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119 Q A Salutation to the Seed of Abraham Margaret Fell, Quaker Evangelism, and the Jews 4 Early Friends’ theology pulses with energy and urgency. Channeled through the social and religious context of the seventeenth century, the stern joy of Quaker proclamation melded with apocalyptic expectation to fit the tenor of the times. As a biblical prerequisite for Christ’s return, the conversion of the Jews has a permanent place in the reckoning of Christian eschatology. Of course, wars, social unrest, disease, earthquakes, and other natural disasters also figure prominently in Christian end-times calculations, but they are much more flexible numerators in the equation. Weighting the vicissitudes of natural disaster and human desire is light duty compared to interpreting the destiny of an entire people through an end-times calculus. That so many have taken up this challenge is a marvel of its own kind. Given the tumultuous religious and political environment in which Margaret Fell lived and wrote, she surely encountered the question of the relationship between England and the Jews. Like most things in her time, the issue was both political and religious . The debate was shaped in large part by the concerns of the Protestant Reformation, and in a more general sense forced by the needs of a Christian faith that is bound historically and theologically to the Jewish people. However, the social and religious anxiety that surrounded these lasttimes discussions was not limited to Christianized peoples. As we will see, the great Jewish Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel had his own reasons for accepting the king’s invitation to England and the Whitehall Conference. There he entered public discourse on the state of world Jewry, believing in his own fashion that signs of the times pointed to the coming Jewish Messiah. In this sense, Menasseh ben Israel and Margaret Fell were part of the same historical discourse though there is no record that they ever met. What they shared was 120 Margaret Fell and the End of Time the belief that Jews should be readmitted to England and her territories, and that this would fulfill a requirement for the full reign of the Jewish Messiah. As a Quaker with a distinct theological perspective on the subject, Margaret Fell expressed solid interest in the readmission of the Jews to England. This is reflected in the four published pamphlets written by her and directed to the attention of the Jewish people. These four publications have earned Margaret Fell attention in publications aimed primarily at scholars outside the field of Quaker studies. The reasons for the interest are varied and at times have almost nothing to do with the woman herself. Perhaps the most intriguing example of this is Margaret Fell’s publication A Loving Salutation to the Seed of Abraham. It is probable that the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza was the unnamed translator for the Hebrew version of this publication, which was then distributed abroad by Quaker missionaries. If Spinoza is the unnamed translator, then it would constitute Spinoza’s first published work.1 However, our purpose for considering these publications is to gain a better understanding of Margaret Fell’s theology as it is revealed in her efforts toward Quaker evangelism of the Jewish people. To begin, we will consider a broad reconstruction of the context in which Fell articulated her religious and theological views, in this case on the issue of the Jews. In essence we are looking to capture those things that Margaret Fell could reasonably be expected to know and believe about the Jews and their place in the world of the seventeenth century. In so doing, we will see that the significance of the Jews for Fell and the early Quakers reflected not only their own theological perspective as Friends, but also the religious, political, and philosophical concerns which dominated England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In attempting to reconstruct the context of her writings to the Jews, our first interest is in England’s stance toward the Jewish people during the seventeenth century. We will look to evidence of attitudes that existed at the popular, scholarly, and political levels. From there we will briefly discuss the life of Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, the leader of the Amsterdam Jewish community who came to England as an emissary to the 1655 Whitehall Conference. For Margaret Fell, as for many others , this visit was a sign of the last days, and to some degree it was made possible because of popular millenarian concerns in...

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