During the first half of the seventeenth century when Anglican poets composed some of their finest verse, there were officially no Jews in England, Nevertheless, in the 1650s, George Herbert chose to write to "The Jews" and Henry Vaughan, twenty years later, also addressed them. Other Anglicans cursorily referred to the Jews in their poetry and meditations, but in The Temple and A Priest to the Temple (published in 1635 and 1659 respectively), and in the two parts of Silex Scintillans (1650 and 1655), Herbert and Vaughan presented the most extensive Anglican verse on the Jews in that period.
This verse has been differently evaluated by critics: on the one hand, Herbert and Vaughan have been praised as models of the "tolerant and undogmatic" strain in Anglicanism; on the other, the former's less than "unwavering" defense of Jewish religion and culture has been criticized. These diametrical conclusions have been reached because the change in attitude towards the Jews which both poets underwent in their lives has been ignored, and so too have the political reasons which informed that change. It will be the purpose of this paper to survey the context of Herbert's and Vaughan's verse and to identify the causes for their changed outlook towards the Jews.
Although Herbert may have received from his friend Nicholas Ferrar first hand accounts of Jews in Holland, his portrayal of the Jews derived largely from biblical verses. His poem on "The Jews" does not reveal personal familiarity with individuals, but evangelical zeal for a people's Christian salvation:
Poore nation, whose sweet sap and juice
By praying in the first stanza for the conversion of the Jews, Herbert reveals his support of a Reformation view that had been given Anglican legitimacy by Richard Hooker, and that had been advocated by his friends Lancelot Andrewes, John Donne, and Ferrar. Hooker, the architect of Anglican theology, urged his coreligionists in some passages of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie to learn the best lessons from the Jews and to cooperate with them towards faith in Christ: "the Apostles doctrine unto the Jewe was, Condemne not the Gentile; unto the Gentile, Despise not the Jewe." Andrewes, a theologian whom Herbert admired, prayed for the conversion of "Gentiles, Turks and Jews"; Donne, a family friend, praised St. Paul's concern for the Jews; Nicholas Ferrar, Herbert's most intimate companion, hoped in his Acta Apostolorum Elegantis for Jewish conversion. English theologians in the first quarter of the seventeenth century were eager to convert the Jews because it was felt that by rejecting Jesus as the Messiah, Jews had made possible the salvation of the Gentiles. A feeling of gratitude to the Jews was recognized, and in return, preachers and. devotional poets like Herbert urged charity and Christian zeal.
In the second stanza, Herbert added that the conversion of the Jews would be effected by the Church before the last "Trump," but the various exclamations in lines 7-8 reveal the distance which he felt still separated him from the eschaton. Be it as it may, by associating the conversion of the Jews with the second coming of Christ, Herbert shows that in the 1620s and early 30s he was coming under the influence of eschatological literature which flourished in England in the wake of the Protestant malaise at the counter-Reformation victories on the continent. Specifically, Herbert was guided by the writings of a fellow Cantabrigian who assumed a prominent position in English millenarian speculation, Joseph Mede. Mede was at Christ's College during Herbert's residence at Trinity and during the latter's function as University Orator. Both men met at Cambridge events, and Mede described in a letter the evening of 12 March 1623 when Herbert delivered a speech before King James I.
In Clavis Apocalyptica (1627), Mede reiterated a Reformation association between the conversion of the Jews and the coming of Christ, and emphasized that the conversion was in fulfillment of the Christian dispensation preceding the eschaton. But in The Mystery o! S. Paul's Conversion, he argued for a peculiarly novel idea in Protestant theology: in order for the Jews to convert, he declared, their diaspora should be ended by their "Restoration" to a kingdom in "Canaan." The Jews, he noted, had been dispersed by God as a "woful evidence that he had quite cast them off from having any longer right or claim unto the Kingdom of Heaven," but this dispersion would have to end in Restoration if Jews are to join the church. By proposing this preeschatological "Restoration of the Jews," Mede was positioning himself at the center of a nascent controversy in English Protestant thought as to whether Christ's second coming was predicated on Jewish Restoration or not: although many theologians favored that Restoration, particularly among the Puritan clergy, many adamantly rejected it, especially among the Anglicans.
Herbert did not address the Restoration controversy in "The Jews" but in the chapter on "The Parson's Dexterity in applying of Remedies" in A Priest to the Temple, he confirmed Mede's eschatological context of Jewish conversion, and justified the Jews' "exile, and disability to live in their Countrey" on the grounds that they continued "to this day" to reject Jesus and to await their Messiah. Their "very dispersion," he added, "in all Lands, was intended not only for a punishment to them, but for an exciting of others by their sight to the acknowledging of God and his power."
Herbert, however, did not follow Mede in supporting the Restoration of the Jews. The reason for this divergence from his mentor was ecclesiastical: by 1630, when he began writing A Priest, Herbert was serving as Anglican rector of Bemerton parish. A few years earlier, the Restoration proposition had come under severe church disapprobation when Sir Henry Finch, one of the most influential lawyers of the seventeenth century, turned to the antiestablishmentarian Writings of Thomas Brightman, and published in 1621 The Worlds Great Restauration. Or the Calling of the Jewes. In this treatise, Finch argued that the Jews would return to Palestine and establish a kingdom to which all world authorities, including England, would be subservient. As a result of what was seen to be a subversive treatise, Finch was jailed by an irate James I and attacked by William Laud. In a sermon honoring the King's birthday on 19 June 1621, Laud refuted the idea of Jewish Restoration and confirmed the Anglican opposition to this militaristic prospect: "It was an old error of the Jews, which denied Christ come, that when their Messias did come, they should have a most glorious temporal kingdom."
John Donne also rejected the heretical proposition of Restoration. In a sermon preached at the churching of the Countess of Bridgewater (c. 1621 or 1623), Donne described the Jews as being "now in dispersion" and he noted that "God had sworne to them an inheritance permanently there [in Canaan], but upon condition of their obedience." Because the Jews had rebelled against him, he had punished them by expulsion:
The land of Canaan, was their own land, and the rest of that land, their Rest by Gods .oath, and covenant; and yet here was not their rest: not here; nor for any thing expressed, or intimated in the word, any where else. Here was a Nunc dimittis, but not in pace; The Lord lets them depart, and makes them depart, but not in peace, for their eyes saw no salvation; they were sent away to a heavy captivity.
Herbert was in the mainstream of this theology and in full doctrinal support of the institution in which Laud would later' become Archbishop and which Donne served as its most eloquent preacher. As a result, he repudiated the Restoration proposition of Finch and Mede, and insisted that "the stubbornesse of the Nation" was the main factor which kept Jews in "their present exile, and disability to live in their Countrey." For him, the Jews should not aspire to a political or military establishment: rather, they should convert to Christianity in order to end their suffering and prepare for the second coming of the Messiah.
For Herbert, the Jews served a theological purpose: they were the "proof, and witnesses" of Christianity, and he believed.that any sympathy shown towards them should be predicated on their compliance with the conversionist image that was designated for them by St. Paul and which he borrowed in the last two lines of his poem. From such a perspective, he could well write what one critic has described as the "first genuinely sympathetic poem on the Jews." But when he viewed the Jews from a historical and New Testamental perspective, he expressed blunt scorn: as early as Passio Discerpta, composed c. 1623, Herbert called the Jews "Barbaros" and "maledicta Ficus arescens / Gens tota fiet"; in "Self-Condemnation," a poem that comes a few pages after "The Jews" in The Temple, Herbert associated Christian recalcitrance and greed with the "Judas-Jew" (line 18). Like many of his contemporaries in early seventeenth century England who used the name "Jew" as a synonym for usury and deceit, Herbert compared his coreligionists' false love of the world with the "Jewish choice" of Barabbas over Jesus (line 9). For him, every moral and spiritual failure among Christians seemed to derive from a Jewish prototype.
Clearly, the poem on "The Jews" in The Temple does not represent a dominant sentiment in Herbert: his attitude to the Jews was consistently hostile whether he was writing in the early 1620s or in the years immediately before his death in 1633. Apprehensive of what he saw as a danger to God and King, Herbert adamantly confirmed the anti-Jewish invective of the Anglican establishment, an invective that had been formalized by King James I, who, in a commentary on Revelation (published in 1603), reflexively associated Satan with the "sinagoge." Subsequently, the Anglican church, to which Herbert passionately subscribed, supported the sentiments and insights of its head and king.
Like his mentor, who feared the political danger of the Jews, Henry Vaughan turned to the Jews because he anticipated their imminent participation in the military conflicts of England and Wales. Both in theme and form, Vaughan composed his verse to reflect the impact of the Jews on current changes and the function they were to fulfil--conversion to Christianity and preparation for the Royalist eschaton. This preoccupation with the messianic transformation of England underlines Vaughan's severe change of attitude towards the Jews between Silex Scintillans I and its sequel H. For in the process of writing his poetry, Vaughan became aware of ecclesiastical factors that influenced his view of the Jews, and transformed them from favorable to hostile figures.
That Vaughan wrote about the Jews was not only a direct result of Herbert's impact. The years in which he worked on both parts of Silex Scintillans witnessed the most intense concern with the Jews in seventeenth-century England. Although they were still denied entry, between 1645 and 1655 the Jews came to occupy a prominent position in revolutionary imagination. The issue of their conversion was specific in the context of the overriding expectation of the millennium. Parliamentary preachers urged the conversion of the Jews to Christianity as a necessary prelude to the eschaton in England. As George Gillespie announced to the House of Lords in 1647: "The Lord Jesus will be revealed mightily, and will make bare his holy Arm, as well in the confusion of Antichrist, as in the conversion of the Jews, before the last judgement, and the end of all things." And so did Peter Sterry in 1649: "[such] Calamities, and Confusions, as the World never saw to this day, must follow, when once Jesus Christ shall begin to appeare for His People, and the Return of the Jews."
In such a context, Henry Vaughan's interest is not unusual although it was singular. For after 1645, the hope for the conversion of the Jews developed exclusively among men and women whose affiliation was Parliamentarian and Cromwellan. While Anglicans and Presbyterians distanced themselves from the millenarian context of Jewish conversion, between 1645 and 1651, the period of Vaughan's composition of Silex Scintillans I, there was nearly unanimous support among army divines for that conversion. Vavasor Powell, who had been appointed minister of the gospel in Wales in 1650, preached the millennium and the conversion of the Jews while visiting Llandeffy in Brecknockshire, where Vaughan lived: "The Jews being restored and converted to the faith of Christ, shall be formed into a State, and have Judges and Counsellors over them as formerly: The Lord Christ himself being their King who shall then also be acknowledged King over all the Earth." In 1651/52, William Erbery, also a Welsh Independent, preached the New Jerusalem in Brecknock, Vaughan's village. Thus, by supporting the conversion of the Jews and the imminence of the eschaton in Silex Scintillans I, Vaughan, a professed Royalist, was advocating a prospect used by Cromwellians to justify their rebellion.
To understand the reasons which directed Vaughan towards a favorable attitude to the Jews in the late 1640s, it is necessary to consider the two parts of Silex scintillans separately. Part I reveals a warm and conversionist attitude to the Jews. In "The Brittish Church," Vaughan contrasts the Jews with the Roundheads and concludes by praising the former because they have not divided Jesus' coat, the church, in the manner of the sectaries. In calling on Christ to hasten his eschatological descent, Vaughan denounces the Parliamentarians who have ruined the church:
Haste, hast my dear,
Such a view contrasting Jews and Roundheads distinguishes Vaughan from contemporary Royalist writers who described the Jews in negative terms. John Warner found none worse than the Jews with whom to identify the regicides, while Royalist newspapers accused the Parliamentarians of consulting the Jews in order to perpetrate the execution of Charles I. "No marvell," announced the Mercurius Pragmaticus, "that those which intend to crucifie their King, should shake hands with them that crucified their saviour." Vaughan realized that every hope for converting the Jews would be dashed if such calumnious descriptions were maintained. Consequently, he chose to contrast, not to compare the Jews with the Roundheads and 'to praise the former rather than vilify both.
In "The Shepheards," a poem that could well have been entitled "The Jews," Vaughan described the "Sweet, harmles" shepherds who accepted the nativity of Jesus (line 1). For Vaughan, they represented the first Jewish converts to Christianity and were the model that Jews should emulate in history. As God chose then to reveal himself to humble shepherds rather than to wealthy Jews in Salem or in Jerusalem, so would he now, as the eschaton approached, expect the wandering tribes of Jews to fulfil their historic debt to the "Lamb of God" (line 48). Vaughan so dramatically portrayed the shepherds' journey from Judaic darkness to Christian light that one E.S., writing in 1650 to convert the Dutch Rabbi Menassah Ben Israel, quoted part of the poem in A Breife Epistle. The poem was read as a gentle and convincing invitation to the Jews to accept Christ.
Another reason for including the poem was the recognition that Vaughan's Jews not only were being invited to convert, but to participate in the eschaton. Vaughan hoped for the Jews to convert in order to make possible Christ's second coming: the author of the Epistle noted Vaughan's predication of the eschaton on Jewish conversion, and he selected the poem because it supported his invitation to Ben Israel to convert and "joyne with some of us for a thousand yeares raigne." For Vaughan, the shepherds' journey at the birth of Christ from the fields to Bethlehem represented the Jews' journey from darkness to faith, and, with reference to Menassah Ben Israel's 1650 call for Jews to settle in England, the proposed journey of the Jews from the European diaspora to a Protestant home. For E.S., Vaughan's Jewish shepherds anticipated the Jewish emigrants who were planning to journey to England and settle in a Christian land.
In Silex Scintillans H, Vaughan's favorable attitude to the Jews was not sustained. The reason for this change was political: Silex Scintillans I was published when Vaughan was still hopeful that Christ would avenge his church after its destruction at Puritan hands, and would establish a Royalist eschaton. In this respect, the conversion of the Jews was necessary, and Vaughan examined the imminent prospect of the eschaton in "The Dawning" and "The Day of Judgement." However, during the writing of Silex Scintillans II between 1651-1654, the eschaton was not realized, the Cromwellians remained in power, and the Jews did not convert to Christianity. Furthermore, by 1652, the campaign for Jewish admission which Ben Israel had launched two years earlier was in full swing, and by 1653 the Jews were "a constant topic of discussion." To the horror of Royalists in England and Wales like James Howell, William Lilly, and Vaughan, the Jews had approached Cromwell and his Council of State for permission to settle in England as Jews: not only were they unwilling to convert, but they were cooperating with the regicidal regime. For Vaughan, the delay in the coming of Christ, and the subsequent continuance of Cromwellian authority were caused by the Jews' refusal to convert. Thus in Silex Scintillans H, Vaughan turned away from millenarianism and transformed the "Sweet, harmles" Jews into the "Stubborn" and "Stiff-necked" Jews.
This shift in attitude appears distinctly in "The Jews." The poem has been treated as a "more cordial" rendering of George Herbert's "The Jews." But a close examination of the poem shows Vaughan's Jews as different from the biblical figures they had been to Herbert: they are real persons as authentic as Menassah Ben Israel was to Londoners in the early 1650s. This realism resulted in a poem completely different from Herbert's in sentiment and form: it is an "argument" poem in two sets of triple stanzas. The first set is a logical syllogism, a convention popular in metaphysical poetry:
When the fair year
The structure of the poem is formal. Vaughan offers to the Jews a practical syllogism marked by a sense of urgency in the triple conditionals of the first stanza. From the speed of this opening statement, Vaughan moves logically through a succession of metrical and rhythmic variations' and arrives at the third and concluding part of the syllogism where he draws the Jews into the Christian eschaton:
For surely he
A few pages later, Vaughan returned to the same topic with more hostility. "Jesus Weeping: S. Luke 19. vet. 41" is a blunt attack on the Jews for having rejected Christ, a rejection that resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem. The poem, however, is carefully constructed to suggest that the Puritans are now also as culpable as the "Stiff-necked Jews" (line 5): in this respect, the poem reverses the position adopted by Vaughan in "The Brittish Church." Vaughan associated the Jews with the Puritans, echoing in this his fellow Royalist James Howell who published in 1653 a treatise on The Wonderful, and Most Deplorable History of the Latter Times of the JEWS with the Destruction of the City of Jerusalem in which the Jews were compared with the seditious Puritans and the fall of Jerusalem with the forthcoming fate of London. Vaughan opens with a meditation on the tears of Jesus shed for the Jews, and concludes with reference to "This land," England, "where the starv'd earth groans for one tear" (line 16). By moving from Jerusalem to England, Vaughan identified the Jews who refused to accept Jesus with those who now wounded the Anglican church and its "head" (line 18). Both were equally heinous.
This poem echoes the Royalist sentiments of the late 1640s which had rejected Jewish conversion and had portrayed the Jews in negative terms. While Royalist writers had then attacked the Jews, Vaughan had sympathized with them; now, he changed his attitude. Ironically, by the mid-1650s, Charles II, exiled and financially destitute on the continent, was starting to make overtures to Jewish money lenders, and to promise them denization in return for their support: the Royalist attitude was shifting in favor of the Jews. Vaughan's anger in 1654 was not in line with the Royalist change of position. Indeed, the Jewish poems in Silex Scintillans H demonstrate that, unlike Charles II on the continent who was befriending Jews, the Royalists who remained in Interregnum Britain were disappointed with the Jews for their cooperation with Cromwell. The needless delay in conversion and the blatant recognition of the regicidal status quo, which bore fruit in Ben Israel's visit to London in 1655, turned Vaughan against the Jews and informed the anti-Jewish sentiment of Silex Scintillans H.
Vaughan borrowed from Herbert models of versification, titles and themes of poems, but in his perception of the Jews, he moved beyond his mentor's theological boundaries to the contemporary political sphere. For Herbert, the Jews were persons who existed between the pages of the Bible or in the tomes of Richard Hooker and Joseph Mede; for Vaughan, the Jews were seen as a religio-political force that he, a Royalist Anglican, had to confront. While Herbert's verse rumbles with an undercurrent of theological and psychological tension, Vaughan's Silex Scintillans addresses the eschatological climax in which that tension finally culminated, a climax that was predicated on the conversion of the Jews.
Neither poet was concerned with Jews qua Jews: Herbert did not defy Laud's perspective; Vaughan could not view the Jews outside his Royalist/anti-Independent vantage. Jews were treated as a means to a theological or political end, therefore the poems tell more about the authors than about the Jews of the seventeenth century. In choosing to treat the Jews from this purely conversionist perspective, Herbert and Vaughan proved. that as Anglicans they were not drastically different from their Puritan contemporaries, who, like John Milton, favored the Jews when viewed in a New Testamental "Hebraic" context, but attacked them when they adhered to their "Judaic" identity. For all their metaphysical and devotional sensitivity, in addressing the Jews neither Herbert nor Vaughan was able to transcend the dogmatic politics and theology of seventeenth-century Anglicanism.
1 For the most extensive study of the Jews in this period, see David S. Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission o! the Jews to England 1603-1655 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).
2 All references to the poetry of George Herbert will be taken from the edition by F.E. Hutchinson, The Works of George Herbert (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945); to Henry Vaughan from the edition by L.C. Martin, The Works of Henry Vaughan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd edn., 1957).
3 John Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. A.J. Smith (London: Penguin, 1971), sonnet xi: "Spit in my face ye Jews"; Robert Herrick, Poetical Works, ed. L.C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), "Observation," p. 384, line 1: "The Jewes, when they built Houses"; Thomas Traherne, Centuries, Poems and Thanksgivings, ed. H.M. Margoliouth, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 2:293-94; Daily Devotions and Thanksgivings, first published in 1673 and reprinted in A Collection of Meditations and Devotions (London, 1717), p. 360: "Call in the Jews"; and "Church's Year-Book," Bodleian MS Eng. Poet. th.e.51, fol. 3r: "the Sleepy Nation the Jews." There were references to the conversion of the Jews among other poets: Andrew Marvell in "To his Coy Mistress," and Abraham Cowley in the "Preface" to his 1655 Poems. For a general discussion of this topic, see Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 114 if.; Hill, "Till the Conversion of the Jews," in The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill, 3 vols. (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1985-86), 2:269-300; Peter Toon, ed., Puritans, the Millennium and the Future of Israel: Puritan Eschatology 1600 to 1660 (Cambridge and London: James Clarke and Co., 1970); Richard H. Popkin, "Jewish Messianism and Christian Millenarianism," in Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment, ed. Perez Zagorin (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980), pp. 67-90.
4 Harold Fisch, The Dual Image (London: World Jewish Library, 1971), p. 41, Katz, Philo-Semitism, pp. 185-86.
5 The Ferrar Papers, ed. Bernard Blackstone (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1938), p. 16n. There may have also been crypto-Jews/Marranos in the Elizabethan and Jacobean court: see Lucien Wolf, "Jews in Elizabethan England," Transactions o! the Jewish Historical Society of England (TJHSE), 11 (1924-27):1-91; E.R. Samuel, "Portuguese Jews in Jacobean London," TJHSE, 18 (1953-55): 171-230; Albert M. Hyamson, The Sephardim of England: A History of the Spanish and Portuguese Community, 1492-1951 (London: AMS Press, 1951), ch. 2. Contrast, however, the view of Jacob Lopes Cardozo, The Contemporary Jew in the Elizabethan Drama (Amsterdam: H.J. Paris, 1925), who argues for the total absence of Jews in England before the mid- 1650s.
6 Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse (Abingdon: The Courtenay Library of Reformation Classics, 1978), pp. 224ff.
7 Richard Hooker, O] the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie (London, 15941597), bk. 4, p. 191. See the study by Theodore Rabb, "The Stirrings of the 1590s and the Return of the Jews to England," TJHSE, 26.(1974-78):74-78.
8 Lancelot Andrewes, The Devotions of Bishop Andrewes, trans. John Henry Newman, 2 vols. (London: SPCK, 1920), 1:56; John Donne, The Sermons, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1956-1962), 8:40, 160; Nicholas Ferrar, Acta Apostolorum Elegantis (Tresley, 1635), p. 142. For Herbert's friendship with Ferrar and with Donne, see Izaak Walton, The Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wooton, Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert and Dr. Robert Sanderson, ed. George Saintsbury (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1927); for his admiration of Andrewes, see the dedicatory poem in Musae Responsoriae to the Bishop of Winchester who by 1618/19 was Lancelot Andrewes (Hutchinson, ed., Works of George Herbert, pp. 385, 588).
9 See also Andrew Wilier, Hexapla in Danielera: That is, a Six-fold Commentarie upon the most Divine Epistle of the holy Apostle S. Paul to the Romanes (London, 1620), p. 187: "The Gentiles should shew themselves unthankfull to insult against the foote, which did beare the branches"; Elnathan Parr, The Workes of that faith full and painefull Preacher Mr. Elnathan Parr (London, 1632, 3rd edn.), p. 173: "God is infinitely good who out of the generall evill, the sinne of the Jewes, can bring so great good, as the salvation of the Gentiles and Jewes."
10 See the analysis of "alas" in Coburn Freer, Music for a King: George Herbert's Style and the Metrical Psalms (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1972), p. 141.
11 H. R. Trevor-Roper, Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (London: Macmillan, 1956), pp. 246-47; see also William M. Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603-1660 (London: Macmillan, 1969), p. 97 for the popularity of the Book of Revelation among Anglicans in the 1630s.
12 Hutchinson, ed., Works of Herbert, p. 598.
13 Joseph Mede, The Works . . . of Joseph Mede, B. D. (London, 1672, 3rd edn.), p. 250.
14 Joseph Mede, Clavis Apocalyptics (1627), first translated in 1643 as The Key to the Revelation, part 2, pp. 94-99; the quotation is from The Works, p. 771. For the Reformation association, see Heiko Oberman, The Roots of Antisemitism, trans. James I. Porter (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), passim.
15 See my "The Idea of the Restoration of the Jews in English Protestant Thought: from the Reformation until 1660," Durham University Journal 78 (1985):23-37.
16 Herbert (ed. Hutchinson), p. 282.
17 Sir Henry Finch, The Worlds Great Restauration OR The Calling of the Jewes (London, 1621), passim. For Finch and Brightman, see Wilfrid R. Prest, "The Art of Law and the Law of God: Sir Henry Finch (1558-1625)" in Puritans and Revolutionaries, ed. Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 108ff.
18 The Works o! William Laud, 7 vols. in 5 (Oxford: J.H. Parker, 1867), 1:17. Laud treated the Restoration proposition as a "Judaizing" aberration; and Judaization was already being Seen as a threat to Christianity in England. See Lancelot Andrewes, "Speech delivered in the Star-Chamber against the two Judaical opinions of M. Traske" on I December 1619, in Two Answers to Cardinal Perron, and other Miscellaneous Works, ed. James Bliss (Oxford, 1854), pp. 65-95.
19 Donne, Sermons, 5:191,196.
20 Ibid., p. 197.
21 Herbert (ed. Hutchinson), p. 282.
22 Fisch, Image, p. 40.
23 Herbert (ed. Hutchinson), p. 404, lines 1, 6-7.
24 Cardozo, The Contemporary few, pp. 110, 124.
25 King James I, A Fruitfull Meditation Containing A plaine and easie Exposition (London, 1603, written 1588), A7r.
26 George Gillespie, A Sermon Preached Before the Right Honourable the House of Lords, In the Abbey Church of Westminster (London, 1645), p. 3.
27 Peter Sterry, The Commings Forth of Christ (London, 1649), p. 11.
28 Sterna Vavasoriensis, A New-Years-Gift for the Welsh Itinerants (London, 1654), p. 6.
29 "A Collection of the Prophecies which concern the Calling of the Jews, and the glory that shall be in the latter days;" in A New and Useful Concordance to the Holy Bible (London, 1671).
30 The Testimony of William Erbery (London, 1658), p. 243.
31 John Warner, The Devilish Conspiracy, hellish Treason, Heathenish Condemnation, And Damnable Murder, Committed, and Executed by the Jewes, against the Anointed of the Lord, Christ their King (London, 1649); Mercurius Pragmaticus (26 December 1648-9 January 1649). See also Mercurius Elencticus (2-9 January 1648/49), and Chaim Eliezer Schertz, "Christian Hebraism in Seventeenth Century England as Reflected in the Works of John Lightfoot" (Ph.D. diss., New York Univ., 1977), p. 232. The rumor that the Jews were planning to buy St. Paul's Cathedral from Cromwell was also generated by Royalist propaganda; see the ballad on "The Jew's High Commendation of St. Paul's" in The Pack of Autolycus, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1927), pp. 59-61.
32 E.S., A Breife Epistle to the Learned Manasseh Ben Israel. In Answer to his, Dedicated to the Parliament (London, 1650). See John Sparrow, "The Hope of Israel, A Breife Epistle, and Silex Scintillans" TJHSE 20 (1956-61):233-38.
33 E.S., A Breife Epistle, p. 7.
34 Jonathan F.S. Post, "Vaughan's 'The Night' and his 'late and dusky Age'," SEL 19 (1979):127-143. See also C.A. Patrides, "Renaissance and Modern Thought on the Last Things: A Study in Changing Conceptions," HTR 51 (1958):171, where the author notes that in "The Jews," Vaughan refrained from calculating the millennium.
35 Katz, Philo-Semitism, p. 189. For the full story, see Cecil Roth, A Life of Menasseh Ben Israel (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1934), pp. 230ff.
36 See James Howell, Royalist writer and translator, The Wonderful and most deplorable History of the Latter Times of the Jews (London, 1653), the preface. William Lilly in Monarchy or no Monarchy in England (London, 1651) ridiculed the wishful thinking of Royalists who believed that Jews would convert to Christianity, then choose the "Scottish King" Charles II as their leader and march to destroy the parliamentary regicides, p. 18.
37 Harold Fisch, Jerusalem and Albion (New York: Russel Press, 1964, rpt. 1985), p. 189; Jonathan F. S. Post, Henry Vaughan, The Unfolding Vision (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), p. 200. See also Katz, Philo-Semitism, pp. 185-86; and Fisch, The Dual Image, pp. 40-42. George Herbert Palmer described Vaughan's poem as an enlargement of Herbert's, The English Works of George Herbert, 3 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), 3:108.
38 J.V. Cunningham, "Logic and Lyric," MP 51 (1953):33-41, especially the discussion of Marvell's "To his Coy Mistress." See also the discussion of Donne's "The Flea" in Earl Miner, The Metaphysical Mode from Donne to Cowley (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 133-35.
39 The title continues: "Moreover, there is a Parallale to the late Times and Crimes in London, with those in Jerusalem." The text was published again in 1671 under the pseudonym of "Josephus Ben Gorion."
40 M. Wilensky, "The Royalist Position Concerning the Readmission of the Jews to England," Jewish Quarterly Review 41 (1950-51):397-409, maintains that between the Civil Wars and 1655 the Royalist attitude to the Jews was hostile; after 1655 it became favorable. See also Toon, ed., Puritans, the Millennium, pp. 85-86.
41 See the 1656 poem against Menassah Ben Israel analysed and cited by David S. Katz, "Edmund Gayton's Anti-Jewish Poem Addressed to Menasseh Ben Israel, 1656," Jewish Quarterly Review 71 (1981):239-50. See also the violent attack on the Jews after the Restoration by Thomas Violet, A Petition Against the Jewes Presented to the Kings Majestic and the Parliament (London, 1661). Hoping to provoke Charles II against the Jews, Violet reminded him of their cooperation with Cromwell.
42 For Milton's attitude toward the Jews see Samuel S. Stollman, "Milton's Dichotomy of 'Judaism' and 'Hebraism'," PMLA 89 (1974):105-12, and my "Milton and the Restoration of the Jews," SEL 27 (1987):109-24.
By NABIL I. MATAR
Nabil I. Matar is Professor of English at Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne. He recently completed an edition of select writings from Peter Sterry (1613-1672).