Jump ahead a couple centuries to the height of the Inquisition, and now the Jews of Spain and Portugal are fleeing those countries however they can. And some of these Spanish-and-Portuguese-speaking Inquisition refugees find a new home in Amsterdam, where lo & behold the Dutch—the practical, business-minded Dutch—offer these amazingly tolerant laws regarding the presence of religious minorities. Of course Jews in Amsterdam still can’t intermarry or socialize with Christians, but hey, they’re allowed to be Jews, so long as they don’t try to convert anybody or foment heresy . . . and for the 1600s that’s a goddamn picnic.
So these Inquisition refugees move in, call Amsterdam their “New Jerusalem,” and get busy trying to revive Judaism. And this turns out to be no simple task, because under the Inquisition they’ve now spent generations as Marranos—meaning secret Jews in Inquisition times, who practiced only vestigial bits of the religion, and even then at risk of death. (“Marrano” was the Spanish word for “pig.” Pretty much sums up Catholic Spain’s view of Jews.) But now that they’re safe in Amsterdam, these until recently secret Jews are so intent on being Good Jews—that is, practicing their faith and reeducating everybody and not making waves with the local populace—that they not only prioritize Jewish education, but suppress dissent, impose rigid social order . . . and give the young Spinoza, who grew up in their ranks, their biggest, most badass excommunication. Never mind the temporary excommunications they usually meted out to troublemakers. These Jewish leaders in Amsterdam banned Spinoza for life and forbade all Jews to have any contact with him, just to make sure nobody would think Amsterdam’s Jews were encouraging religious upheaval.
They were, the record shows, just a wee bit intense.
And also kind of messed up in a predictably tragic way. I’ll skip the details of all the pleasant things the Inquisition did in those days. But in Amsterdam these traumatized Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition refugees now looked down on the eastern European Jews they met—Polish Jews fleeing pogroms—and wouldn’t let them marry into their community or even be buried in their cemetery. Not only that, the Spanish and Portuguese Jews still considered Iberian languages and culture to be the gold standard for sophistication . . . which goes to show how the Stockholm Syndrome works. They might have spoken Dutch with non-Jews, but they used Portuguese for daily life and Castilian (medieval Spanish) for anything more formal.
And that’s where I’m lucky . . . because in addition to the far-too-many years of Hebrew and Latin under my belt, I happen to have a solid reading knowledge of Portuguese, helped along by a semester I spent bumming around Brazil, and I can get by in Castilian.
Am I boring you yet?
You know, some women find pompous son-of-a-bitches a turn-on.
(You will note I don’t hold that comment against you. Though I should.)
A comment she might not even remember making, so little he meant to her. While his thoughts bent irresistibly. Her jet-black cropped hair, her tank-top lifting over her head, the muscles of her back lengthening as her arms reached for the ceiling—he hadn’t guessed a woman’s back could be so beautiful, could humble him with its strength. And had Shakespeare at least had the pleasure of a substantial affair with his Dark Lady, if there ever even was such a woman—or had he, too, wasted sweat and ink and solitary hours in a dark bedroom on a woman he’d slept with only once?
So if you’re even still reading, if you haven’t yet deleted me from your inbox for the length of this thing, you might guess that the people who wrote those papers found under the stairwell were Portuguese Jews, and from Amsterdam. And the thing is, they also knew Menasseh ben Israel. He was one of the most famous of the Portuguese Jewish rabbis in Amsterdam. The guy was respected not only among the Jews, but by Christians too—he was in with both Rembrandt and the queen of Sweden, a big deal for a Jew.
Now imagine this: Menasseh’s day is a big time for all kinds of desperate messianic thinking. Plenty of eyes are peeled for the Messiah—even Christian scholars have definitively declared that 1666 is going to be the year the big one comes back. And famous, well-connected Menasseh ben Israel is sitting there in Amsterdam in the 1650s and thinking about bringing the Messiah, and also thinking about all the tortured Jews in Spain and Portugal and even the tortured Jews in Poland and Russia who need safe haven. And he hears a rumor that the lost tribe of Israel has been found in Brazil: Jews! In the Americas! And he remembers the prophecy that Jews have to be present in all corners of the world in order for the messiah to come.
And in all the known world of that time, guess which country is the only one with officially no Jews?
Bingo. Now you can guess where all this is heading.
So old Menasseh approaches Oliver Cromwell, who’s now won the English Civil War. And he tells Cromwell it’s time to bring the Messiah by letting the Jews into England. And despite difficulties I won’t go into because your eyes are surely already glazing over, Cromwell decides he likes the idea. At this point it’s an open secret that there already are Jews in London, about twenty families of extremely successful merchants—they claim to be Catholics but keep a rudimentary Jewish practice in secret. So whether it’s because Cromwell just wants his England to benefit by welcoming prosperous merchants, or because he thinks he might use his Jews with their ships and their connections in Europe’s ports to collect intelligence . . . or else maybe because he honestly does believe it’s going to hasten the messianic age . . . Cromwell agrees to let Jews live in England. He can’t do it officially—try though he may, he can’t get Parliament to agree to welcome the Jews. But he does it sort of semi-officially.
Of course, public opinion immediately turns ugly. The local English merchants raise a fuss at the prospect of competition from some imagined Jewish influx, and the usual anti-Semitic rumors circulate: the Jews are buying St. Paul’s Cathedral for the sum of one million pounds . . . the Jews are coming to use the blood of Christian children in their Passover feasts. Poems were circulating about how Cromwell, before executing Charles I, had befriended the Jews because it was only natural that someone who wanted to crucify his king would want to take lessons from those who crucified the savior.
So now, politically speaking, Cromwell can’t approve any substantial Jewish immigration. But he gets as far as letting the hidden Jews who are already in London be officially and openly Jewish . . . as long as they’re not too blatant about it, and don’t invite hundreds of their Jewish cousins to join them in London.
Given that the last time we Hebes had been in England, the locals had taken to massacring us as calisthenics to warm up for the Third Crusade, stepping out as Jews must have seemed a dubious proposition. But bit by bit these London Jews start being more public about their religion. Meanwhile, though, Menasseh ben Israel has a big falling out with them. He doesn’t think the Jews are being bold enough about outing themselves, and he keeps trying to push Cromwell for fuller official acceptance. But the Jews of London don’t want him to do it—the Inquisition is still going on, remember, and even though London’s Jews are themselves safely out of Spain or Portugal, plenty of them lost family members to the Inquisition. They know just how bad things can be. And they’ve been living under cover in London just fine, thank you. Sure, they’re grateful to Menasseh that they’ve now got permission to be openly Jewish, but they don’t want to take instructions from some naive rabbi who spent most of his life in tolerant Amsterdam. They want him to stop pushing before he brings trouble down on their heads.
Menasseh ben Israel insists, he tries to get Cromwell to press forward, and he can’t get anyone to budge. For all his effort, no expanding English Jewry, no Messiah, nada. Failure.
Then Menasseh ben Israel’s son, who had traveled to London with him, dies. Menasseh goes back to the Netherlands. And then he himself dies there a couple months later, at the age of fifty-three.