Not many people become the subject of a biography. Far fewer people yet have been written about so much that an entire volume of bibliography is dedicated to them. Two such persons lived in the Portuguese Jewish community of seventeenth-century Amsterdam. One was, not surprisingly, the great philosopher Benedict de Spinoza. The other was the third-tier rabbi of the community, Menasseh ben Israel. The bibliography on Menasseh by J. H. Coppenhagen (Jerusalem: Misgav Yerushalayim, 1990) runs to over four hundred pages and would probably be a great deal longer if it included all the material published in the intervening three decades.
Steven Nadler published a landmark biography of Spinoza in 1999 and has now published an excellent biography of the enigmatic Menasseh in the Yale Jewish Lives series. (Note that of the thirty-eight biographies in the series, Menasseh is only the third figure from the two-millennium span between the Bible and the nineteenth century, the others being the second-century Rabbi Akiva and the eighteenth-century Moses Mendelssohn.) An earlier biography of Menasseh was written by Cecil Roth in 1934.
The perennial interest of academics in Menasseh does not derive from his great stature as a Torah luminary, for he did not stand out from his rabbinic peers or write important works of talmudic scholarship. Menasseh's attraction as a subject does not arise from his personality, or accomplishments as a leader or innovator, either. It appears that Menasseh continues to fascinate because of his standing among European Christian scholars as a sort of erudite envoy of Jewish knowledge, and because of the various projects into which this standing propelled him. In this he somewhat resembles his older contemporary, Leon Modena of Venice.
Menasseh was born in 1604—apparently in Lisbon—as Manoel Dias Soeiro, to a converso family. Manoel's father had recently been released from a long, horrifying stint in an inquisitorial prison. The family fled to Madeira and then to La Rochelle. Around Manoel's tenth year they settled in Amsterdam and declared a return to their ancestral Judaism. Manoel, now styled Menasseh ben Israel, was enrolled in the Talmud Torah school, where he excelled. He also received a solid education in Latin and European ideas somewhere along the way, though much of this may have been self-taught. In his teens Menasseh was already helping teach students and delivering sermons.
Menasseh, along with his classmate Isaac Aboab de Fonseca, became a rabbi, but when the three separate Amsterdam Portuguese congregations combined in 1639 he found himself in the third chair, with an insultingly low salary. Menasseh turned to teaching and also to publishing Hebrew books, an innovative profession for a Dutch Jew. His teaching extended to Christian scholars wishing to learn not only Hebrew language but Jewish ideas as well. While Menasseh's career in the Jewish community stagnated, he became Europe's best-known Jew among intellectuals. He was consulted by some of the greatest thinkers of the age on the Jewish view about various religious issues. In response to their queries he wrote a series of works in Latin and Spanish about topics such as the contradictions in scriptural passages, the Jewish view of resurrection, the nature of life expectancy, and the meaning of Daniel's statue prophecy. These were very popular with Christian readers. He also wrote instructional works for his own community.
On a fateful day in 1644 a converso named Antonio de Montezinos appeared in Amsterdam reporting that he had encountered indigenous Jews during his travels in South America. Menasseh's friend, the millenarian Scot John Dury, communicated this news to his colleague, Thomas Thorowgood. The latter had previously disseminated a theory that the American Indians were members of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Thorowgood put the two ideas about Jews in America together and Dury was inspired by the resulting conjoined perspective. The rediscovery of the Lost Tribes and their return to Zion was a major step in many Christian scenarios of the Second Coming of Christ. Dury and Thorowgood created excitement among a significant group of fellow messianists in England, who then approached Menasseh for his view of this situation. Menasseh's response was a treatise on the Jewish messiah called Hope of Israel (1650).
Shortly afterward a group of Menasseh's English friends invited him to England to make the case to the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, and to a governmental committee, that the Jews should be readmitted to England, from which they had been expelled in 1290. The millenarians probably saw an opportunity to bring Jews into their own orbit and convert them to Christianity.
They may also, however, have been convinced by one of the arguments Menasseh placed before Cromwell. The Jews, he said, need to be scattered to the four corners of the earth before they can be regathered to their land (e.g., Isaiah 11) as part of the messianic advent. Now that Jews have been found in America as well as the other parts of the known world, the only place to which they have not been dispersed is the place actually called (in a tendentious reading) the Corner of the World: Angle Terre—England. The English should therefore readmit the Jews, which will complete the preconditions for the coming of the messiah. Whether that messiah would be Jesus Christ or some unknown Jew was a matter that could be left for the near future as events unfolded.
The committee refused to make a decision about readmission of the Jews despite Cromwell's urging, and the matter was shelved. Menasseh died on his way back to Holland, believing his mission was a failure. He was so destitute that he did not even leave enough money for his own burial. He could not have known that four years later the Puritans would be deposed and King Charles II would take the English throne, nullifying all the laws established under Cromwell. Jews were tacitly readmitted under Charles and their rights of residence slowly established.
Nadler does a masterful job with the brilliant and complex Menasseh. He is able to draw on over eight decades of research conducted between Roth's biography and his own. This allows Nadler to include numerous details and connections unknown in Roth's day. What stands out even more when comparing the biographies is Nadler's skill at placing Menasseh's relationships and projects in a clear framework. He guides the reader through the steps by which each one entered Menasseh's life. Nadler's thorough familiarity with the Amsterdam Portuguese community and its ideas allows him to conjure up a lively, clear, thorough, and contextualized narrative. This is particularly useful for understanding Menasseh's friendships with Christian Hebraists.
Nadler's book on Menasseh is another major coup in his long list of fascinating studies in history, philosophy, and religion. It brings the colorful Menasseh to life and provides rich context for understanding what made Menasseh such a noteworthy figure of his time.
