Cromwell Permits Jews to Return to England

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Amsterdam rabbi Menasseh ben Israel arrived in London in September 1655, three hundred and sixty five years after Edward I's edict had emptied England of its Jewish community, to press the Puritan Commonwealth government for permission to let Jews return. His appeal found an audience partly receptive for reasons of its own: millenarian hopes running through Cromwell's government held that a Jewish presence in England mattered to prophecies about the end of the age, and Menasseh ben Israel argued his case into that climate directly.

The government's own Whitehall Conference took up the question that December, debating it at length without reaching any formal ruling either way, leaving Jewish readmission in a kind of legal limbo rather than settling it by decree.

Resolution came instead through a court case rather than a government pronouncement. In March 1656, the legal case of the Marrano merchant Antonio Robles established that nothing in English law actually barred Jewish settlement in the country, a finding that gave Oliver Cromwell and the Council of State the opening to extend tacit permission for Jews to return and worship privately, without ever issuing the formal readmission edict Menasseh ben Israel had originally sought.

What Cromwell's tacit permission changed for Judaism's spread in England was the end of 366 years without any legally tenable Jewish community in the country, restoring a Jewish presence to England not by royal proclamation but by the quieter route of a court finding that the old expulsion had left no actual law standing in the way.