Do Jews have a future in Britain?
This Shabbat is the last but one before Rosh Hashanah. Our Torah cycle nears its end, and Moses begins his summing up. Much of this week’s reading (Ki Tavo) describes the many blessings which will come to those who obey Torah, and the multiple curses which will come to those who disobey. Just as neglect of Torah in ancient times led to destruction and exile, so human divisions, warfare and climate change in our time rebound on our heads. Then and now, we become victims of our own folly. Some of the curses described in the Torah are so horrible that they are not even fitting to quote here. Over the course of history, many of those terrible curses actually happened.
I have chosen this verse to discuss, a prophecy of exile (Deuteronomy 28: 64):
וֶהֱפִיצְךָ יְהוָֹה בְּכָל־הָעַמִּים מִקְצֵה הָאָרֶץ וְעַד־קְצֵה הָאָרֶץ
God will scatter you among all the peoples, from one end of the earth to the other end of the earth.
In ancient times, when the world was considered to be a land mass surrounded by ocean, it was easy to imagine that the earth did indeed have ends. Even the discovery of America did not change older views that ‘the end of the earth’ was in Europe. But in the 1640s the Jewish scholar Menasseh ben Israel, then living in Amsterdam, met a Portuguese Jewish traveller who had been in the New World. Menasseh became convinced that South American native tribes were from the Ten Lost Tribes of Ancient Israel. He began to develop Messianic expectations based on the idea that salvation would come when Jews were in every part of the earth, in accordance with Moses’ prophecy quoted above. Menasseh’s parents were from Portugal, where they had been forced to pretend to be Christians, for fear of the Inquisition. Jews had a long history in Portugal, and from its position in the far west of Europe the country had a good claim to be considered one of the ends of the earth. Menasseh argued that case in a book The Hope of Israel, published in English in 1652.
In 1656, during the brief time when England was a republic, Menasseh presented to Oliver Cromwell a ‘Humble Petition’ asking for Jews in London to have the right to practise their religion in their own houses. The readmission of Jews to England after an absence of nearly 400 years is generally dated from this event, though no formal permission was ever issued. In the same year Menasseh argued in a new book that the ‘end of the earth’ was not Portugal but England. Among Jews, that notion went back to the time of the medieval Jewish community, who spoke Norman French: in that language England was ‘Engleterre’, meaning ‘the land of the tribe of the Angles’ (as in ‘Anglo-Saxon’, meaning ‘Angles and Saxons’). There is a legend that Pope Gregory I, around the year 590, seeing fair skinned slaves for sale in Rome, said they were ‘not Angles but angels.’ A few years later he wrote about gens Anglorum in mundi Angulo posita, meaning ‘the people of the Angles placed in the corner of the world.’
The first known Jewish writer to take up that idea and to link it to the ‘end of the earth’ in this week’s Torah reading was the wandering scholar Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089–1167) in his pamphlet Iggeret Shabbat / Letter of the Sabbath. It is thought to have been written in medieval England. He began:
I, Abraham the Spaniard, called ‘Ibn Ezra,’ was in one of the cities of the island called ‘the end of the earth,’ which is in the seventh clime of the inhabited earth.
In Deuteronomy 30: 3-4 (part of next week’s reading), it states that God will turn the captivity and bring the people back from all the nations, even from the uttermost parts of heaven. It is from the two texts, this week’s and next week’s, taken together, that the idea grew that the scattering of Jews to every part of the world was a necessary precondition for the Messiah to arrive.
Menasseh ben Israel’s messianism found much sympathy among English Puritans, some of whom believed that the execution of King Charles I in 1649 and the rise of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth were signs that the ‘last days’ were close. But although Menasseh and his Christian friends agreed that the redemption of the Jews was approaching and England could have a part in it, they had diametrically opposite positions about where this was leading. The Christian ‘millenarians’, as they were called, hoped for and believed in the conversion of Jews to Christianity. But that was in the future, and strangely enough, it did not stop Jews and Christians agreeing that for the time being, they could live peacefully side by side.
It is easy to see how these last chapters of the Torah, speaking of exile and return, spoke to Menasseh ben Israel and his hopeful band of Jewish supporters as they sought to migrate from Amsterdam to London. These chapters speak to us too, leading us towards the High Holydays. Each year, we celebrate this season as a time of huge hope for us and for our world.
But warnings remain: better times will not come until we mend our ways. We are only too aware that individually and collectively, things have to change. Menasseh ben Israel and his fledgling Jewish community had its opponents, and today we still have our opponents, here and everywhere. But that has never stopped us. Jews have been involved in English society for the last 370 years: long may we continue to play our part to work for a better Britain for everyone who lives here, and may we begin our New Year with hope in our hearts and peace of mind.
Do Jews have a future in Britain? Only time will tell, but in the meantime, we can do much to improve our lot through tolerance, dialogue and understanding.
- Rabbi Dr Michael Hilton is Rabbi Emeritus of Kol Chai Hatch End Reform Jewish Community, and Scholar in Residence at The Liberal Jewish Synagogue.