Season 2: Episode 8 - The Hope of Israel

Generated automatically from the audio and lightly corrected. It may contain errors; the recording is the authority.

We must accept finite disappointment, says the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, but never lose infinite hope. Well, I'm hoping that the Infinite One is with me as I unwind this part of our tale, because I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Episode 8, The Hope of Israel You know, enthusiasm is a wonderful quality, I think we can all agree. And what exactly is it that gives that sense of unbounded excitement and limitless expectation, which are the energizing power of enthusiasm? Well, isn't it simply the experience of the unbounded, as it descends into my own graspable proportions? Well, it's that coupled with humility in knowing ourselves to the deepest boundaries. and therefore not limiting the world to what we judge it to be.

And the hopefully naive innocence, which aids us in interpreting all the signs of life in our favor. And that's why there's nothing like a powerful bit of coincidence to touch off a bit of enthusiasm. And by coincidence, I mean more than random intersection of events. In fact, what I actually mean is a harmonization of at least two stories, one inside, one out, which can give us insight on both. Furthermore, enthusiasm has its own momentum. There's nothing more powerful for getting groups of people over the hump of the activation energy it takes and into a mode of social change than enthusiasm. People are willing to do, see, and believe the craziest things when they're all worked up. Enthusiasm actually has a meaning in the context of religious studies, and it's important for our story.

The word originates from the Greek, which I'm not even going to try to mangle, and it means literally possessed by a god's essence. And they applied it originally to actual manifestations of divine possession, whatever that looked like in ancient Greece. Socrates abstracted it a bit for his own culture, and he taught that the inspiration of poets is a form of enthusiasm. The term came to represent both a belief in religious inspiration, that's in the head, and or an experience of intense religious fervor. In Am Yisrael, it has its historic residence amongst the prophets who danced and trembled before the Lord and their teachers. you know, believe me, go take a look at the second half of the first book of Shmuel, chapter 19.

And then perhaps it passed on to the mystics who claimed to be their heirs. And after the Christian split, the term had a last gasp as a technical term applied in the condemnation of a heretical sect, the Yuchaits, who among other things believed that only sensible revelations of God confer perfection upon the believer. And for our story, it re-emerges in a somewhat softer form in reference to the heart religions of the Puritans and the Pietists of the 16th and 17th century Europe. And in this formative period of the Protestant Reformation, enthusiastic emotion served as an increasingly important resource for religious experience amongst Anglos on both sides of the Atlantic and German Protestants.

and frankly, things kind of went off the rails when in the 17th century, the English Civil War broke out much fueled by religion and overly enthusiastic Protestants killed their king made England a commonwealth overnight and then proceeded to wage a war of conquest on all of their immediate surroundings suddenly, being called overly enthusiastic over anything was an insult at best and an implicit threat to calm you down by force at worst. Various Christian movements in the 18th century were accused of blind enthusiasm and they defended themselves by distinguishing between fanaticism and the religion of the heart. So, enthusiasm of both the simple and the religious type are going to carry a lot of the momentum of our story going forward over the next couple of centuries.

What lies on our horizon? The failed Messiah of Shabtai Tzvi. The rise of Hasidut. the European Romantic Movement, the rise of Zionism and other motivating political ideologies. And let's not forget to look back a step and see that the Holy Arizal and his brethren were about as enthusiastic as it gets. And furthermore, that they brought down and distilled teachings, mythic worlds and mystic systems, as we spoke about last week, meant to make the energy of their enthusiastic beliefs available to others across the globe and down through generations. I want you to keep the thought that the writings of the Ari are always in the background at this point of our story going forward. Now, there is a huge scholarly debate over whether they play any real causative role in all the revolutions to come.

But no one questions that they made available depths of consciousness, structures of thought, and modes of practice which were able to receive the energies of those revolutions and develop them into something productive. So that's a lot of the energy of our story going forward. But to begin, if you really want to understand enthusiasm, you have to appreciate what it's up against. So the life of the conversos, the underground crypto-Jews, the new Christians, was still very dark at the turn of the 17th century. In 1580, the crowns of Spain and Portugal had come together in a move hailed by Spaniards, at least, for uniting the peninsula, not to mention two extensive overseas empires, into one mighty kingdom.

But it wasn't such good news for the Jews. Because a century after its introduction, the Inquisition in Spain had pretty much beaten its own new Christians into submission. It was still ruthlessly pursuing Judaizers of the New World, but business on the peninsula was positively flat. And then, miracles, miracles, the borders opened up, and Portuguese merchants began to flow into Spain. Now you'll recall, I hope, that the situation of the conversos in Portugal was radically different than that of those in Spain. The mass conversion, which began their journey back in 1497, was as quick as it was false. And it was followed by four decades without any formal inquisition to pursue them. So when the Inquisition finally was introduced, it faced a thriving crypto-Jewish culture.

And though the Portuguese lost no time in mobilizing their most brutal tools against the Judaizers, the first auto de fe was held in Lisbon, actually, in 1540, it was too late. The converso culture was not going to go away. So therefore, when the crowns were united, in the eyes of the Spanish Inquisition, the fact that one was Portuguese was enough in and of itself to have reason for suspicion. And we know, in the dark, fanatical world of the Inquisition, it was a short step from suspicion to prison, and even shorter from there to torture and death. If a converso survived prison and torture, maybe by saving themselves, repenting of their sins, they were still doomed to a life of scrutiny, living a broken existence, knowing that any sign of relapse was an immediate death sentence.

The great hope for many of the conversers of the peninsula was escape. Only, the way wasn't exactly clear. Italy was a wish, the land of Israel a dream, but for most, the free cities of northern Europe were the promised land, or at least, the chosen land, where trade flourished and Jews were free to be Jews. Now you have to remember at this point in history, which is probably true for most points in history, that war is the given context for so much of European development. And at the turn of the 17th century, the Dutch Republic was in the midst of their 80-year war of independence from Spain. And at least at this point, things were going their way. Religiously, the Calvinist Dutch Reformed Church was ascendant over the Catholic and far more tolerant of dissenting faiths than most other faiths in Europe.

And the Dutch were also fast becoming one of the world's most powerful commercial empires. The famous Dutch East India Company was launched in 1602, which was in a very real sense the first ever multinational corporation. It was financed by shares and basically effectively created the first modern stock exchange. And the merchant class who dominated both trade and local politics were well aware that the ports by which they profited are by definition a place in which worlds meet. And in fact, that's what makes them profitable. They saw tolerance within a limited range as good for business. And Amsterdam was the thriving port city at the heart of this Dutch Golden Age. As one poet of the age said, Amsterdam, that bank of conscience, were not one so strange opinion, but finds credit and exchange.

So such a combination of wealth and tolerance was a redemptive vision for the conversos trapped in Iberia. On August 3rd, 1603, 25-year-old Diogo de Assumcao went to the stake at an auto-de-fe in Lisbon. He was a Franciscan friar, actually, with some Jewish ancestry, and it seems that his intensive studies of the Hebrew Bible had led him astray and awoken the Jew within. Or maybe some secret Judaizer had, but either way, he was arrested by the Inquisition, trying to flee to England, imprisoned, and tortured brutally in order to force him to renounce the Judaism he had rediscovered. But he stood firm, and when his torturers saw that he would not recant, he was given over to the secular arm, as they said, and burned alive in a public spectacle.

And in the moment of his death, for one man at least, that was enough. He was the head of the Soeiro family, and we don't even know his given Portuguese name. He too had been a victim of the Inquisition. He had been tortured and lost most of his possessions to the church. And the friar's death was enough. It was time, in his mind, to escape with his life and those of his family. Now the first stop, since they couldn't simply jump ship to Amsterdam, was the Madeira Islands, a Portuguese colony off the northwest coast of Africa. And it seems that it was there that a son was born to him, whom he named Manuel. But even off the coast of Africa, the crypto-Jew was not safe. The Inquisition was following every step of colonial expansion, eager to convert the heathens they found living in darkness, and to pursue the purity of the faith amongst the empire's agents wherever they went.

So the family moved on. The next stop was the French port of La Rochelle, a stronghold of the Protestant Huguenots in southwest France. There, at least, it was sufficient to maintain a facade of Christianity. They were no longer pursued by the Inquisition, and no one knew what they did in the privacy of their own homes. But La Rochelle was only another stop. Maybe they were seeking nothing less than total freedom to declare their adherence to the God of Israel, or maybe the father sensed the impending disaster which would soon lay waste to La Rochelle and all its Protestant freedoms. Either way, sometime around 1610, they arrived in Amsterdam. The mother declared herself to be Rachel, the daughter Esther.

Father and sons immediately underwent circumcision, despite their ages, and he adopted the name of Yosef, and from this the boy's name followed naturally, Ephraim and Menashe. And they took on the surname of Ben Israel. And so Manuel Dias Soyero became Menashe Ben Israel. The community of Amsterdam was perhaps one of the most unique Jewish communities ever known. Its members, almost without exception, had been born and educated as Christians. Some had even held high offices in the church. Many, if not most, had suffered in the dungeons of the Inquisitions, some without any cause at all, and others because they were actually active Judaizers, seeking to keep their faith alive in the face of the unthinkable oppression.

But one thing united them all, and that was their sense of identity. They were the Hebrews of the Portuguese nation, the Nacio. Now that may sound strange, that once they escaped to Amsterdam, they would choose to identify themselves as Portuguese, as their oppressors from whom they fled. And aside from the fact of the language, which was of course what they shared, and the fact that they were culturally distinct from the Dutch there a deeper element You know I once heard Rav Ryskin she be healthy and well in a speech say you know my whole life I was a Jew Only in Israel did I become an Anglo You could say the same of these escapees from the Iberian Peninsula. Once they found their freedom, they began to take great pride in the nobility of their Portuguese identity.

The first sparks of community life can be found in two legends that were recorded by Daniel Levi de Barrios. He was a former new Christian and became a compiler of the history of Amsterdam-Portuguese community in the late 17th century. So he says that the earliest settlers in Amsterdam, Jewish settlers that is, escaped Lisbon by boat toward the end of the 16th century, and their only destination was freedom. They had no idea where they were going. Captured by an English vessel, they were brought home to port in England. And the English captain, a nobleman by birth, was so smitten by one of the captured Jews that he wanted to marry her and make her beauty his own, despite the fact, of course, that Jews were not permitted in England at this time.

Apparently, clean Elizabeth got wind of this, and she insisted on meeting this Maria Nunes for herself, and in turn was so taken by her beauty that she turned around London in her royal coach. However, Jews were not allowed in England, and the party was moved safely on to Amsterdam. There there remained a secret presence until the time of Debarios' second story. He reports that religious life in Amsterdam was established when the heads of the nascent community sent for an Ashkenazi rabbi from Emden by the name of Uri HaLevi. And the rabbi's underground efforts stayed well hidden until Yom Kippur of the year 1595, when suddenly, at the height of the Nailah prayer, as the whole congregation lay prostrate and trembling on the ground in tears, police raided their secret synagogue.

Now they, of course, many of whom having escaped the dungeons of the Inquisition, expected the worst. But to their great surprise, the police demanded that they immediately hand over their hosts and crucifixes. In the ensuing confusion, the police search, of course, turned up no such thing, only some Hebrew books. And the election concludes that when it became clear that there was a group of Jews at prayer and not a bunch of the hated, idolatrous papists, the sheriff himself asked them to pray to the God of Israel on behalf of the government of Amsterdam and let them be. Now far be it for me to pick away at legend. And in fact, historians have located a core fact that lies beneath this story. But what's critical for us to know is that by 1614, the authorities of Amsterdam had accepted the fait accompli of a community of Jews, and even tolerated the open practice of their religion.

You know, once you have a foothold, then you have to build. And since the time of the Gemaras, our sages have been firm on the point that the primary tool for building community, and in fact, the primary obligation of a community to its members, is education. And I can tell you as a teacher and as an educator, that, in my eyes, the community of Amsterdam posed some particularly difficult educational challenges. First of all, there was no local tradition on which to draw. They were truly new. And no core of learned members on which to build. They had all escaped an underground life. Education of those who escaped the Inquisition, often descendants of generations of hidden Jewishness, was more than a question of methods or resources.

Because even if you had all the time in the world, all the fancy books and the best teachers, it was still at its heart a matter of shifting an inner framework of consciousness. What do I mean? Well, have you ever noticed that little children learn languages far more easily than adults, or even older children? The developmental psychologists and educators will tell us that that's because that up to a certain point, the brain is basically a sponge. It absorbs whatever it's hidden, together with everything else. There is a point, however, at which our learning processes become far less fluid. Our brain ceases to simply absorb. It freezes in place and begins to process everything we learn in light of what we already know.

Therefore, rather than simply absorbing a new language, for instance, My mind treats it as a code, which must be decoded and then recoded into the familiar. And that's why, before one gains real fluency, they find themselves translating in their head. Now, this is true about language and everything else. I can tell you, having been a teacher for many years of American students, many of whom don't grow up with the Torah as their primary basis of education, and even those who do grow up in so-called private religious schools, still, it's really the Western secular culture that's the foundation of their educational perspective. I'll give you one example. The idea of the chosen people. It's an edgy one, and a lot of Jews, and non-Jews for that matter, have challenges with it.

But that's because, largely in my mind, they come from a culture of rights. our story at this point is just treading on the edges of the enlightenment and we'll treat it in its time but one of the principles of the enlightenment is the notion of rights that I join a collective in order to maximize my rights or protect my rights but the basic principle is that human beings have rights well there is no word for rights in the Torah modern Hebrew had to borrow a word and change its meaning choyot means merits not rights and that's because the Torah's perspective is one of obligations. And it's so simple, but it's so profound. If I say to you that we are the chosen people and you come from a framework of rights, that means we have more rights.

But if I say to you that we are the chosen people from the perspective of the Torah, that means we are bearing a tremendous responsibility. So the educational and cultural matrix which the conversos had absorbed, really which formed them, was that of Catholicism. And even though many of them had dedicated their lives rejecting it as idolatry and clinging to the shards of what they knew of their religion. The rebellion itself shaped them by what they hated. There was a dominant idea, for instance, among conversos that personal salvation comes through belief in the law of Moshe, not necessarily through practice of the details of that law. The idea was rooted, on the one hand, in the reality of persecution.

Crypto-Jews lack the knowledge or even the freedom to keep the law. But on the other hand, it also parallels the very bedrock Christian notion which rejected the efficacy of the law during salvation and replaced it with faith. The notion that it's sufficient to believe in one's heart rather than actually perform the commandments will persist amongst the conversos, even those who adopt the traditional lifestyle, and it will re-emerge in many strange ways as a challenge to the rabbinic norms that the community fights to establish. it is also the reality that crypto-Jewish identity was bound up with the passionate hope for dramatic salvation from oppression as the Catholic priest Andres Bernaldez recorded as far back as the 15th century all of them clung to their hope like the Israelites in Egypt that God would lead them out from the midst of them, so too the conversos looked upon the Christians as Egyptians or worse, they held steadfastly to their faith that God would guide and remember them, and bring them out from the midst of the Christians, and lead them to the holy and promised land.

The escape to Amsterdam offered the conversions freedom of worship, and often a prosperous life. But it didn't offer them the magic of redemption. And the price of entry was reintegration into present-day Judaism. Whatever fantasies they may have had about prophetic visions and holistic salvation, it meant submitting to the yoke of the Torah as it was defined by the rabbis and oligarchs who ruled their community. And normative Judaism had come a long way since the Bible, which these conversos had so clung to. And many of them were unprepared to replace a burning passion for imminent salvation with the pervasive everyday demands of law. In fact, some rebelled against it, just as they had against the power of the Church.

Gabriel da Costa was a new Christian born at Porto, Portugal, in 1590. He began to study canon law at the University of Cumbra, I'm sure I said that wrong, in 1608, and there he first seriously encountered the Bible. He found himself later, as he writes, unable to find that spiritual satisfaction I wanted in the Romish church, yet desirous to attach myself to an established religion. So what was he to do but search out his past? At the death of his father in 1615, responsibility for his mother and young siblings fell to him. And he took the office of treasurer at a local church for a brief time, but all the while his dissatisfaction grew and he sought knowledge. And he grew closer to the Hebrew Bible.

Cautiously, carefully, he revealed to his family his longing for Judaism, and in 1617, at the risk of great danger, they escaped from Portugal to Amsterdam, tracing a very similar path to that of the Ben Israel family. Once there, they threw off the mask of their Christianity, and in what had become a rite of passage for the conversos, changed their names, and entered the covenant of Avram Avinu. Gabriel was now Uriel da Costa. Now, most conversos who escaped to freedom were truly crypto-Jews, in the sense that, though they knew little of theology or law, they were attached to Judaism with a tribal, powerful, and unselfconscious bond. It was who they were, forged in the fires of oppression. Furthermore, most often what sustained them in their trials, as I said, was the belief in a promised salvation.

But Uriel da Costa was different. He was a different model of crypto-Jew. He was a solitary seeker of truth. As he himself records, I went through the books of Moses and the prophets, wherein I found some things not a little contradictory to the doctrines of the New Testament, and there seemed to be less difficulty in believing these things which were revealed by God himself. Less, but not none at all. Thus, when he arrived in Amsterdam, Royal de Casa was already somewhat detached from the visceral ethnic loyalties that motivated so many other conversos in their flight. His identity was actually a little bit closer to the radical Reformation spirit that had shaken the Catholic Church, independent, bibliocentric, and fiercely anti-clerical.

He came to Amsterdam filled with visions of a free and liberal religion, of the inspiration he tasted in the words of the prophets. But as he described it, he found a rigid, cumbersome accumulation of ritual and observance, line upon line, command upon command, in the words of Isaiah. And he was outspoken enough to express his disgust. Of course, in all fairness, Dikasi knew nothing of the history, the tragedy, the powerful suffering that had welded the religion of the prophets into the form he found. And certainly, his Christian training showed through when he openly spoke against the Pharisees of the Amsterdam Synagogue. His earliest written declaration was Objections Against Tradition, 11 short theses which called into question the disjunction between certain present-day Jewish customs and a literal reading of the Torah.

Its goal was to prove from reason and scripture that the Torah is a law sufficient unto itself. The students of the Protestant Reformation should find that phrase familiar. Now the leaders of the Amsterdam Jewry were at too young a stage to handle such a challenge themselves, and they sent the text on for review by the religious court of Venice. The result was unequivocal condemnation of the book, and a call to place Uriel da Costa under, at first, a mild form of the ban of excommunication. But despite the punishment, his spirit could find no rest. And in 1623, he published yet another work in Portuguese, an examination of the traditions of the Pharisees. Yeah, the title hurts enough. Now, the objections was a pamphlet.

This was a major work, more than 200 pages. The first part developed his old objections and responded to the criticism of the Venetian rabbis that had reviewed it. The second part, he adds a new element, taking one more step, asserting that the Hebrew Bible, and especially the Torah, does not support the idea of the immortality of the soul. Now we're going to come back to that with a later thinker, but that's a major move. He further examined discrepancies between biblical Judaism and rabbinic, and in the end declared the latter to be nothing more than an accumulation of ceremonies and practices devoid of spiritual and philosophical concepts This time the reaction was far more severe Because not only had he hit at the guts of a sensitive community the leaders of the Amsterdam jury were afraid that the book would be seen as an attack on Christianity as well as Judaism, which, at least implicitly, it was.

He was fined heavily, placed under a severe ban, and the book was publicly burned. Now there were other rounds of struggle, reconciliation, outbursts, and excommunication ahead. But finally, after having been once again driven from the community for dissuading two Christians from their desire to convert, the loneliness became too much. And as DeCosta says in his autobiographical sketch, Example of a Human Life, he decided to go back to being an ape amongst apes. But the price of readmission proved too high. As a final punishment for his heretical views, de Casa was publicly lashed 39 times at the Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam and then forced to lie on the threshold of the door while the entire congregation trampled them on their way into shul.

This humiliating event is the last episode of his example. And in truth, his autobiography is only a few pages long. It only came into print in Latin some decades after his death. It's a sketch of his life. portraying himself as a victim of intolerance. And it also provides the culmination of DaCosta's intellectual development, because it questions whether biblical law was divinely sanctioned at all, or simply written down by the man Moses. It suggests all religion is a human invention, as God has no use for empty ceremony, nor for violence and strife. And in 1640, not long after his final humiliation, Oriel DaCosta loaded two pistols, one for the cousin he blamed for betraying him, the other for himself, and headed out into the street.

To the good fortune of his cousin, the first misfire, but the second took his life through an agonizing gut wound. They say he wallowed in his blood for three days. And the tragic life of DaCosta actually will serve as an inspiration, personal and creative, to the Jewish enlighteners down through the coming centuries. but his impact was more immediate as well. It was a young man, only eight years old, when Uriel da Costa's inability to reconcile his inner sense with the outer world of religion led to his death. But it would take decades until Baruch Svinoza was prepared to kill God rather than himself. So unlike Uriel da Costa, Menashe ben Israel took to the Judaism he found in Amsterdam like a fish to water.

By age 13, we already find his name on the membership role of the Holy Brotherhood for the study of the law. By 15, he was invited to address the community from the pulpit of the synagogue. By 17, he'd written his first book, a Hebrew grammar entitled Safa Brugha, a clear language. He was quickly developing into the hometown hero, the great hope that the Nacio, the Hebrews of the Portuguese nation in Amsterdam, would no longer have to depend on older communities like Venice or Livorno for its religious leadership, but could finally begin to produce its own rabbis. And in the spring of 1622, Menashe's teacher Rav Yitzchak Uziel died after many years of hard work bringing waves of conversos into the fold.

His post as rabbi of the Holy Congregation Nevei Shalom, the smallest and poorest of the three Portuguese synagogues in Amsterdam, was left vacant. and the choice of successor fell on his student, Menashe ben Israel. And though it may have been more than a little bit influenced by the fact that the community couldn't afford the salary of a more mature leader, nevertheless it was indicative of Menashe's quality, as well as the great hopes placed in him that he was chosen despite being only 18 years old. And the young rabbi soon became a familiar figure around Amsterdam and a popular preacher as well. He continued to grow in his intellectual pursuits, he could soon claim knowledge of ten languages, and he would eventually publish books in five of them.

Most important for his story will be his mastery of Latin, since the international language of scholarship was what gave him an entree into the non-Jewish world. It was also at this stage that Rav Menashe began to feel the lack of a fundamental aspect of life in Amsterdam. No Jewish community to this very day can thrive without books, and at this point of the early 17th century, I hope you recall, Jewish printing was still centered in Italy, and in Venice in particular. However, the Hebrews of the Portuguese nation had a particular need. A mastery of the Hebrew language is the absolute necessary precursor to acquiring any depth of Jewish knowledge. But I can tell you, as a latecomer to the game of learning, that this mastery is easier said than gained.

And the first concern of the rabbis of Amsterdam was to bring the conversos who fled to their community into the fold of normative religious practice. Once the people were on board, then they could focus on the depth of knowledge. And this gave rise to a flowering of translations of the prayer book, of the Bible, digests of the basis of Jewish law and thought. It was the art scroll industry of its day, producing popular, user-friendly, and successful ritual guides in Portuguese and Spanish. And in order to get these critical works into as many hands as possible, as quickly as possible, a local printing press was required. And Rav Menashe ben Israel was the perfect candidate for such a task. As a rabbi, he felt the need for books that could bridge the language gap and bring the members of the nasio deeper into the Torah.

As an author, he needed an outlet for his constant output, and preferably one close at hand and sympathetic to his projects. And frankly, he badly needed the income. Printing was useful and dignified and a way to pay bills. so he found the appropriate backers had the Hebrew type cut from the outset including Latin characters as well he purchased the press set it up in his own home and in 1627 the first work a miniature prayer book rolled off the press a modest beginning of what would become a major industry for the Jews of Amsterdam Rav Menashev in Israel's printing house was actually active for over 30 years publishing more than 60 works in various languages and was eventually joined by 13 other houses some of them quite short-lived, before his death.

By 1632, he himself published his first great original work, the Conciliador, an attempt to address 180 passages in the Hebrew Bible which appear to contradict the 400 pages of the work can give one the sense of the author's vast range of knowledge, as well as the style of the day. He's quoting texts in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese. He's citing Talmudic authorities, the early church fathers, medieval rabbis, Greco-Roman classics, Thomas Aquinas, and everybody in between. And it seems that his primary motivation, aside from love of learning, was to minimize any objections that might be raised by skeptical conversos, who he was attempting to return to the faith. And that's why the book was written in Spanish rather than in Hebrew, which might have actually been better suited to the task.

And as a consequence, the book was accessible to non-Jewish scholars. In fact, it found so much favor in their eyes that its author became overnight an instant international celebrity. Because it came as a revelation to the scholarly world of Holland, and Holland was at the heart of the scholarly world, particularly of the Protestant scholarly world at this point, that there was a rabbi living amongst them who could actually converse on equal footing. And the word spread from there. In fact, from the moment that the Contiliador was published, Rav Menasheb in Israel slowly but surely began to represent Jewish scholarship to the entire outside world. His correspondence and his list of friends reads like a who's who of the scholarly community of his day.

And though he was respected and loved by his fellow Jews, it was the non-Jewish world who revered him. So, Rabbi, scholar, preacher, author, printer, it seems the only thing which Rav Menashe ben Israel was not was a wealthy man. As the rabbi of the smallest of the three Portuguese synagogues, he got by. But in 1639, the refugees from Portugal and Spain put aside their differences and consolidated into one single body, the Kielat HaKodesh, the Holy Congregation, the Talmud Torah. Good news for the Jews of Amsterdam, but not so much so for Rav Menashe, as overnight he became the third wheel. Rav Shaul Levi Murtara was the well-established head of the rabbinic establishment, and he took his rightful place as chief rabbi of the new congregation.

Rav Yitzch Abouav, young mystic and budding Talmudist, became his assistant, and Rav Menashe ben Izzar was left the position of official preacher and teacher of elementary classes. Together with his printing, he managed to eke out a living, but it was a blow to his dignity as well to his pocketbook. It seems that the Jews of Amsterdam did not value his contributions nearly as high as the non-Jewish scholars. But fortunately for Rav Menashe, there was another way. As I mentioned, this was the golden age of Dutch commerce, and the Jews of Amsterdam, along with a good portion of the rest of the city, lived off the thriving colonial trade. In the mid-17th century, the Dutch West India Company, that's over in the Americas, was at the height of his attempts to conquer Brazil from the Spanish and the Portuguese.

And the Jews on both sides of the Atlantic were deeply involved in the effort, for more than financial reasons. The Spanish colony was home to a large number of conversos, who'd fled the Iberian Peninsula, and now hoped that war might bring them liberty under the Dutch to live their lives as Jews. And indeed, the Dutch managed to carve out a colony of Pernambuco in 1631, with its capital at Recife, and the Jews of Amsterdam held a near total monopoly on trade and its products, sugar cheap amongst them. In general, the mastery of Spanish and Portuguese languages, their tight network of family and business relations which spanned the Atlantic, and the ability to muster capital at the blink of an eye, gave the Amsterdam community a critical role in the rise of Dutch commerce altogether.

As Jonathan Israel, the great historian of Dutch jury, says, Jews and conversos were simultaneously victims of and agents of empire. The wealth, the social mobility, and the cross-cultural experience of these Jews who led this effort gave rise to a class of merchants who have been called port Jews, in a strong parallel to the court Jews that we'll discuss when we return to the history of Central Europe. So a word on who they were. Number one, mobile, in a way most people, much less Jews, were not. And that was facilitated by the Nacio's extensive network of business and family associates so they could go from port to port and be at home. Accepted, certainly in a way which Jews were not, largely because non-Jewish community leaders in this age of mercantilism were more than willing to put aside their religious prejudices in order to attract increased wealth and commercial power.

Dollar trumped ideology. Number three, they received legal protections and rights beyond what most Jews could dream of, as they were often functioning in new territories, like the colony in Brazil, which had no history of institutionalized exclusion of Jews, and frequently they functioned as commercial corporations rather than communities, which made it easier to let them be. They were more cultured, not just than the average Jews, but the conversers had been raised in the heart of European culture. they would need no Jewish enlightenment to become members of the modern world. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, the poor Jews were independent in outlook, and often questioned rabbinic authority.

Many of the descendants of the conversos were far more committed to their ethnic identity than a pedantic adherence to the law. All in all, the poor Jews are going to be an important elm of our story going forward, be it in their role in spreading the Sabbatean heresy, or in their action as agents of modernity in the heart of Jewish culture. So Rav Menashe ben Israel thought to make his fortune as a merchant. His brother Ephraim had recently done so. He settled in Recife and reported that the community was growing in size and wealth at a rapid pace. Of course, he planned to go as a merchant, but certainly Rav Menashe hoped that the young community would seize upon his rabbinic talents as well. The second half of his work, conciliatul, was finalized in the rush of preparation.

and as we can see from the letter of praise he attached to his first printing its primary audience lay across the Atlantic to the most noble and magnificent wardens of the members of the newly formed congregation of Recife just as when kings leave their country for foreign parts they are accustomed to send an ambassador before them to announce their coming so most noble sirs leaving this most flourishing land of Batavia for the distant parts of Brazil I have determined to send in accordance with my humble position a token of my studies and capabilities which may serve as ambassador Impressive and surely the community would have been moved by both his learning and his prose but it was not to be As the trunk of books was shipped ahead of him across the Atlantic, a letter of commission for the position of the new rabbi of the community recife arrived in Amsterdam, only it was addressed to Rav Yitzchak Abob.

Rav Manasheh took it well, and in truth his new role as assistant rabbi, in which he replaced Rabbi Boav to the Holy Congregation to Talmud Torah suited him quite fine. He continued his writing and his printing and his reputation continued to grow amongst the Christian scholars of his day. Anyone of culture and learning who passed through Amsterdam, and most did at this point, felt it was absolutely necessary to visit Rabbi Menasheb in Israel, truly the voice of the Jews to the world. Little did he know that in a manner of speaking, his fortune did lie across the Atlantic. and that it was soon to come seeking him. In September of 1644, Antonio de Montesinos, also known as Arne Levi de Montesinos, who was a converso, returned to Amsterdam from New Granada, that's modern de Ecuador, with a tale that electrified the city, Jew and non-Jew alike.

He'd been on a journey through the mountains. caught in a terrible blizzard together with his native mule packers. And as they cursed the weather, their leader Francisco told them to be patient and that their luck would turn. They replied that they had no right to hope because of the way in which they had treated a holy people the best in the world. When Francisco hushed them, Montenzinos became intrigued and he questioned his guide about their comments that night. In return, he received the reply that all the enemies, Spanish and native alike, would soon receive their due vengeance from the hidden people. When Montezinos arrived at his destination in Cartagena, he was summarily arrested on charges of Judaizing by the Inquisition, whose hand, of course, was everywhere.

And between his interrogations and tortures, he contemplated what he had heard from Francisco. And he ultimately swore an oath to the God of Israel that if he ever regained his freedom, he would go on a journey to discover what lay behind his cryptic remarks. Sure enough, he was released. And immediately finding his former guide, Montezinos revealed to him that he himself was a Jew of the tribe of Levi. And after much persuasion, he convinced Francisco to take him to see the hidden people of whom he spoke. They set out on foot, and after a week of hard travel over mountain passes, they came to a broad river where they were greeted by three men and one woman in a boat. Now just imagine Montezino's surprise when he was greeted with Shema Yisrael, Hashem Elokeinu, Hashem Echad.

Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And for three days Montezino stayed with the tribe discovering that they were none other than the tribe of Reuven who had been transported away to that distant land after their exile back in biblical times through the wondrous acts of God. And they assured him that his arrival was a sign, a sign not only of their reunion with the rest of the House of Israel, but that the hour of redemption was soon at hand. They would come out of their hiding and wreak vengeance upon the Spanish and the world. Now this story was told in a much fuller fashion. Under oath, in front of the heads of the community in Amsterdam, all were astounded. but no one so moved as from Menashe ben Israel.

Rumors which associated the native peoples of the New World with the ten lost tribes of Israel had circulated amongst Christians for decades. The expansion of the overseas empires was seen by many of them as holding redemptive potential, as finally setting up the last kingdom of the earth. And as we discussed back in episode 2, the messianic hope of both Christians and Jews was bound up with the notion of the return of the lost. ten lost tribes. And so, having what he deemed to be first-hand account of such an event, Menasha lost no time in putting the story to paper and distributing it far and wide. The response was overwhelming. Letters poured in from Christian scholars. Some were blatant attempts to convert the rabbi and to recruit his assistants in reaching his brothers, a critical element in Christian eschatology of the time.

Others were simply expressions of excitement at the good news. A few even demanded that Rav Menashe reveal to them the end of the time, which had been hidden by the Jews. Major Protestant theologians took up their pens as well, and a bubble of Messianic excitement began to rise through their correspondence. In the wake of all this work, Rav Menashe himself began to draw a clear connection between this supposed discovery and the imminent redemption. Hope was born anew. And it was, of course, based on the book of Daniel. Chapter 12, line 7. And I heard the man clad in linen, who was above the waters of the river. And he raised his right hand and his left hand to the heavens. And he swore by the life of the world, that in the time of two times and a half, when they have ended shattering the strength of the holy people, all this will end.

you know the line can be read as when they've ended scattering the strength of the holy people redemption in the mind of Rav Menashe ben Israel would only come when the dispersion was complete and if Jews had been discovered in the mountains of South America what could be more complete a dispersion than that in response to letters from prominent English theologians Rav Menashe's thoughts came together in early 1650 in a work entitled The Hope of Israel. It was in many ways a response to the particular enthusiasm of the English, who themselves were in more than a bit of a messianic flush. The Puritans had recently carried the day in the English Civil War. Under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell, they had tried and executed King Charles I and declared the Commonwealth.

the victorious parliament was filled with the sense that they were God's agents in the land driving papistry from the ranks and bringing the pure religion there was even an extreme faction of the parliament known as the 5th monarchy men they took their name, you guessed it, from the prophecy at the opening of the book of Daniel remember Daniel? this was a story about Daniel once upon a time and there that prophecy describes the four ancient kingdoms of Babylon, Persia Greece and Rome which will precede the redeeming kingdom the fifth monarchy now of course in their eyes this was meant to be the fleshly kingdom which would lead to the second coming of their savior and by their calculation the year in which this would occur was 1666 remember that number for the next episode so the hope of Israel written by Rav Menashevin Israel was actually originally in Latin but it was quickly translated by the English and ran through three printings in three years, just to give you a sense of how popular it was.

Rahman Asha was now positively bombarded by letters and requests to convert, to reveal the end. But, mostly, the idea that began to circulate was the question of the return of the Jews to England. If you'll recall, the Jews were expelled from England in 1290. For almost four centuries, the one area of the world which had been truly Jew-free was just across the North Sea. Now the ten lost tribes were actually reappearing in their day. The Stuart King, whose ancestors had expelled the Jews, had died at the hands of Old Testament-loving Christians. If the complete dispersion were to be the trigger of the redemption, who was to say that the absence of the Jews from England was not the only thing holding back the Messiah?

Rav Menashe pointed out did it not say in Deuteronomy and the Lord shall scatter you among all people from one end of the earth even to the other and that end of the earth is translated by Spanish scholars as Ketze Haaretz which is the exact name they also gave to England momentum grew Jews and Christians alike began to beg the Rabbi to take action first Rav Menashe sent an agent Manuel Martinez Domino to submit a petition to Cromwell, the Lord Protector. It detailed the suffering of Domino's life under the tyranny of the Inquisition, a topic sure to fire Protestant sympathies, and dwelt on the economic benefits that the conversos had brought to all the lands to which they fled, and which they were willing to bring to England should they be given shelter there.

Cromwell's Puritan beliefs made him naturally empathetic to the plight of the Jews, but he was no messiness. In his eyes, the fifth monarchy men were extremists who threatened the stability of all he had fought for. However, the crown jewel of his foreign policy was to protect and develop British trade. He was currently at war with both Holland and Spain, and he knew well that the Converso merchants could enrich London just as they had Livorno, Amsterdam, and Hamburg. In fact, he already knew that the few Portuguese merchants operating in London in his day were new Christians and likely suspected that their loyalties lay with the God of Israel. But despite his support, the issue hung up in parliamentary committee.

Dormito sent letters to Rav Menashe telling him that if the Jews were to regain entry, he would have to personally represent them. So Rav Menashe ben Israel spent the next two years in England fighting to realize his great hope. I'm not going to detail his struggles, or how, in the end, popular anti-Semitism eventually outweighed even Parliament's good detentions. Frankly, it seems that Cromwell knew that fighting the fight would be a mistake, and he rather just took a passive stance and allowed the Jews to slowly but surely make their way back. And for two years, London had a rabbi. And just imagine how Rav Menashe ben Israel must have felt on his first Rosh Hashanah in this foreign land, as he let loose the first shofar blast in the British Isles for almost 400 years.

in the end, Rav Menashe's hope died in committee even with all this status and determined will Cromwell was unable to reverse the course of history broken and ill, Rav Menashe returned to Amsterdam in 1657 where he took to bed and died in the same year a life filled with enthusiasm enthusiasm for the Torah, enthusiasm for his people enthusiasm for the God of Israel and most importantly, an enthusiasm for his own power to bring redemption came to what seemed like a failed end. But the paths of the Most High are many and winding. Within a few years of Robinash's death, Cromwell was dead as well. Not only dead, but his body was exhumed from Westminster Abbey and hung on Tyburn Tree. It was the Restoration.

and with a stroke of a pen, the new king, Charles Stuart, erased almost every act which the Commonwealth had passed through Parliament. It's amazing to think about it, but if Rab Menashe ben Israel and his enthusiastic Englishmen had succeeded, the re-entry of the Jews into England would have been among those acts of Parliament. But since Cromwell chose rather to passively sanction their return, and not actively legislated it, there was no law to strike down. And the Jews simply stayed, and they multiplied. And by 1663, the Jews of London brought over a rabbi from Amsterdam, receiving the assurance from the king himself to the same favor they formerly had, so long as they demean themselves peaceable and quietly and with due obedience.

And so ends a hopeful chapter in Israel, in what seemed like bitter disappointment. and I want you to keep in mind this power of enthusiasm and hope and particularly of hope delayed and hope lost as we move forward into the story of Shabtai Tzvi I just want to thank a few people I want to thank the people who give their hard-earned money in order to make this show possible you can join them right now I encourage you if you want to know how go to my Rav Mike Foyer Facebook page or you can send me an email at robmikefoyer at gmail.com or you can go directly to www.patreon.com and you find my M. Foyer page to make a little per-podcast donation. I'd also like to thank the folks at the Land of Israel Network for giving me access to such an amazing platform.

I want to thank the Pardes Institute, pardes.org.il for being such an awesome place to reach the hearts and minds of the Jews. I want to thank Suomiakob because it's my home, and I want to thank you for listening. I'm Rav Mike Foyer. And this is The Jewish Story.