Menasseh ben Israel #8 - Helped Jews Readmitted to England?
Award winning author Professor Steven Nadler
Vilas Research Professor and William H. Hay II Professor (Columbia, Ph.D. 1986)
Director of UW-Madison’s Institute for Research in the Humanities
Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Author:
Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi of Amsterdam (“Jewish Lives”, Yale, 2018)
Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge, 1999; second edition, 2018);
The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God, and Evil (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2008);
The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy: From Antiquity through the Seventeenth Century (2009), co-edited with Tamar Rudavsky;
A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton, 2011)
The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter: A Portrait of Descartes (Princeton, 2013).
MENASSEH BEN ISRAEL
# 8 Did Menasseh help get the Jews readmitted to England?
• Was perhaps looking to get out of Amsterdam
• Went to England in 1655
• Claims he was invited by Cromwell
• Advocated for return of Jews to England
• Whitehall Conference did not make a decision
• The few Jews in London not pleased with Menasseh
• Readmission evolved over time
• Died on way back from England to Amsterda
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