Even Luther’s admirers tended to regard this as a bit extreme. Widespread though resentment of the Jews might be among Protestants, there were also some who felt sympathy for them. In England, where the self-identification of Puritans as the new Israel had fostered a boom in the study of Hebrew, this might on occasion shade almost into admiration. Even before Menasseh’s arrival in London, there were sectarians who claimed it a sin ‘that the Jews were not allowed the open profession and exercise of their religion amongst us’.20 Some warned that God’s anger was bound to fall on England unless repentance was shown for their expulsion. Others demanded their readmission so that they might the more easily be won for Christ, and thereby expedite the end of days. Cromwell, who convened an entire conference in Whitehall to debate Menasseh’s request, was sympathetic to this perspective. Nevertheless, he failed to win formal backing for it. Accordingly – in typical fashion – he opted for compromise. Written permission for the Jews to settle in England was denied; but Cromwell did give Menasseh the private nod, and a pension of a hundred pounds. The practical effect of this was noted by a diarist that same December. ‘Now were the Jews admitted.’21
Yet in not nearly large enough numbers to satisfy some in England. Friends, as Quakers called themselves, felt charged with a mission to the Jews. ‘The Lord moved his good spirit in me, and his word came unto me, (which was in me as a fire).’22 It was this burning impulse to proclaim God’s kingdom – which might inspire some Friends to preach naked, and others in sackcloth and ashes – that had frustrated all attempts by the authorities to extinguish it. Unlike the Diggers, all of whom had ended up evicted from their various communes by local landowners, the Quakers had positively flourished in the face of official hostility. Women were particularly active. One, marching into Cromwell’s private quarters in Whitehall, boldly addressed the Protector as a ‘dunghill’, and then spent an hour urging him to repentance; another, a one-time housemaid, travelled to Constantinople, where she somehow succeeded in preaching to the sultan himself. It was the Jews, though, who were a particular object of Quaker hopes. The refusal of Cromwell to grant them a formal right of admission prompted missionaries to head for Amsterdam. The early signs were not promising. The Jews there seemed resolutely uninterested in the Quakers’ message; the authorities were hostile; only one of the missionaries spoke Dutch. Nevertheless, it was not the Quaker way to despair. There was, so one of the missionaries reported, ‘a spark in many of the Jews’ bosoms, which in process of time may kindle to a burning flame’.23
Here, to any Friend, was encouragement enough. Well read though Quakers might be in scripture, they, like other radicals, did not view it as the most direct source of truth. The most excitable among them – to the embarrassment of their leaders – were known on occasion to burn Bibles in public. Only an unmediated openness to the Spirit could enable the rancorous sectarianism that bedevilled other Christians to be transcended. ‘He that puts the letter for the light, when the letter says Christ is the light, is blind.’24 Quite how this light was to be defined – whether as the conscience natural to all humans mentioned by Paul, or as the Spirit, or as Christ, or as a mingling of all three, or perhaps as something else entirely – was a question to which Quakers could never provide a consistent answer. This, though, did not greatly bother them. To feel the light was to know it. Such was the message that Margaret Fell, one of the founding members of the Friends, addressed directly to Menasseh. A second pamphlet, A Loving Salutation, to the Seed of Abraham Among the Jews, quickly followed. Anxious to get both tracts into Hebrew, the Quaker missionaries in Amsterdam were delighted to report back to Fell that they had successfully procured the services of a translator. This translator was not only a skilled linguist; he had also been a pupil of none other than Menasseh himself.25
Baruch Spinoza was no ordinary Jew. Indeed, he barely considered himself a Jew at all. In July 1656, he had been formally expelled, cursed and damned by the synagogue in Amsterdam. Such a sentence was not unheard of, and was issued in the full expectation that offenders – rather than risk being cut off permanently from their own community – would scrabble to make their peace with the synagogue’s governing board. But Spinoza refused to make peace. He had alternative ports of call. Rather than the Quaker missionaries in Amsterdam approaching him, it was he who had approached the Friends. Writing to Margaret Fell, one of them explained that Spinoza had been ‘Cast out (as he himself and others sayeth) because he owneth no other teacher but the light . . .’ 26 Whether this was an accurate report or not, it was certainly the case that Spinoza, in the wake of his excommunication, did not lack for companionship and support. Rather than with the Quakers, though, it was with their nearest Dutch equivalents that he had sought refuge. Collegiants, as they were called, were recognisably bred of the same soil as their fellow radicals in England. They scorned the claims to authority of the public Church; disdained all ideals of hierarchy and priesthood; despaired of sectarian rivalries and quarrels. Spinoza’s Dutch friends, like his Quaker contacts, believed that true holiness was enlightenment. ‘This it is which leads man in truth, into the way to God, which excuseth him in well-doing, giving him peace in his conscience, yea, brings him to union with God, wherein all happiness and salvation consist.’27
To settle among such Protestants – as Spinoza did in 1660, when he moved to Rijnsberg, a village outside Leiden that had become the centre of Collegiant life – was very consciously to take sides in what had become the major division in Dutch society. The purging of dissident preachers in 1619 had provided the Reformed Church with only a temporary victory. For decades, rival promoters of discipline and toleration had been locked in effective stalemate. Meanwhile, in England, fresh upheavals were serving to sharpen the sense of what was at stake. Two years after the death of Cromwell in 1658, the monarchy was restored – and the Church of England with it. An Act of Uniformity served to push Quakers and other religious dissenters to the margins. The warning to Protestants in the Netherlands who rejected the pretensions of institutional churches, who affirmed that personal enlightenment was the surest guide to truth, who read the word of God as something written pre-eminently on their consciences, appeared a grim one. The enemies of toleration were everywhere. Freedom could never be taken for granted – not even in the Dutch Republic. When Spinoza, in 1665, began preparing a book in defence of religious liberty, the praise he offered his homeland was touched by irony as well as gratitude. ‘We are fortunate to enjoy the rare happiness of living in a republic where every person’s liberty to judge for himself is respected, everyone is permitted to worship God according to his own mind, and nothing is thought dearer or sweeter than freedom.’28