(Sadler, John). Rights of the Kingdom: or, Customs of our Ancestors. Touching the Duty, Power, Election, or Succession of our Kings and Parliaments

(MENASSEH BEN ISRAEL)

for J. Kidgell

London

1682

Second Edition. English, single Hebrew letter "Hé" on p. 124 (reference is to Tractate Yoma 21b). Bookplate of Edward Shipperdson

Coppenhagen, Menasseh 645; Roth, Bibliotheca Anglo-Judaica, p. 204, no. 7

John Sadler (1615-1674), Puritan Hebraist, Neoplatonist and millenarian thinker, was a statesman and academician. He served as a Member of Parliament and was for a while private secretary to Oliver Cromwell. From 1650-1660 he was Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. His Rights of the Kingdom (first edition 1649), a rather chaotic book, has been construed as providing both the founding document of British Israelitism (by way of an invented Israelite genealogy) and historical justification for regicide. The book demonstrates its author's familiarity with all aspects of Judaism, both exoteric and esoteric. No doubt, this hard-to-come-by knowledge of Judaism is attributable in no small measure to Sadler's intimate friendship with the Rabbi of Amsterdam, Menasseh ben Israel. Historian Ernestine van der Wall writes: "When in 1655 Menasseh came over to London to plead the Jewish readmission in person, Sadler showed himself to be one of his greatest friends. After Menasseh's death, he was the one who, on behalf of the Rabbi's widow, wrote petitions to Oliver Cromwell, and then to his son Richard, to ask for financial support for her" (E.G.E. van der Wall, "Three Letters by Menasseh ben Israel to John Durie: English Philo-Judaism and the 'Spes Israelis', "Nederlands Archief voor Kerk Geschiedenis 65 [1985], p. 53). Testimony to the association between Sadler and Menasseh may be found on p. 119: "I cannot but with Honor mention him that has so much obliged the World, by his learned Writings, Rab Menasseh Ben Israel: a very Learned Civil Man, and a Lover of our Nation." Earlier in the book (p. 106), we find an allusion to Menasseh's informant concerning the Ten Lost Tribes in the New World, Antonio de Montezinos (aka Aaron Halevi): "Nor do they think the time far off…than is the old Prediction in their Zohar, which foretels their Redemption should be upon, or about, the Year last past [1648]; to which they add somewhat they see, or have heard from their Brethren of Juda in Brasile: or of Israel in other parts of America. "