The English Revolution and Cromwell
Parliament executes the king, and for eleven years England is a republic under Oliver Cromwell—under whom the Jews return to the country.
The civil war between king and parliament ended in something Europe had not yet seen: on 30 January 1649 Charles I was tried and beheaded by sentence of a court, the House of Lords was abolished, and England was declared a republic. The power lay with the army, and the army was ruled by Oliver Cromwell—a Puritan, a general and from 1653 Lord Protector, with an authority no king had held. He crushed Ireland and Scotland, dismissed parliament, fought Holland and Spain, and died in 1658; two years later the executed king's son returned to the throne, and Cromwell's body was dug up and hanged.
For Jewish history these are the very years in which the Amsterdam rabbi Menasseh ben Israel came to London to ask for the return of the Jews expelled in 1290. Cromwell convened a conference; the conference decided nothing—but the authorities stopped obstructing, and the London community took shape under him, without a law, by one tacit allowance. That has its own entry: "Menasseh ben Israel before Cromwell."
Sources
Documents of the period
- the Acts of the Long Parliament and the Protectorate — the trial of the king, the proclamation of the republic, the title of Lord Protector
Scholarship
- history of the English Revolution — the course of the war, Cromwell's rule and the Restoration
Basis: documents and evidence.