Three and a Half Centuries, and No Repeal

What makes the instrument unusual in this collection is how it ended. It was not repealed, amended or superseded. It simply ceased to be applied, and the ceasing took a constitutional argument rather than an act.

There were Jews in England throughout the period in small numbers, mostly conversos from the Iberian peninsula living outwardly as Christians, some in the service of the crown. The question became live again in the 1650s, when Menasseh ben Israel, a rabbi of Amsterdam, petitioned the Commonwealth for readmission. Oliver Cromwell called a conference at Whitehall in December 1655 of judges, clergy and merchants. The judges gave the answer that mattered: there was no law that forbade Jews to return to England, the expulsion having been an act of royal prerogative directed at persons then living rather than a statute of general effect. The conference itself broke up without agreement on terms, so nothing was formally enacted.

Cromwell allowed the matter to rest there, and a community established itself quietly in London from 1656. The synagogue at Bevis Marks, opened in 1701, has been in continuous use ever since. The atlas records the repeal status as never having occurred in form: the instrument was overtaken by a finding that it had never had the force its authors assumed.