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  • Israel in Early Modern England
  • Paul Stevens (bio)
Achsah Guibbory , Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010), i-xii, 1-328.

In his 1978 Oxford D.Phil. dissertation, David Katz brought dramatic new attention to the surprising decision on the part of Oliver Cromwell's government to seek the readmission of the Jews to England after their expulsion more than 350 years before in 1290. Deeply moved by the petitions and arguments orchestrated by the Dutch-Portuguese rabbi, Menasseh ben Israel, Cromwell convened a conference at Whitehall in December 1655 to consider readmission. For both 'politique and divine reasons,' the conference accepted the findings of Justices Glynne and Steel that 'there is no law against their coming' - literally so, not only because there was no parliamentary legislation, but also because no one could find any documentary evidence of prerogative legislation either. Although there was no official declaration of readmission under Cromwell, there was, so Katz contends, something close to it a few years later under Charles II: in 1664 Jews domiciled in England were assured by Henry Hennett on behalf of the king that they might 'promise themselves the effects of the same favour as formerly they have had so long as they demeane themselves peaceably and quietly with due obedience to his Majesties Laws and without scandal to his Government' (qtd. in Katz 243), and indeed a prominent member of the Jewish community, Solomon de Medina, was knighted by William III in 1700. For Katz, deeply influenced by the postwar work of the German-Jewish scholar Hans-Joachim Schoeps on 'Baroque philo-semitism,' the amelioration of Christian-Jewish relations epitomized in the Whitehall conference [End Page 313] and the subsequent Restoration recognition of England's Jewish community was clearly something to be celebrated.1 This positive story was important in that the remarkable phenomenon of English philo-Semitism moved centre stage, and the highly influential book that emerged from Katz's doctoral research initiated a new academic discourse in English.

All history is contemporary history, or so one is tempted to believe. Katz was the Jewish student of Hugh Trevor-Roper, the former British intelligence officer and Oxford don who first became a celebrity not with his youthful biography of Archbishop Laud but with his 1947 best seller, The Last Days of Hitler. Trevor-Roper saw himself less as a philo-Semite than as an Enlightenment historian utterly contemptuous of any form of religious prejudice, and while his book's cleverly Tacitean treatment of Hitler provoked Zionist death threats, it initiated a lifelong engagement with Jews and Jewish history.2 Katz idolized Trevor-Roper, and between them, so it might be argued, the Jewish student and his English supervisor wrote contemporary history in that they appear to have reenacted the seventeenth-century amelioration of relations imagined in Katz's book. Katz was passionate to demonstrate that while economic motives certainly did figure in Cromwell's calculations, English philo-Semitism itself, like the disinterestedness of his great mentor, was often genuinely altruistic and largely independent of Jewish capital and business skills. One of the most compelling reasons for readmission was external oppression: even as he concedes the importance of economic motives, Katz dwells on the Inquisition's 'violent powers to Judge the hidden interiours oneley Reserved to god Creatore' (qtd. in Katz 194). For James Shapiro, writing from a very different place almost two decades later, such an explanation is overly sentimental and belies the full horror of Jews as England's defining other. Taking his cue from Colin Richmond's 'post-Holocaust perspective' (Shapiro 53) and deeply influenced by Norman Cohn's postwar excursions into Europe's anti-Semitic inner demons, he has little doubt that the English preoccupation with Jews in the seventeenth century was essentially racist, a function of England's national reinvention: 'the opposition between [End Page 314] Christian and Jew was slowly overtaken by that of Englishman and Jew' (225). The last thing Shapiro wants to write is contemporary history, but there's a degree to which he finds it hard to avoid. He insists that his book is not just 'another cry of Jewish victimization' (227), but...

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