using messianic arguments such as the millenarianesque argument Ketzeh
ha-aretz(literally, the end of the earth, a reference to Jews being scattered
throughout the world).
In 1654, Cromwell convened the Whitehall Conference with the aim of
readmitting Jews. However, when he saw that the participants were going to
readmit Jews, but on unfavorable terms, he dissolved the conference. He then
contemplated admitting Jews on his own authority, but did not for fear of a
public outcry. Instead, he made a more limited, informal arrangement with
London’s crypto-Jewish community, which had petitioned for freedom of
worship and the right to bury their dead in a Jewish cemetery. Cromwell
granted the petition.
In response to these events, Menasseh ben Israel published Vindiciae
Judaeorumin 1656. This pamphlet, an apology and an argument for the return
of Jews to England, defended Jews and Judaism largely in economic and
social rather than religious terms:
Three things ... make a strange nation well-beloved amongst the natives
of a land where they dwell: profit they may receive from them; fidelity
they hold towards their princes; and the nobleness and purity of their
blood. Now when I shall have made good that all these three things are
found in the Jewish nation I shall certainly pursuade your highness that
... you shall be pleased to receive the nation of the Jews.By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the growing presence of Jews,
primarily in London, prompted some enlightened Englishmen to call for the
naturalization of the Jews as citizens. In 1714, pamphleteer John Toland
echoed ben Israel’s defense of Jews by contrasting the negative effects of
expelling Jews to the benefits of welcoming them: “What a paltry fishertown
was Leghorn [Livorno] before the admission of the Jews? What a loser is
Lisbon, since they have been lost to it?” By 1740, this attitude crystallized
into policy in the English colonies in the New World.
Jewish settlement in the New World was non-existent in Spanish and
Portuguese colonies owing to the expulsion edict and – with respect to
crypto-Jews – the branches of the Inquisition in South and Central America.
It began with the establishment of Dutch and English colonies on Caribbean
islands of Curaçao, Jamaica, and Surinam; northeastern Brazil while under
Dutch rule; and eventually the eastern seaboard of North America. In 1740,
echoing Toland and urged further by the pressing need to attract settlers to
British colonies in the New World, the British Parliament passed the
Plantation Act in 1740, granting full citizenship to any and all settlers in
British colonies who remained for at least seven years. In retrospect, though,
the Plantation Act’s significance as a legal breakthrough for Anglo-Jewry is
overshadowed by the fact that Jews in British colonies had already attained
these rights before 1740.
The age of enlightenment and emancipation, 1750–1880 143