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Jewish World in His Writings and to Examine the Language He Used and Its Attendant Theological, Moral and Political Connotations

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Jewish World in His Writings and to Examine the Language He Used and Its Attendant Theological, Moral and Political Connotations MENASSEH BEN ISRAEL AND THE WORLD OF THE NON-JEW HENRY MÉCHOULAN This paper aims to show how Menasseh ben Israel perceived the non- Jewish world in his writings and to examine the language he used and its attendant theological, moral and political connotations. Several authors have brought hardly sympathetic, even unjust judgments to bear on him1 for they do not consider the rich, difficult and complicated age in which our rabbi lived, and fail to take into account the fact that his discourse was addressed to two kinds of non-Jews: the Christian world on the one hand, and the world of former crypto-Jews on the other. The latter indeed threw off their mask of assumed Catholicism but arrived in Amsterdam from the Iberian Peninsula stripped of all Jewish learning. They confused the ob­ servance of a few holidays and Biblical scholarship in its broadest sense with Judaism itself, and they knew no Hebrew even long after having settl­ ed there2. Menasseh ben Israel had therefore two battles to fight: against the heterodoxy created by his own community (we should not forget that he lived through the huge crises provoked by Uriel da Costa, Spinoza and Juan de Prado), and against Calvinist orthodoxy which made no secret either of its anti-Judaism, nor of its identificatory empathy. With only few exceptions which he emphasizes, Menasseh ben Israel had to constantly confront Christian proselytizing from which he was able to keep his dis­ tance with a benevolent and rigorous steadfastness. We must bear in mind that he was the contemporary of Voetius and Hoornbeeck, who were hostile to the Jews and awaited their conversion as an event necessary to the Second Coming3. 1 See my introduction to Espérance d'Israël (Paris, 1979), pp. 37-38. Graetz and Gebhardt are amongst the harshest critics of our rabbi. 2 Menasseh ben Israel, Conciliador . (Frankfurt, 1632), Al lector, unpaginated: "Va esta escritura en la pobreza de mi romance porque escrivo conforme el tiempo me da lugar, pretendiendo aprovechar a los sefiores de mi nación espanola (a quien dedico esta obra) que por la mayor parte carecen de la intelección de la lengua hebrea . .' '. Abraham Pereyra, in La Certeza del Camino (Amsterdam, 1666) confesses that he is one of those who do not know Hebrew: ". los que carecemos de las sagradas letras" (pro­ logue, unpaginated). See my edition, Hispanidady judaisrno en tiempos de Espinoza (Salamanca, 1987), p. 103. 3 See P. Toon, Puritans, the Millenium and the Future of Israel. Puritan Eschatobgy (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 141 and passim. 84 HENRY MÉGHOULAN His opinions were sought by the Republic of Letters, he was questioned by troubled millenarians, and was pressed to appear before Cromwell by his fellow Jews. Menasseh ben Israel responded and reacted to all these de­ mands and pressures not only as a rabbi but as the representative of Euro­ pean Judaism, for educated Europe turned only to him and did not begrudge him its esteem4. Far from being a weak man, Menasseh ben Israel was an impassioned and involved rabbi, perfectly aware of his real importance, and often, we must admit, rather too aware5. If he did not modify Judaism from a doctrinal point of view, he knew how to make it respected and how to present its universal message with supreme skill, by teaching the non-Jewish world that Jews and Christians were indissolubly linked in spite of their fundamental difference, which was not an obstacle at all in the eyes of the Lord. In short, Menasseh ben Israel was in a posi­ tion of permanent controversy, but was able to transform this tension into a peaceful, instructive and informed dialogue, a dialogue which he wanted to see taken up by all: ''I would like my works to win universal approval' '6. A desire all the more difficult to realize if we keep in mind that a wide range of competing Christian denominations was displayed before Menas­ seh ben Israel's eyes and he would have to choose with whom to form his allegiance. But before considering the doctrinal options open to our rabbi, let us remember that neither he nor the Amsterdam community lived in a ghet­ to. There were many and varied relations with the non-Jewish world. Was it not Rembrandt who was to illustrate the Piedra gloriosa ? We know that thinkers like Vossius, Grotius, Salmasius, Ravius and Beverovicius had re­ course to the learning of our rabbi, who was the close friend of the famous Episcopius and above all Barlaeus. In his Vindiciaejudeorum7 Menasseh re­ counts that Barlaeus, the modern Virgil, had composed several verses in his honor, without the slightest proselytizing motive behind them, as we can indeed see from the last elegiac couplets of the epigram he wrote in 1635 for the De creationeproblemata3. But, as F.F. Blok tells us, this recogni­ tion was by no means unanimous9. The controversy stirred up by Barlaeus 4 "Respondi tambien a mas de CL epistolas de hombres doctos de toda Europa sobre muchas preclaradas dudas y questiones . .", in Conciliador . (Amsterdam, 1641), Al lec­ tor, unpaginated. 5 See, amongst others, the preface to the Conciliador (second part, 1641), op. cit., and the envoy "al lector" of De lafragilidad humana (Amsterdam, 1642). 6 De la fragilidad humana . , op. cit., Al lector, unpaginated. 7 Vindiciae Juaaeorum . (London, 1656), 4th count of indictment, 1°. 8 See F.F. Blok on this epigram in ''Quelques humanistes de la Jérusalem de 1 Occi­ dent", in Acta conventus neo-latini amstelodamensis, Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies (Munich, 1979), pp. 120-121. 9 Ibid., p. 122. .
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