The Jews and the Reformation

"Well, it’s become quite an important thing to me. It’s a subject that I’ve had to take a lot of interest in over the past few years in writing my book about Cromwell’s Protectorate. Cromwell was the main agent of the resettlement of Jews into England. They had been expelled from England in 1290, unbelievably, and were absent in any official, legitimate way from English culture for the best part of 350 years. I’d become interested in Jewish life and the interaction between Jewish and Christian life politically, theologically and commercially during the 17th century, which is essentially what we’re talking about here. Of course, it’s about much more than that because the Reformation’s concentration on the Word—not just Luther, but Calvin—brought a renewed scholarly attraction to and attention on the Bible. The true meaning of this ‘Word’ became so important. You had a lot of Protestants, in all their different guises, looking at the Old Testament in particular, for which Hebrew was absolutely crucial, but also at St Paul in Greek, and at Jewish writers who were writing in Greek and other languages as well. As well as that, Jews as ‘the other’ became people closer to you, if you were one of these scholars. And yet, at the same time, because of the divisions in Christianity and Christendom, they became not the only other. If you were a Protestant, the Catholics were the ‘other’; if you were a member of the Church of England, then Presbyterians or Baptists became the ‘other’. There was this whole pool of new people you could oppose. And, of course, if you were Catholic all the Protestant world was the ‘other’. So, the Jews were no longer the only ‘other’. There was a kind of legitimacy to their position in England. It depended where you were. In Italy there tended to be quite a strong tradition of relative tolerance and for quite a long while, certainly in England, it improved. How typical that was is difficult to say. But Protestantism was obsessed with anything to do with millenarianism, this idea that Christ would return to Earth and would herald the new Jerusalem. In Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, there’s quite an important phrase which says, “All Israel will be saved,” which was interpreted as meaning that before this can happen, the Jews will be saved. And they will be saved if they convert to Christianity. This comes back to why Cromwell wanted Jews resettled in England: it wasn’t out of humanitarian idealism, of tolerance towards a beleaguered ethnic group or anything. It was related to the idea that England was on its way to creating the perfect Christian country on Earth and therefore, if Jews resettled, that was the place they were most likely to be converted to Christianity. Therefore Christ would return to England. That would be the chosen place. We’ve got to understand that politics and religion at this time were absolutely one, and this is a point that Kenneth Austin makes from the very beginning of this book. It is impossible to divide politics and religion in any way at this point. Jews can be the beneficiaries of this and they can be the victims of it. It’s a rather capricious world in which they are involved. Not really. It’s puzzling. There were a lot of people around Cromwell, for example, who really didn’t want Jews resettled. Cromwell himself can’t pass a law which will allow them to. He does it with a nod and a wink through a person called John Sadler, who was Cromwell’s secretary for a while and was Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He was a noted Hebraist and Neoplatonist. He was very much involved in this hermetic world of millenarianism. Magdalene College happened to hold some land in the City of London, which is where Cree Lane is now, just near St Mary Axe and the Gherkin. You can see a plaque there for the site of the first synagogue in Britain since the resettlement, which I think was 1656 or 1657. That synagogue lasted until about 1701. The Jewish Community was largely Sephardic—from Portugal and a Portuguese community in Amsterdam. The main agent of this was a person called Manasseh Ben Israel who was a very learned intellectual, who brought over a community. He was friends with Cromwell and Sadler. “We’ve got to understand that politics and religion at this time were absolutely one, and this is a point that Kenneth Austin makes from the very beginning” But I don’t think anyone had worked anything out other than to give them a synagogue and allowing them to trade openly. It was not like the large-scale immigration of the 19th century, with Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern and Central Europe escaping Russian pogroms. This 17th-century community, particularly the ones from Amsterdam, were familiar with a similar political and mercantile milieu to the one operating in the City of London. By and large they were left alone. They were useful. They had good networks in Europe, intelligence networks as well as trading networks. They proved useful to the regime and, when the Cromwellian regime disappeared, there was no attempt to change anything. They just carried on slowly expanding. Bevis Marks Synagogue, which still stands, was built in 1701 and is relatively near to where the original synagogue was. They’ve been there ever since. No, not at all. It’s very much about Europe as a whole and covers all of this in a series of chapters that deal with the reaction of Protestantism in all its different guises, and Catholicism in the Counter-Reformation, as well. So you get a real panorama. It’s a fascinating book."