CHAPTER TWO

THE CASE OF THE FALSE JEW AND AFTER

Belief in the Saturday-Sabbath is as old as the Jews, and as we have seen, entered into English Protestant thought soon after the Reformation. Most of the early practitioners of the seventh-day Sabbath, however, tended to be rather isolated figures, lacking in supporters and persecuted by the church authorities who found their mode of religious observance to be wholly objectionable. Even John Traske, who did command a certain number of followers and did attract widespread attention, was important for the issues of Sabbath observing and Judaising that he raised, rather than for any genuine threat that his beleaguered sect imposed. But we do know that the idea of the seventh-day Sabbath eventually does become in• stitutionalized in a Restoration sect; what needs to be done is to complete the lines leading into that non-conformist fellowship from its earliest an• tecedents, and away from them as well, to determine if a genuine personal link can be found to more modern groups such as the Seventh-Day Adven- tists and other Fundamentalist denominations. For it is not enough merely to show that someone, somewhere had similar ideas about the Sabbath; the historical influence of these beliefs can only be demonstrated either through direct personal contact or by testimony relating the expression of the idea to its eventual implementation. At the same time, such a search often becomes ends-oriented in such a way that it takes on the worst char• acteristics of Whig history, isolating those elements in the story which in some way ' 'contributed' ' to the final design, as if only that final destina• tion could have been reached. But all this having been said, there definitely is a prehistory of the Satur• day-Sabbatarian movement, a boiling pot of ideas from which the emerg• ing institutions established their controlling ideologies. Very clearly, the first Seventh-Day men of this group were , and it is to the begin• nings of that movement that we need to go when looking for the evolution of the Saturday-Sabbatarians in England. The most influential founder of the English Baptists, Henry Jessey, was himself a Seventh-Day man:

As for what he held (in his latter days) concerning the seventh day Sabbath, to be kept by Christians Evangelically; without Jewish Services or Ceremo• nies he managed his Judgment and practice therein with great caution; that there might be no offence or breaches among Professours; for at first for some considerable time, (near two years) he kept his opinion much to himself, and then afterwards (when he had communicated it to others) he observed the 22 THE CASE OF THE FALSE JEW AND AFTER

day in his own Chamber, with only 4 or 5 more of the same mind, and on the first day of the week he preached, and met publickly and privately as before. One of these men may have been John Traske the notorious Jacobean Ju- daiser, who was a member of the flock which Jessey led. Jessey even be• lieved that "the Lords Sabbaths begins on the Evening before'', in Jewish fashion. Jessey was careful to keep this aspect of his private belief con• cealed from most of his followers so as to avoid yet another split in the al• ready fragmenting world of the gathered churches in .1 Jessey would have preferred to leave the thorny theological question of the Sab• bath for some very future discussion, but was unable to keep quiet the er• ratic and even bizarre career of Thomas Tillam, who left the organized Baptist Church after being duped by a fraudulent convert in the north of England where Tillam had been sent as a Baptist missionary. Tillam even• tually led a group of followers to the Continent where he established com• munal settlements devoted to the exaltation of the Saturday-Sabbath and the keeping of the Ten Commandments in their entirety. Tillam's decision to forsake a society that defiled the word of God had a great effect on all those associated with him. The Baptists were ridiculed out of the north, which was largely lost in this period to the Quakers. Henry Jessey himself, a man with very numerous contacts with Jews and an ardent millenarian, never revealed publicly his devotion to the Satur• day-Sabbath and thus denied the doctrine the respectability which it dear• ly needed.2 Most importantly for the other Seventh-Day men who made the Saturday-Sabbath their creed, Thomas Tillam and the Case of the False Jew was a calumny that they were never allowed to forget, and which seemed to link them inextricably with fanatics of every undesirable variety.

I Tillam's early life remains obscure. He has been claimed to have been of Jewish extraction, although no evidence for this exists.3 Tillam avowed himself to have been originally a Roman Catholic, and to have travelled on the Continent.4 Like himself and many other English• men during the years of extreme political and economic hardship in the 1620s and 1630s, Tillam had looked towards the New World and the possi-

1 D.S. Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603-1655 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 32-3. 2 See generally, D.S. Katz, "'s Christian Connection: Henry Jessey and the Jews", in Menasseh ben Israel and his World, ed. R.H. Popkin et al. (forthcoming). 3 W.T. Whitley, "The Rev. Colonel Paul Hobson", Bap. Qly.f ix (1938-9), 307. 4 See below, p. 28.