LEADING figures in Oliver Cromwell’s republic were currently excited by a fashionable doctrine promising that Christ would come to reign for a thousand years before the end of the world, as soon as the Jews were converted to Christianity.* Cromwell shared these hopes, and was also aware that, thanks to her Jews, Holland’s commercial activity was outperforming England’s.
As it happened, Cromwell’s friend John Drury had corresponded with a Dutch rabbi, Menasseh ben Israel, who thought along similar lines, though he believed the Messiah would come when Jews had spread to every nation, including England.* The reasoning was different, but the readmission of Jews suited both, and Menasseh boldly crossed the Channel in 1655.
That same year senior English judges told the Whitehall Conference that there was no bar to Menasseh or any other Jew remaining in England, and many more followed him over, settling quietly into British life. Few converted, and the world did not end; but mercifully the Commonwealth did, in 1660.
This belief was condemned as contrary to Scripture at the Council of Constantinople in 381, but some Protestants in the Reformation age returned to it, claiming that after the conversion of the Jews the ‘fifth monarchy’ (after the Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman Empires) would be established.
Menasseh’s enthusiasm was further inflamed by reports that the ten lost tribes of Israel - the tribes that apparently vanished from history after the Northern Kingdom was annexed by Assyria in 722 BC - had been found in South America, another in a long line of such ‘sightings’ and as baseless as all the others. However, it strengthened Menasseh’s conviction that Jews had spread to almost every corner of the globe, except England.