- Last Name
- BEN-ISRAEL
- First Name
- Menasseh
- Title
- The Hope of Israel
- Publisher
- Littman Library of Jewish Civilization
- Year
- 2000
- Group
- RJI2
- Comments
- Amazon Review/s
Dutch Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel lived and died in the XVIIth century (1604-1657). He argues from scripture in this 1650 work that Messianic redemption would not come to the Jewish people until they were scattered to all corners of the earth and that only the return of the Jews to England was needed to complete that dispersal. Rabbi Menasseh ben-Israel wrote to the Jews before he embarked to England to lobby there for the readmission of Jews, "I have been informed by letters, and by faithful correspondences, that today the English nation is no longer our ancient enemy, but has changed the papistic religion and become excellently affected to our nation as oppressed people whereof it has good hope." Those friendly letters came from Philo-semitic Puritans (Society of Friends) who were in Amsterdam befriending the Jews there in hope of presenting then with an unadulterated gospel, free from popish lies. Specifically, one such friend left a written account, Margaret Fell, the woman founder of the Society of Friends who sent him a year before he died her 1656 work For Manasseth-ben-Israel: The Call of the Jews out of Babylon, Which is Good Tidings to the Meek, Liberty to the Captives, and of Opening of Prison Doors., using only the Old Testament to support the New. His response to her work is unknown, but Menasseh Ben Israel wrote in his work, The hope of Israel, “My second Motive is, because the opinion of many Christians and mine doe concurre herein, that we both believe that the restoring time of our Nation into their Native Countrey, is very neer at hand; I believing more particularly, that this restauration cannot be, before these words of Daniel, Chap. 12. ver. 7. be first accomplished, when he saith, And when the dispersion of the Holy people shall be compleated in all places, then shall all these things be compleated: signifying therewith, that before all be fulfilled, the People of God must be first dispersed into all places and Countreyes of the World. Now we know, how our Nation at the present is spread all about, and hath its seat and dwelling in the most flourishing parts of all the Kingdomes, and Countreys of the World, as well in America, as in the other three parts thereof; except onely in this considerable and mighty Island. And therefore this remains onely in my judgement, before the Messia come and restore our ration, that first we must have our seat here likewise.” He also believed a report from Montezinos, a Jew in Latin America who claimed he had met there a tribe that recited the Shema, and he also gave serious credence to the speculations that the Indians of the Americas were the 10 lost tribes (see Indians or Jews?: An introduction to a reprint of Manasseh ben Israel's The hope of Israel by Lynn Glaser, Menasseh ben Israel, U. of Michigan, 1973).
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