall Conference of December 1655 or the Council of State that followed. We are not talking of a ‘recall of the Jews’ to England. Nonetheless, John Evelyn’s diary for the precise period mentions the Conference and records that ‘Then [after 15 December 1655] were the Jews admitted.’ This is a significant formulation and Evelyn is an impeccable eyewitness to affairs of state and the spirit of the times.

Despite the absence of a proclamation signed by the Protector announcing the readmission of the Jews to England, there is circumstantial evidence for tacit acceptance of the presence of Jews in London as officially tolerated and not to be gainsaid, and perhaps even to be encouraged. By the standards of the day this was acceptance enough for Jews to feel at home here. The evidence is circumstantial: but it is precise, decisive, unimpeachable and, I believe, sufficient.

While there were probably no Jews in London while Archbishop Laud was a power in the land (impeachment proceedings opened against him in 1641), there were Jews again in the city by 1643, and certainly by 1653. We may assume that there was private (and thus secret) worship amongst the few families concerned. By 1655 the leader of this group was Antonio Fernandes Carvajal, who provided ‘intelligences’ to the government and in August 1655 secured endenization for himself and his two sons.

The Whitehall Conference is the pivotal event of the era. Look what happens shortly afterwards. Carvajal and colleagues acquired ground for a cemetery during 1656. In 1657, Solomon Dormido secured a brokership on the Exchange, a foothold in the formalities of trade. In March 1657, the builders and craftsmen of St Catherine’s Creechurch were reprimanded for having taken on a commission to extend Carvajal’s premises in Creechurch Lane to furbish a synagogue there, which means that he recognized the need for more accommodation for the acts of worship now permitted to Jews in London. Samuel Pepys, whose visit to the synagogue in October 1663 is famous, made his first visit to the synagogue on 3 December 1659 on the occasion of the very public memorial service for Carvajal.

It is the presence of Carvajal and his colleagues of the resident community whose incontrovertible careers ensured acceptance of Jewry in London. They effectively rejected Menasseh ben Israel as their rabbi, and he left disconsolate before the end of 1657. Moses Athias of Hamburg, a relative of Carvajal and active in his business, took on the role of chazan at Creechurch Lane when services opened early in 1657.

We now come to the Restoration and Charles II. When the presence of Jews was again under scrutiny and threat by clerics, merchants and political leaders in 1664, the Jews appealed to Charles II. He upheld their right to remain in England, stating that ‘the Jews could enjoy all that they had enjoyed hitherto’, thereby acknowledging the primacy of what had happened under Cromwell. Even before this, and soon after the Restoration in 1660, the Lord Mayor and Aldermen (on behalf of cloth merchants amongst others) had petitioned the King unsuccessfully for the expulsion of some 40 or 50 Jewish families. The community had presented Charles with a parcel of Hebrew books – implying that they were already established residents.

The endenizations, Evelyn’s sense of the spirit of the Whitehall Conference, the burial ground, the normality and extension of the synagogue, the brokership, the opposition of the cloth merchants, the gift of books and the retrospective nature of Charles II’s toleration together make, I believe, a substantial skein of evidence that the resettlement was well under way before the Restoration – and largely as a result of what happened in 1655-6.

Dr Eliane Glaser: Stephen Massil’s claims that the evidence for Cromwell’s readmission of the Jews is ‘precise, decisive, unimpeachable and sufficient’ – and that Jews could, after the Whitehall Conference, ‘feel at home here’ – are wishful thinking. Could Jews really feel at home when, in 1661, a merchant called Thomas Violet stated that, ‘It is Felony for any Jew to be found in England’? When the small community in London was denounced and threatened repeatedly in the second half of the seventeenth century; when Jewish merchants were arrested on account of their religion; when the Jews’ legal status was continually in doubt? When, in 1703, a treatise was published that referred to the Jews as ‘mere aliens’, and another published as late as 1753 that stated that

a Jew has no Right to appear in England, without a Yellow Badge fixed on the upper Garment . . . that Synagogues are to be suppressed, and that no Rabbi, on Pain of Death, is to pervert any one to Judaism, and that a Return of the Jews after their Expulsion, renders them incapable of receiving any Benefit from our Laws?

When the London clergyman William Romaine wrote, in the same year, that the Jews ‘could never be made natural-born Subjects, while the Act of Parliament, by which they were outlawed, was in full Force against them’? Such statements were not isolated insults; they reflected a widespread view.

The point is not that nothing happened for the Jews in the years following 1656, nor that a Jewish community did not slowly come into being. It’s just that none of the evidence that Massil cites proves, as is so often stated, that Oliver Cromwell readmitted the Jews to England in 1656.

For example, John Evelyn does indeed state in his diary that, after the Whitehall Conference, ‘Now were the Jews admitted.’ But the simple fact is that, since the Whitehall Conference failed, Evelyn got it wrong. Many commentators claimed at the time that the Jews were plotting to take over St Paul’s Cathedral and use it as a synagogue. Should we believe them too? And Massil’s argument that Charles II’s proclamation to the Jews contains an implicit reference to Cromwellian toleration would be more convincing had it been made on the King’s accession in 1660, rather than in 1664.

It was only in the late nineteenth century that the Anglo-Jewish community decided, once and for all, that it was Cromwell, not Charles II, who was responsible for their presence here. Throughout the Victorian age, the Puritan revival had fostered an enthusiasm for seventeenth-century religious radicals, and Cromwell was portrayed, for the first time, as their heroic leader. At the same time, as floods of unwashed Jewish immigrants poured in from Eastern Europe, the established community looked anxiously to 1656 for proof that Jewish immigration could be a success.

It was no accident that, in 1887, an exhibition of Anglo-Jewish history was held at the Albert Hall. It was accompanied by a series of lectures, and supported by the Jewish Chronicle. In 1893 the Jewish Historical Society of England was established; the first ‘Resettlement Day’ was held in 1894. The need for celebration, it seems, was born out of communal anxiety.

Stephen Massil: The question in hand is whether there is sufficient evidence to satisfy a widely accepted understanding that it was under Cromwell and the Protectorate that the settlement of Jews in England became tolerated – in however circumscribed a way – rather than under Charles II. Dr Glaser evades my ‘evidence’ by calling it ‘wishful thinking’, but she cannot refute it. She also offers a parade of antisemitic discourse to show that Jews were not accepted here at any time. I can cite equivalent philosemitic statements that indicate the opposite, and they come for the most part from those (such as John Evelyn) whose words carry weight. The real argument is about the prevailing attitude of the Jews coming to settle and the authorities (not a chorus of generally pettifogging antisemites) tolerating their presence.

I repeat the point that Carvajal, like John Evelyn, understood from the Whitehall debates and Cromwell’s persistent support for the Petition (all the accounts, whether from his opponents or supporters, show how he brokered the discussion in favour of the Jews’ admission) that it would be in order for the Jews to proceed to acquire cemetery, synagogue and formal financial standing and to encourage families from the Continent to come and settle. He was therefore ‘happy’ to commission the craftsmen of St Catherine’s Creechurch to furbish up his rooms for public worship. That the builders endured the reprimand of the Parish is one thing; that Carvajal was not required to demolish their work and that no stones were thrown through his windows is quite another.

Dr Glaser would apparently have been more convinced by my reference to Charles II’s acquiescence in the Cromwellian dispensation if he had made it clear on his Restoration rather than in response to antisemitic pressure in 1664. But that is the point: he did not need to restate the obvious in 1660.

Let us come to the late nineteenth century, where Dr Glaser posits the view that the ‘readmission’ only came into focus because of the ‘anxiety’ of the established Jewish community in the face of the mass immigration from Eastern Europe and as a way of demonstrating to itself and the wider community the validity of its credentials. That is a topsy-turvy view. For the Jews were not alone in tracing ‘myths’ and roots. British history itself was undergoing such a reappraisal: the Public Records Office (‘strong box of the Empire’) had been consolidated in 1838, the Royal Historical Society was established in 1868, the first Acts in connection with preservation of ancient monuments and the beginnings of ‘heritage’ were passed in the 1870s. Leaving aside how other groups, such as the Huguenot descendants, were actively reconsidering their roots and historical credentials at just this date, it was the proposed demolition of Bevis Marks in 1885 that galvanized the Jewish community and gave the inspiration for the Anglo-Jewish Exhibition of 1887 and its offspring here and in the United States.

Alongside this, it was the promotion of the anniversary of the Domesday Book in 1886 that proved a crucial spur for historical debate, while the research of the Royal Historical Society encouraged Jews to study their own part in the mediaeval records. It was when the RHS heard a paper on the York massacre of 1190 in 1890 that Lucien Wolf finally took the bull by the horns to get the Jewish Historical Society of England started on just such work. A focus on the expulsion inevitably re-opened the question of readmission. John Evelyn’s use of the term ‘admission’ reminds us that, in the seventeenth century, expulsions and readmissions of Jews (and other groups) were a common feature of Continental history. One can say that, despite the rhetoric of antisemitic discourse (usually drawn upon in the ‘Church and State debates’ of the 1750s and 1850s), Jews in England at all times felt that they were better placed here than anywhere else in Europe and were ready to acknowledge this to the authorities.

The facts of 1656 speak for themselves; their re-interpretation in the 1880s fitted into a very wide spectrum of historical research. The ‘Tercentenary Exhibition’ of 1956 made its own claims and carried subliminal messages (that Britain and Anglo-Jewry had survived the Shoah). Our revisiting of these facts in 2006 in an era of multiculturalism brings forward a new appraisal of attitudes and shows British Jewry acting to promote its heritage, just like other groups. Dr Glaser may disparage the celebratory nature of that promotion but not deny the facts behind its origins.

Dr Eliane Glaser: I don’t attempt to ‘refute’ Stephen Massil’s evidence; I disagree with its interpretation. Some English Christians said nice things about Jews in the years after the Whitehall Conference; others said nasty things. Gradually, the Jews of London took tentative steps, in the second half of the seventeenth century, to establish a community. But none of this adds up to a definitive act of ‘readmission’ in 1656.

On one important point, moreover, Massil is incorrect: Cromwell did not ‘broker the discussion in favour of the Jews’ readmission’. As Nathaniel Crouch’s 1715 account of the Whitehall Conference reports, Cromwell closed the conference by saying that

he had hoped by these preachers to have had some clearing of the case, as to matter of conscience; but seeing these agreed not, but were of different opinions, it was left more doubtful to him and his council than before.

Cromwell was careful never to state his own opinion on the matter, whatever that was.

It’s true that the Jewish community of the late nineteenth century fixed 1656 as a foundational date in the context of a broader process of Victorian nationalist myth-making. But there was more to it than that. The first President of the Jewish Historical Society of England, Lucien Wolf, gave a revealing speech at the 250th anniversary of readmission. He declared:

There is no question that [readmission] saved us from the Ghetto system then in force all over Europe. We consequently owe to it, in a very large measure, the fact that our social assimilation with our non-Jewish fellow-citizens is, and has always been, far more complete in this country than in any other country, and that, as a result, the baleful wave of anti-Semitism which has swept across the Continent, has dashed impotently against our shores.

As hoards of Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe arrived in Britain, and as organizations such as the Russo-Polish Committee were set up to anglicize the immigrant foreigners, the community had a rather more pressing motive than those of Victorian Englishmen in their examination of the past. From the 1870s onwards, a new form of antisemitism began to emerge in Britain; based on race rather than religion, it was one strand of the xenophobia that would result, ultimately, in the Aliens Act of 1905. Lucien Wolf’s proud words were tinged with anxiety, hence his reference to assimilation; after all, if the Jews of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Britain felt so comfortable, why did they have to keep repeating their gratitude to the British establishment?

Today, at a time of relative communal security, it seems strange that the 350th anniversary is such a big deal. In another gesture of support for ‘multiculturalism’, Tony Blair attended the special service at Bevis Marks on 13 June; no doubt he is unaware that the anniversary rests on such shaky historical ground. But why is British Jewry playing along? The answer, I believe, lies in a community that, despite its ostensible ease, perceives itself to be under threat from assimilation and the rise of ‘the new antisemitism’. The response, therefore, is not to question history, but rather to retreat into a celebration of identity. To me, that doesn’t call for champagne.

Stephen Massil: At the outset Dr Glaser was arguing for 1664 as against 1656; in this final phase she is arguing for 1906 as opposed to 1885. Certainly in 1906 the Aliens legislation was a current topic. But the historical momentum for re-examining the readmission dates, as we have seen, from the 1880s. It was the proposed demolition of Bevis Marks that galvanized a reaction in favour of ‘heritage’ (like the establishment of the National Trust in the 1890s) and inspired the Anglo-Jewish Exhibition of 1887, the American JHS and the JHSE.

If we want to assess Dr Glaser’s recourse to ‘antisemitism’ as the atmosphere of the time, we might nonetheless examine further what Lucien Wolf was saying at the 250th anniversary of February 1906. He was lecturing the Establishment, in the form of the recently elected Liberal Prime Minister (who was to put a Jew in the Cabinet for the first time), about the ‘solutions’ continental Europe had subjected Jewry to over the centuries, from ghettos and expulsions to pogroms. And he was reminding the new government of the case of Gladstone and the Mansion House meetings of the 1880s, which responded so promptly to Jewish suffering in Eastern Europe. It was philosemitism and not antisemitism, in other words, that could be seen as the driving national and civic force behind the general reception of Jews in Britain.

To revert again to the facts of 1655-6: so far as Jewish settlement anywhere is concerned, a burial ground and a place of public worship are sufficient – and these were achieved in London by 1657; economic viability was achieved at the same time; and in 1659, when the leader of the community died at the hands of a prominent surgeon, his obsequies were witnessed by a young man from the civil service – which, along with John Evelyn’s assessment of the situation, provides sufficient evidence of public acceptance.

Dr Glaser is not up to opening the champagne. She is embarrassed by the habit of gratitude that all ‘strangers’ have traditionally offered the government of England; and she appears to think that, given the experience of Jewry at large, there hasn’t been much to be grateful for. She seems happiest in her reliance on antisemitic witnesses. But one question she does not address is why, in such an atmosphere of antisemitism, the Whitehall Conference was convened at all and why Menasseh’s ‘Petition’ was even given a hearing. It would appear, for lack of either proclamation or denunciation, that the door had been open for some time. Let us agree to this concession: that there was no need for ‘readmission’ because there was no supravening objection to the presence of Jews on British soil. Perhaps Dr Glaser can allow that, if the prevailing antisemitism was so ineffectual, we can at least drink to that! b

Dr Eliane Glaser is a historian, writer and producer for BBC Radio 4. She has written about Jewish affairs for The Times Literary Supplement, Jewish Chronicle and Jewish Quarterly, and was one of the judges for this year’s Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize. Her book on the history of the Jews in England will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in Spring 2006.

Stephen Massil is President of the Jewish Historical Society of England and Editor of the Jewish Year Book. He works as a Research Librarian, currently for the National Trust.