Manasseh ben Israel

Timeline

1. 1622–1640Amsterdam · North HollandMoved to Amsterdam with his family as a child, received rabbinic training, headed a Talmud Torah school, and ran a Hebrew printing press. Published works such as the Mishnah and Zohar along with his own exegetical writings, making Amsterdam one of the centers of Jewish publishing in the seventeenth century.
2. 1641–1650Amsterdam · North HollandLed Amsterdam's Sephardic community in the 1640s and engaged in religious dialogue with Christian scholars. In 1650 he published the Latin work Mikveh Israel, arguing that the indigenous peoples of the Americas might be descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, sparking widespread European discussion and building public opinion for Jewish return to England.
3. 1651–1657London · Greater LondonTraveled to London in 1655 to meet Cromwell and lobby for allowing Jews to return to England. In 1656 the English government tacitly permitted Spanish Jews to worship openly—a milestone, though the expulsion order was not formally repealed. After returning to the Netherlands he continued writing, dying in Amsterdam in 1657.