When trying to comprehend the Jews in 1650, the parliamentarian Edward Spencer looked north of the border. Writing to the Dutch-Portuguese rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, Spencer condemned what he felt was the overly impudent request to allow Jews to live, trade and practise their faith in England, a nation from which they had been expelled in 1290. In Spencer's mind, the Jews could only be equated with the Scots for their stubbornness, their tight-fistedness and their foolish hope in a coming messiah. To agree to Menasseh's request that the Jews be allowed to dwell among the English was thus absurd and dangerous. As the Scots had attempted to dictate to the English at the Westminster Assembly, so, he implied, might the Jews attempt to dictate to the English if they were allowed into the nation. In the background was the ominous thought of the Scottish reaction to the execution of Charles i. Might the Jews also, wondered Spencer, first show themselves as friends before revealing their true colours in reaction to the political realities of the Interregnum?Footnote ¹ Spencer's concerns are symptomatic of worries that surrounded the debate on the readmission of the Jews to England in the mid-1650s. What would the arrival of an alien group – a group with an entirely different religion – do to the already fragile English nation? Some, such as Spencer, believed that their arrival was a portent of disaster. For others, however, the coming in of the Jews would be both the means of extending England's influence and freeing her from a weight of accumulated sin.

A range of factors – millenarianism, questions of religious toleration and a reassessment of English foreign policy – all helped to contribute to a growing interest in readmitting Jews to England in the 1650s. This interest led to what has often been seen as the landmark event in Anglo-Jewish history, the Whitehall Conference of 1655. The conference was convened to discuss the potential readmission and settling of a Jewish community in England after an official absence of 365 years. This article will examine the literature that was produced before, during and after the conference in an attempt to sway opinion one way or the other. It is argued that one of the key elements of this debate concerned the role that England would play in the restoration of the Jews to Palestine. While several examinations of Whitehall over the last twenty years have highlighted the way in which the Jews were used to forge an oppositional sense of English identity, something much more complex was in fact going on. In a synthesis of ideas of similarity, difference and a range of interpretations of biblical prophecy, a number of English writers was able to forge a sense of the nation's ‘chosen’ identity by focusing on the projected restoration to Palestine.

The details of the organisation of the Whitehall Conference are well known and have been discussed extensively. Only the key facts, therefore, will be briefly discussed here.Footnote ² Spencer's addressee, Menasseh ben Israel, was the central figure at Whitehall. Having been keen to visit England from 1650 onwards (when he had been granted a passport by the English government), the rabbi had been delayed by local circumstances in Amsterdam and the outbreak of the Anglo-Dutch war. His Spes Israelis, translated into English by John Milton's millenarian friend Moses Wall in 1652, had openly called for Jewish readmission to England, cannily arguing that this would help to fulfil biblical prophecies of the full calling of the Jews. Menasseh's interest in readmission could partly be traced to a rabbinic tradition according to which ‘Angleterre’ could be translated as ‘end(s) of the earth’. As several passages (most notably Deuteronomy xxviii.64) predicted a scattering of the Jewish people ‘to the ends of the earth’ before they were recalled by the messiah, it was believed that the Jews must be ‘scattered’ into England before the messiah came.Footnote ³ Menasseh's correspondence with figures such as John Dury and Nathaniel Homes also allowed him to be increasingly optimistic about English reactions to the Jews.Footnote ⁴ Yet it would be unfair to see Menasseh's hopes for readmission merely as an exercise in eschatology. He had practical hopes that England could serve as a refuge for Jews dispersed by persecution in Spain and Portugal, and was always up-front about his desire that Jews should be admitted to England to practise their religion. Moreover, his Sephardi backers in Amsterdam hoped that through readmission they might circumvent the pressing conditions of the 1651 Navigation Act, which had been passed to break the influence of the Dutch on trade with England.

Menasseh's son Samuel arrived in England in October 1654, along with Manuel Martinez Dormido (also known as David Abrabanel). Dormido had fled the inquisition in Portugal, become successful in Amsterdam, and recently lost his fortune when the Portuguese took Pernambuco in Brazil from the Dutch. The men submitted two petitions to Cromwell. One called for help in regaining Dormido's money, with the other requesting Jewish readmission to England. The Council of State ignored them both, although Cromwell personally wrote to the king of Portugal on Dormido's behalf.Footnote ⁵ Whether Menasseh took this as a sign of the Lord Protector's personal goodwill or not, he was finally able to visit England in the following year. Staying in lodgings on the Strand, he published a detailed petition to Cromwell requesting the official readmission of the Jews, that they be free to practise their faith, and that they be allowed a synagogue in which to worship.Footnote ⁶ The Council of State appointed a committee to consider the petition, which Cromwell recommended to them on 13 November 1655. It concluded, bluntly, that the requests were ‘sinful in any Christian nation’.Footnote ⁷ Yet this was not the end of the matter. In rejecting Menasseh's proposals, it was decided that they none the less merited further discussion. A group of theologians, merchants and lawyers were to meet together to discuss the issue (and what measures would be taken if the Jews were readmitted), at Whitehall on 4 December 1655. This conference dragged on indeterminably for three further meetings, on 12, 14 and 18 December. Cromwell closed the conference by admitting that nothing had been decided. Whereas he had hoped for clarity from the delegates and guidance on what action to take, ‘these agreed not but were of two or three opinions, it was left the more doubtfull to him and the Councel [sic]’.Footnote ⁸ Some months later, Cromwell may or may not have given a positive response to a petition from the small Jewish community then in London for some form of guarantee of safety.Footnote ⁹ No legislation was passed, however.

The importance of the Whitehall Conference and the supposed ‘readmission’ of 1656 may well be in its symbolic value rather than any actual decisions reached there. As James Shapiro and Eliane Glaser have shown, the conference has served as a focal point for Anglo-Jewish history, being seen as a symbol of English tolerance and (in Menasseh and Cromwell) as evidence of Englishmen and Jews working together for the national good. As both authors point out, this is a false picture – the details of the conference and subsequent debates are much messier, and reveal that links with modern ideals of religious toleration are premature to say the least.Footnote ¹⁰ None the less, both events at Whitehall and the debate they generated (well into 1656) show the high level of public interest in practical, political questions surrounding Jews in England. Why was there this widespread interest? Traditionally, two major reasons have stood out – philosemitic millennialism, which saw readmission as a sign of coming Jewish conversion, and mercantilism, which aimed to profit from Jewish trading skill. Both of these reasons were used by Menasseh after all (unsurprisingly, however, he did not mention conversion). The Hope of Israel had been suffused with messianic expectation, while the petition to Cromwell emphasised the profit that was to be made for the nation where Jews were welcomed.Footnote ¹¹ Shapiro added a third reason to these motives – the possibility that readmission was about defining the boundaries of Englishness after a period of instability and turmoil in the civil wars. The conference therefore allowed debate on who was (and was not) English.Footnote ¹² Glaser's work, while broadly accepting Shapiro's conclusions, added a fourth explanation when she claimed that many of the debates surrounding readmission were not about Jews at all. Instead, they used the example of the Jews (and Jewish precedents) to discuss issues such as the validity of the common law and separation of Church and State.Footnote ¹³ These should not necessarily be seen as competing explanations, but as reflecting different areas of interests which converged in the debate.Footnote ¹⁴

Here, however, the particular focus will be on the national interest in the discussions at Whitehall. Shapiro is right to see the debate over readmission as an opportunity to define the precise limits of Englishness, and what it was that precisely made one an Englishman. Yet there is a missing component in his discussion that can serve as the link between his focus on national identity formation and Katz's emphasis on philosemitism – that is, Judeo-centric eschatology. Emerging in the work of writers such as Thomas Brightman and Joseph Mede, Judeo-centrism was an eschatology that focused on the importance of Jewish restoration to Palestine, and the empire and the rule that the Jews would enjoy there.Footnote ¹⁵ Shapiro only examines the issue tangentially and briefly, mentioning it as part of a triad of options for dealing with the Jews in early modern England: readmission, restoration to Palestine and use in colonisation. Indeed, he struggles to find any ‘rational’ explanation for the interest in Palestine, wondering why ‘efforts to restore the Jews to their ancient homeland remained far more palatable to English writers than the idea of restoring the Jews to England itself’.Footnote ¹⁶

Shapiro perhaps finds the notion so difficult precisely because he fails to see how it can contribute to a sense of English identity. After all, both readmission and expulsion clearly offer up opportunities for national identity formation. Through readmission the nation can define itself by its openness, its tolerance and its kindness to strangers. In other words, it can fulfil part of the elect role expected of Israel in the Old Testament, seeing itself as a ‘light to the nations’. By coming into England, argued ‘D.L.’, the Jews would thus be able to enjoy ‘the plentifull means of obtaining grace and favour, which by the gospel preached are here to be, to the glory of our nation’.Footnote ¹⁷ On the other hand, expulsion offered the opportunity to maintain identity against a clearly defined other, as in the acerbic note from William Prynne, the chief opponent of readmission, that as far as England was concerned ‘God hath appointed [it] to the English alone for their portion (and therefore these aliens may not invade or intrude themselves into it, without the nation's general consent)’.Footnote ¹⁸ Restoration to Palestine, on the other hand, offered neither of these opportunities. It showed too much identification with Jewish beliefs to be considered as another form of exclusion, while it also moved some way from the openness of readmission. Yet the fact remains that many of those calling for readmission also called for restoration. Shapiro is at a loss to explain this paradox, other than to suggest his third option of setting up the Jews in an unpopulated country as a dependency of England. Given that this was a plan suggested by only two known writers (one of whom was writing a utopia), this hardly seems a viable position.Footnote ¹⁹

A second problem, recently noted in Achsah Guibbory's work, appears when we try to trace national identity in the debates on readmission. Her reading of the literature surrounding the conference finds it marked by an essential clash between two ideals of the elect nation. English writers, having seen England as a country specifically chosen by God and having appropriated many of the trappings of Old Testament Israel, were faced with the possibility of having to accommodate the Jews who were part of that same ‘Old Israel’, and thus claimed those same blessings for themselves, within their nation. For English writers used to finding an analogue between the history of their nation and Old Testament Israel, the difficulty was clear.Footnote ²⁰ The response, argues Guibbory, was therefore vehement from those who opposed the Jews' claims to the title of Israel.Footnote ²¹ So, Prynne claimed that while the Jews were once God's chosen people, they were now ‘the saddest spectacles of divine justice, and humane misery’Footnote ²² – under ‘God's just curse and vengeance … for their sins'.Footnote ²³ Similarly, Quakers were quick both to write to and condemn the Jews for their claims to be God's chosen people: ‘wee are the circumcision, who worship God in the spirit, and have no confidence in the flesh’;Footnote ²⁴ ‘[those] who are Israels common-wealth, who are the remnant that keeps the command of God, and are of the seed of Abraham … are by the dark world called Quakers'.Footnote ²⁵ On the surface we therefore have the clash of two groups claiming to be ‘Israel’; two elect nations squaring up to one another. Again, however, for a number of writers this did not prove to be a problem. On the contrary, many were happy to affirm that the Jews were superior to the Gentiles and remained the chosen people of God. Yet at the same time they did not abandon the high claims that were made for England. Taking the opportunity afforded by discussions of readmission, they were able to forge a holy, English identity, which found England's key role in its relationship with the Jewish people. This ‘chosen’ identity combined providential thinking with proto-Zionism to forge a picture of England as a nation defined by its relationship with Jews.

This concern was apparent from early attempts to discuss Jewish readmission, even before Menasseh had written his Hope. The otherwise unknown Edward Nicholas published his Apology for the honorable nation of the Jews in 1648, a work probably written in response to the failure of the Council of Officers to agree to a toleration clause that included Jews in the Agreement of the People approved on 15 January 1648/9.Footnote ²⁶ Nicholas's pamphlet is important as it highlights themes which became essential in the debate on Jewish readmission in the 1650s. These can be split into three broad areas – the identity of the Jews, the judgement on England for her sins, and the opportunity for England to act as a redeemer nation towards the Jews by directing them back to their own country. Using Nicholas's work as a springboard, we can examine each category in turn.

For Judeo-centrists, the Jews were firstly a people who still enjoyed a special relationship with God. Nicholas notes that this ‘appears by the many and large expressions of his [God's] favor to them, stiling them his gems, his firstborn, a precious people above all peoples of the earth’.Footnote ²⁷ The Jews were thus ‘of the highest and most honourable descent of any nobility in any country in the world, being ennobled by God himself … and this, I believe to be true nobility, having God to ratify it’.Footnote ²⁸ Where some might think that the Jews were cast off for crucifying Christ, Nicholas instead placed the guilt only on their first-century leaders. While this caused him some difficulty when he tried to explain why they were now exiled from their land, he none the less argued forcefully that the Jews remained the true people of God.Footnote ²⁹ This was obviously a challenge to standard Protestant theology, which accepted that the Jews as a nation had been cut off and the blessings that they enjoyed were to be spiritually fulfilled in the Church.Footnote ³⁰ Nicholas was alive to the implications of the shift that he proposed. The promise that God made to Abraham – to bless those who blessed him and curse those who cursed him (Genesis xvii) – was still in force.Footnote ³¹

This idea, that the Jews remained God's people even after Christ's death and resurrection, was therefore frequently expressed. Writing in an appendix to Menasseh's Hope of Israel in 1651, Moses Wall repeatedly affirmed the special and quite separate nature of God's promises for Jews and Gentiles. The Jews' covenant ‘is not nulled or broken, but only suspended’.Footnote ³² This attracted the ire of the aforementioned Edward Spencer, published in his letter to Menasseh. He worried that Wall granted the Jews not only a dignity which they did not deserve, but also set them apart from Christians even when converted: ‘they must not exalt themselves as a nation, for they must be ingrafted upon that branch, or vine, Christ Jesus’.Footnote ³³ John Tillinghast, writing in 1653, broached the same subject. The Jews were described as ‘kings’ in Revelation xvi, he claimed, ‘for that great honour and dignity God will put upon his people (setting them uppermost in the kingdom)’.Footnote ³⁴

Just how far the Jews would be ‘uppermost’ was made clear when Tillinghast discussed the relationship of non-Jews to the restored Jewish kingdom. ‘The Gentiles shall be in a manner servants to the Jews’, he wrote, ‘yet shall their hearts be so spiritual, that considering it to be their fathers work & will, they shall be so far from being offended… [that] they shall exceedingly delight in the thing.’Footnote ³⁵ Nathaniel Homes agreed. On their conversion, those nations who had opposed the coming of Jewish power ‘shall now be given into the hands of the converted Jews’. This power would also be enjoyed by converted Gentiles, noted Homes, although they were defined only by their relationship to the Jews: ‘the holy Gentiles adhering to them [the Jews]’.Footnote ³⁶ This kingdom would be everlasting, for God ‘gave them the seale of the seven kindomes of the whole country of Canaan, and that for an everlasting possession … [they will be] most glorious restored to the possession of it; the seed of Abraham, the beleeving [sic] Jews and Gentiles ruling there, and over the whole earth, as long as ever there shall be any habitation on earth’.Footnote ³⁷

These claims of the inherent nobility of the Jews resounded through works arguing for readmission. ‘They are a people above all the peoples and nations in the world’ wrote Roger Williams, ‘under most gracious and express promises.’Footnote ³⁸ ‘God still owns them as his people and hath a special eye over them’, argued Thomas Collier in 1655, looking forward to a time when God would ‘make them the head of the nations’.Footnote ³⁹ In a direct appeal to the Jews, he was even clearer about their future glory: ‘[You] shall be honoured of God when the nations shall fall before you, and confess you a people sought out and favoured.’Footnote ⁴⁰ At their conversion, argued ‘J. J. Philo-Judaeus’, ‘God will accept them for a sweet smelling savor, and give such pleasant rest in their borders, so that they shall be afraid of the nations no longer; but God will be a wall of fire around them.’Footnote ⁴¹ As the same author stated even more bluntly, the Jews ‘are our superiors’.Footnote ⁴² Even their rejection of Christ could take on an almost heroic character. Philo-Judaeus therefore imagined the Jews almost as a corporate Christ-figure, as they renounced the honour that they were due and submitted to humiliation and penal substitution so that the Gentiles might be saved: ‘It was for our sakes that they hated Christ, refused the gospel, and became enemies to the truth, that we might be brought to the knowledge of him who is able to save to the utmost … [God] hath laid them aside which were once his people, that we stupid and blind idolaters might be grafted into the true olive tree.’Footnote ⁴³ These statements of the blessings enjoyed by Jews were not limited to works discussing readmission; they also found expression at the Whitehall Conference itself. Even when the Jews were being punished for their sins, noted delegates, God ‘hath a special eye to them; observing all the unkind carriage of others towards them’.Footnote ⁴⁴

The second idea that came to prominence in the debates was the threat of punishment which England faced. Again, Nicholas was clear as to where the fault lay. After listing the medieval massacres and laws currently in force against the Jews, he noted that ‘in rejecting them, we highly incense the majesty of Jehovah, whereas we ought rather to honor them whom God honoreth’; ‘we have great and important cause to take heed, lest we of this kingdom of England, putting from us and abandoning these people of God, we separate not ourselves from Gods favor and protection’.Footnote ⁴⁵ The treatment of the Jews was thus used both as a warning piece, and as a possible explanation for the sufferings of the civil wars. This was one of the central themes of the first formal appeal for readmission by Johanna and Ebenezer Cartwright, two English Baptists living in Amsterdam. The petition, dated 5 January 1649, was sent to Thomas Fairfax and the Council of War, and asked that readmission be allowed so that ‘the wrath of God, will be much appeased towards you, for their innocent blood shed’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Williams argued along similar lines, attacking the ‘horrible oppressions and horrible slaughters [which] the Jews suffered from the Kings and peoples of this nation’. This placed the nation as a whole under judgement: ‘for removing of which guilt, and the pacifying of the wrath of the most high against this nation … it is humbly conceived to be a great and weighty duty which lies upon this State, to provide (on the Jewes account) some gracious expedients for such holy and Christian ends'.Footnote ⁴⁷

Addressing himself to Cromwell, Collier solemnly noted that the Jews' ‘affliction hath been especially the sin of princes and governours of the nations … and they it is must give an account for the wrong done to them &c. That so it may be your Highness and your Councils care, to deliver your selves from that guilt the world lyeth under, for their wrong unto them’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Philo-Judaeus took time to warn that ‘it had been better for us, if our predecessors had not driven them out of England, doubtless the Lord will not leave punishing of us, untill we do leave remembering of their faults … by receiving of them again to inhabit amongst us'.Footnote ⁴⁹ Again, these themes reverberated through discussions at Whitehall. If God had plagued Israel after the death of Saul until satisfaction was made, might it not ‘offend the Lord, if we yield not to the Jews this courtesie which they desire; and it may be accounted some kinde of satisfaction to them?’Footnote ⁵⁰ Recounting English atrocities against the Jews, the theologians present noted that ‘for such grosse injuries the Lord may be very sore displeased with England … if [readmission] be denyed them, it's feared the Lord may shew his displeasure to be great against England’.Footnote ⁵¹

While this might seem a very negative picture, these warnings against inaction also featured a promise that England had a unique role to play in the future of the Jews. These writers therefore aimed to provide ways in which the nation could reconstruct itself and build positive models for national identity upon their relationship with the Jews. As Nicholas slyly suggested, if ‘we … follow the politicans rule, that aim onley at their own ends’ the way in which the Jews were treated would ‘prove and will certainly be an advantage to us divers ways … the good or evil usage of God's people is the greatest states interest in the world’.Footnote ⁵² If England wanted not only to abrogate judgement, but also to build up her own status as a nation, then she would be wise to be on the side of God's people. In doing so, argued Nicholas, England would also be further defining herself against countries, such as France and Spain, who were renowned for their hatred of the Jews. Nicholas hoped that when peace came to England ‘our weapons…may be bent against the cruel oppressors of [God's] people in forraign parts, and those mercyless tyrants so rigorous towards the Jews'.

Nicolas's musing on England's role did not end there. The civil wars, he argued, were simply the prelude to the emergence of England's true identity as the redeemer of the Jews. Taking the story from 1 Kings v–vi in which Solomon ordered timber and stone hewn in Lebanon, so as not to have the sound of sawing near the Holy of Holies, Nicholas argued by analogy that ‘our late tumults and bloodshed … may be the hewing and working in Lebanon which we have heard’.Footnote ⁵³ In other words, they served as the preparation for God's work with the Jews. The tract, which initially seemed so negative towards England, ended with a metaphorical appeal to the nation as an imagined community: ‘to the whole Kingdom of England, from the highest to the lowest’ with a reminder that they too showed signs of God's special chosen status: ‘God hath exceedingly blessed this kingdom above others … [as] the chief bulwark of the truth.’Footnote ⁵⁴ Similar images appear again and again throughout the literature on the readmission debate.

While for some writers this was only seen in terms of offering the Jews the opportunity to convert, for others England's role included the facilitation of the restoration of the Jews to Palestine. The Cartwright petition, for example, included the hope that ‘this Nation of ENGLAND, with the inhabitants of the Nether-lands, shall be the first and readiest to transport IZRAELLS sons & daughters in their ships to that Land promised to their forefathers'.Footnote ⁵⁵ The judgement that currently lay upon England would not only be reversed, but playing into hopes of an apocalyptic Anglo-Dutch confederation, the combined nations would serve as the redeemers of the Jewish people.Footnote ⁵⁶ Later writers removed any other nation from this picture and presented a uniquely English enterprise in blessing the Jews. According to Philo-Judaeus, the nation had thus been offered ‘that honour before all nations in the world, so that through the assistance of our Lord, we may be instruments of Israels resurrection and restauration’. This opportunity was a moment of crisis for the nation, he argued, and England as a whole had to take the opening provided by God who ‘had put one opportunity more of doing good into our hands, if we will but lay hold of it’. As Mordecai had warned Esther, if she did not speak for the Jews at this time, then deliverance would arise ‘from another place to the Jews, but thou and thy father's house shall perish’.Footnote ⁵⁷ For Collier, England would offer unique opportunities for the Jews to convert. While the Jewish community living in Amsterdam might remain obstinate, ‘God may cause the water of or in our England to wash away that leprosie which might not be done in other nations’.Footnote ⁵⁸ When that ‘leprosie’ was cleansed, however, the Jews would probably not remain in England long. Here, Cromwell might expect a special role: ‘but God may make you not only as a nursing father to them here, but an instrument in his hand to help them in to their own countrey, for thither they shall return, by whom and by what means, time will manifest’.Footnote ⁵⁹

As far as Tillinghast was concerned, the restoration of the Jews was the ‘generation work’ that God had prepared for completion in 1650s England. While all Christians were called to further God's kingdom, Tillinghast claimed that each generation (and each nation) could be entrusted with a particular mission by God. If this mission was embraced then blessing would follow. If not, then judgement was inevitable. This was obvious from the most recent example of a generation following God's command for its special work: the success of parliamentary armies in the civil war. Footnote ⁶⁰ The new work that God had laid at England's feet was that of Jewish conversion, an event likely in 1656. With that in mind, England had not only a duty to readmit the Jews, but to take the lead in their restoration to Palestine. Engaging in an extended exegesis of Isaiah, Tillinghast set out the attributes of the Gentile nation that would play the lead role in the Jewish return. They ‘shall be a people inhabiting some isles…[possess] a longing desire to see the day of Israels redemption … [be] very considerable and strong in shipping’ and have ‘a state government’ rather than a monarchy.Footnote ⁶¹ This nation would also take the lead role in destroying Rome, being represented by the stone that grows into a great mountain in Daniel ii before smashing a statue representing a succession of world empires. This stone would begin to form in the north of Europe, before slowly gathering speed and numbers as it approached Rome: ‘where the stone is first taken out of the mountains, and formed together by God, and begins to roll and smite; out of that quarter, may we conclude the tempest (though yet it be a great way off) which is to fall upon Rome shall most certainly come’.Footnote ⁶² Jewish leaders with strong messianic faith, meanwhile, would begin discussing restoration with those whom they perceived as helpful in their return to Palestine. After the English-led alliance had destroyed Rome, they would help to restore the Jews through the force of their arms. After their departure, however, the Jews were fated to face an unprecedented trial as they battled against hostile nations and their unconverted brethren. Two-thirds of them would die. But they were guaranteed to prevail through Christ and enjoy an earthly kingdom.Footnote ⁶³ The allusions to Menasseh in the figure of the messianically-minded Jewish leader were clear.

Although the detailed apocalyptic scheme that Tillinghast had set out was not discussed at Whitehall, there is no question that one of the key hopes expressed at the conference was that England could enjoy a special role through its focus upon the Jews. God had, after all, ‘exalted England in spiritual, and in temporal mercies and deliverances, as much as, (or more then [sic]) any other nation under heaven’. Not only was this the case, but ‘the good people generally have more believed the promises touching the calling of the Jews and the great riches and glory that shall follow to Jews, and us Gentiles, and have (and do still) more often and earnestly pray for it than any other nation that we have heard of’.Footnote ⁶⁴ While it was hoped that England would play a part in their conversion, some speakers followed Nicholas in arguing that readmission allowed the definition of England against continental ‘others’. Readmission should be used to demonstrate the way in which England was unlike nations like France and Spain, where open persecution took place.Footnote ⁶⁵ Both a more millenarian theme and the possible benefits to England emerged in a private meeting. The entry of the Jews into England ‘might tend to the benefit of very many in our nation, even in outward things, beside their conversion; which time (it's hoped) is now at hand, even at the door’.Footnote ⁶⁶

The bulk of literature surrounding the Whitehall Conference therefore viewed Jewish readmission with one eye on the fractured image of Englishness that had splintered as a result of the civil war. As Shapiro has argued, the conference could therefore act as a way in which Englishness was reaffirmed and redefined after a difficult period – what was it that made one English, and were these characteristics antithetical to Judaism?Footnote ⁶⁷ Yet the millenarian writers of the literature which surrounded Whitehall advanced beyond this oppositional question by striving to ‘write the nation’ through their pamphlets, commentaries and sermons. This was not the clash of the elect nations, but rather a definition and defence of Englishness in distinction to Old Testament Israel, while at the same time in constant dialogue with contemporary Jews.Footnote ⁶⁸ Where the nation had been divided in the recent wars, wrote Tillinghast, the project of Jewish readmission to England and restoration to Palestine presented the opportunity to imagine the nation as a unified community: ‘there is no part or piece of generation-work, but every Christian man or woman may some way be helpful thereunto’.Footnote ⁶⁹ D. L. was drawn into a long panegyric as he imagined the role that a similarly unified England would play for the Jewish people:

Of course, coming from radicals such as Collier and Tillinghast, such rhetoric may appear merely as the vain hopes of a defeated party which, as Steven Pincus has noted, was reduced to political insignificance after the fall of the Barebones parliament in 1653.Footnote ⁷¹ Yet, in fact, such rhetoric operated as a way for radical writers to attempt to reconnect to the political and religious mainstream from which they appeared to have been excluded. Indeed, their rhetoric recalled Cromwell's own previous statements on the issue. The future Lord Protector famously addressed his eschatological hopes for the Nominated Assembly in his speech of 4 July 1653 in which he concluded that the new parliament might be a sign of the times in which ‘God is bringing the Jews home to their station from the Isles of the sea, surely when God sets up the glory of the gospel church, it shall be gathering people out of deep waters, out of the multitudes of waters’.Footnote ⁷² The reference to the ‘isles of the sea’ implied an English role – precisely the role for which Menasseh's mission seemed to be preparing the nation.

Cromwell's continued favouring of Menasseh – including providing him with lodgings on the Strand, entertaining him and adding additional Judeo-centric divines to the Whitehall conference as it proceeded, all implied that the Lord Protector viewed Jewish readmission as of national importance. Cromwell's closing statement to the conference on 18 December, that ‘he had no engagement to the Jews, but only what the Scripture holds forth’Footnote ⁷³ was therefore deeply revealing. The conference itself also included a number of ministers who had previously written and preached on their belief in the restoration of the Jews to Palestine, including John Owen, Thomas Goodwin, Thomas Manton and Joseph Caryl. Goodwin, for example, had written that the Turks were ‘to be overthrown by or for the Jews, to make way for them to get possession of their own land’.Footnote ⁷⁴ It was these divines who expressed the fear that England was due judgement if they did not accept Menasseh's demands. Goodwin provides a further link to the highest levels of English government, as his church was attended by Henry Lawrence, Lord President of the Council of State and one of the key figures in organising the Whitehall Conference.Footnote ⁷⁵ Lawrence was one of five members of the Council who attended the conference, taking his place alongside Sir Gilbert Pickering, Sir Charles Wolsely, Francis Rous and John Lisle. He was likely to be sympathetic to the rabbi's demands; his eldest son Edward, in the company of the Judeo-centric Henry Oldenburg, certainly met with Menasseh on a number of occasions.Footnote ⁷⁶ Lawrence's influence, combined with his links to Goodwin and other Judeo-centric ministers, is suggestive of the extent of this type of thinking at the highest levels of government. By appealing to the importance of Jewish restoration, radical writers therefore tried to relocate their concerns within a wider political-religious discourse and thus return themselves to the political mainstream.

All of these writers, both radical and mainstream, sought to define the nation in terms of its relationship and duty to the Jews, but not in the sense that England replaced them as the elect nation. England's role in the projected apocalyptic war to restore the Jews was to lead other Protestant nations, not to make exclusive claims of blessing at the expense of others.Footnote ⁷⁷ England might receive the greatest measure of spiritual and political blessing from God, but this did not mean that other nations would not also be blessed.Footnote ⁷⁸ Thus England might be ‘chosen’ for a special purpose, but only ethnic Israel could enjoy election as ‘God's chosen people’. The chosen nature of England therefore differed from the chosen nature of Israel in that the nation was judged, primarily, by its relationship with the Jews. When Tillinghast was setting up an image of England's chosen nature, he therefore used the Philistines, not Israel, as the model for England.Footnote ⁷⁹ The link between the English nation and the Jews was therefore neither oppositional in these works, nor did it see England as a straightforward replacement for Israel. Instead, it looked to define a nation's worth by its treatment of the Jewish people.

This helps to explain the providential understanding of England's relationship with the Jews, which was able to resonate with key elements of English thinking on the subject. In recent work on providentialism in the early modern Atlantic world, Nicholas Guyatt has suggested that three distinctive forms of providential thought were present in the period. ‘Judicial’ providentialism found nations being judged for individual actions, without reference to an overarching grand plan; ‘historical’ providentialism saw God as preparing particular nations to improve the world, guiding their history accordingly; while ‘apocalyptic’ providentialism argued that particular nations were chosen not only in fulfilling God's general plan, but had been set apart to play the key role in fulfilling events described in the Book of Revelation.Footnote ⁸⁰ The providential thinking which surrounded the Whitehall conference was so successful precisely because it was able to appeal to all of these positions.

For example, it was quite possible to adopt only a ‘judicial’ providential position and find that the nation was currently being punished for its previous sins, whether medieval massacres of Jews or the continued expulsion order. As God's chosen people, the Jews enjoyed special privileges and protections. To be chosen as a Gentile nation meant that England needed to show herself the best friend of the Jewish people. As Philo-Judaeus had concluded: ‘I am perswaded, that man which harbors an Israelite in his house, a poor distressed outcast, shall find that God hath increased his riches both in body and soul.’ Listing a number of biblical examples – from Pharaoh's acceptance of Joseph's family to the prostitute Rahab's willingness to hide Jewish spies in Jericho – he argued that God treated the nation in response to its treatment of the Jews.Footnote ⁸¹ This is a point reiterated, in a fairly blunt form, by D. L:

This providential focus upon the Jews could also attract those who held to a form of ‘historical’ providentialism. England's treatment of the Jews was fundamentally linked for many writers to the historical mission that God had prepared for them. This idea resembles what Krishan Kumar has described as ‘missionary nationalism’. Yet, for Kumar, such a model of national identity was not available before the eighteenth century, when England built its identity as the key member of an internal ‘British’ empire of the Isles and an external ‘missionary’ empire spreading civilisation across the world.Footnote ⁸³ The Judeo-centric approach to nationhood that was expressed around the Whitehall Conference found its missionary impulse defined by duty to God and his ancient people, rather than by its civilising role. This was a mission in which the whole nation could play a part. This therefore differed significantly in its conception from the fantasy crusades against Rome that had been imagined over the previous century. In the early seventeenth century these were envisaged as primarily imperial affairs, in which the individual's identity could be defined by a relationship to God and the monarch, who was always seen as leading these ventures. The more recent Fifth Monarchist visions of international crusade, which saw the destruction of Rome by the Godly as its core aim, could also be reimagined through a Judeo-centric lens. While (for Tillinghast in particular) this remained a part of England's mission for the Jews, it was now supplemental to the nation's duty towards God's ancient people. The providential reading of Jewish readmission therefore also held appeal for those who adopted what Guyatt describes as ‘apocalyptic’ providentialism, who could read readmission as England living up to the unique role provided for it in Revelation. Judeo-centric providential thinking was therefore successful precisely because of its ability to engage a number of groups. Less extreme writers could ignore the crusading aspect entirely, and still focus on England's special role towards the Jews, helping to build a platform for shared political goals between moderates and radicals.

The writers who imagined England's role in restoring the Jews in the mid-1650s thus conceived of every member of the nation having a role to play in the reality of restoration. Philo-Judaeus took the blessings that an individual would experience when ‘harbouring an Israelite in his house’ and extrapolated outwards until that blessing could be applied to the nation as a whole. While many of the appeals examined here were made directly to Cromwell, they none the less included an increased awareness of the nation as a group of individuals outside the ruling elite. God, thought Tillinghast, would first make his desire to restore the Jews ‘amongst a middle sort of people … not amongst the poorest of all … nor the richest … but a middle sort of people, living in a plain, but an honourable and comely way’.Footnote ⁸⁴

Such a development is perhaps unsurprising. As Anthony Smith has argued, the idea of a national covenant had already presumed that the nation could unify around a commitment to action before God. There was certainly the potential to imagine the nation outside the more limited parameters of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century thought.Footnote ⁸⁵ Smith, however, still holds to the idea that this covenanted nation served as the ‘new Israel’, thus gaining credibility by repeated Old Testament allusions. It is true that many did make ample use of these allusions to help to define the nation in this period. Yet the idea of the ‘chosen’ nation is much more complicated than merely emphasising similarities with Old Testament Israel, an idea which was deliberately disavowed by many Judeo-centrists. In terms of national identity formation, to presume a type-antitype relationship between Israel and England is a gross oversimplification. Instead of seeing this relationship in terms of binary opposites, it is better to imagine the England/Israel relationship as a patchwork of images and interrelations open to the Englishman writing or preaching on the nation.

The precise use of Israel to define England therefore varied between writers who used the comparison for different reasons. Many, such as Prynne, viewed Israel in terms of abrogated blessings which could be claimed for England; with the Jews rejected, Englishness could be defined by alterity. Yet for Judeo-centrists, who used the comparison in an entirely different manner, the blessings were not abrogated but continuous. England could define itself against Israel only in that it would be judged upon the treatment and political support that it gave to the scattered Jews. There is, of course, an abiding irony in all of this, for the Judeo-centrist perspective served to emphasise the otherness of the Jews just as much as the positions adopted by the opponents of readmission. In accepting that the promises to Israel remained in force, Judeo-centrists presumed that the Jews could never become a functioning part of the English nation. Their stay in England was, after all, a temporary sojourn on their way to Palestine. As Shapiro has pointed out, it was an eschatological necessity that the Jews not be assimilated in any way – to do so would leave Christians uncertain as to the identity of the people on whom so much of God's plans hinged. Taken together with the difficulty of identifying the ten tribes, this would have been a step too far into confusion.Footnote ⁸⁶ Menasseh's writing had probably not helped on this count. Desperate to answer every possible objection to readmission, he had simultaneously argued that the Jews became a useful part of the nations into which they were welcomed, and that they had no desire for lands, titles or participation in national life, but remained a community entirely set apart.Footnote ⁸⁷

Potentially more disturbing are the implications of these ideas for the Christian conception of the Jewish people. Here the Jews were not to be valued for what they could do for the nation in terms of either personal or corporate contributions. Instead, they were treated as virtual fetishes; a way of guaranteeing national success through an unthinking support for their supposed geo-political interests rather than actual engagement with the Jewish community. Philo-Judaeus' assertion that the man who took a Jew into his house would be blessed ‘body and soul’ had the ring of folk superstition about it rather than actual concern for Jewish welfare. The appeal of the ‘judicial’ providentialism of Judeo-centrism may, however, lie in just this area. The link between national sin and national punishment was an established part of the Puritan psyche, and providential defeats and setbacks could easily be explained as the result of general moral failures or a reluctance to institute reform.Footnote ⁸⁸

Yet this kind of providential thinking was handicapped by its generalised nature. When providence seemed to turn against England, even as the nation appeared to be following God's will, which sins were to be identified as those which had displeased God? More pertinently, were they the sins of the nation's leaders, the people as a whole, or both? This question had been raised forcefully shortly before the Whitehall Conference, with Cromwell's failed attempt to take Hispaniola from the Spanish in the summer of 1655. The collapse of this plan left Cromwell deeply confused over the direction in which providence was pointing, as well as providing his opponents with an opportunity to identify the Lord Protector as the man responsible for bringing God's displeasure upon England.Footnote ⁸⁹ In this context, Judeo-centric providentialism offered an opportunity to identify England's sin with previous administrations, stretching back to the thirteenth century. Both the horrors of the civil wars and recent foreign policy failures could thus be explained without any specific blame being placed on either Cromwell or the masses who made up the contemporary English nation. England's recent military misadventures could also be forgotten as the nation prepared to fulfil their true mission of restoring the Jews to Palestine, rather than attacking Spain in the Americas. Both inherent weaknesses within providential thought and recent military setbacks thus contributed to the success of Judeo-centric arguments in 1655/6. Just how far those writing in favour of readmission were interested in actual Jews is debateable.

While it is easy to criticise Judeo-centrism in the discussions at Whitehall, particularly from a twenty-first century perspective, the very real friendships between Englishmen and Amsterdam Jews seen in figures such as Jessey, Dury and Menasseh should not be forgotten.Footnote ⁹⁰ None the less, while English Judeo-centrists might theoretically have fostered a more positive view of Jews and Judaism, they found it difficult to imagine a scenario in which it would be possible to be both a Jew and an Englishman. Their difficulty is perhaps symptomatic of the problem that Judeo-centrists (and their modern successors, Christian Zionists) have experienced in their attempts to navigate the complex matrix of Jewish-Christian relations over the centuries since the Whitehall Conference. The debates around the abortive act to naturalise foreign Jews in 1753 (popularly known as the ‘Jew Bill’ controversy),Footnote ⁹¹ or the controversies surrounding the activities of eschatologically motivated missionaries to the Jews in early nineteenth-century London,Footnote ⁹² both speak powerfully to the continuing challenges for those who tried to befriend, convert and encourage the Jews to return to Palestine. Such controversies, however, allowed those participating in them to imagine the role that their nation might play in restoring the Jews; again, to forge a ‘chosen’ identity as a redeemer nation. When such considerations moved into the realm of foreign policy, with Lord Shaftesbury's agitation for Jewish restoration and the eventual issuing of the Balfour Declaration,Footnote ⁹³ or in Evangelical pressure placed upon the United States government to support Israel,Footnote ⁹⁴ once again the importance of using the nation's relationship to Judaism to forge national identity came to the fore. It is always dangerous to draw direct lines between similar occurrences in the past and the contemporary world, or to join the Whiggish search for the ‘origins’ of the present.Footnote ⁹⁵ None the less, when contemporary American politicians talk openly about the need to ‘bless Israel’ to keep their nation safeFootnote ⁹⁶ and Evangelical writers suggest that a failure to do so was the cause of events from 9/11 to the loss of the British Empire,Footnote ⁹⁷ perhaps now more than ever it is essential that we attempt to understand the way in which the relationship between national identity, eschatological speculation and ideas of Jewish restoration have played out across Anglo-American history.Footnote ⁹⁸