importance as a trading city that Jews from the Netherlands began to settle in the country once more from the 1630s. It is from this first that the current Jewish population of the UK has grown. Religious toleration and liberty of conscience The 1640s and 1650s in England were marked by intense debates about religious tolerance, marked by speeches and tracts by radical puritans and dissenters who called for liberty of conscience. This extreme diversity of opinion about religious toleration was sorted into 12 schools of thought in the seminal study of the period by W.K. Jordan. John Coffey uses a simpler three-point schema: anti-tolerationists, conservative tolerationists, and radical tolerationists, pointing out that although the latter were in a minority, they formed an important part of the debate. Nonetheless it is important to remember that although figures such as William Walwyn, Henry Vane, John Milton, and others made powerful apologia for religious toleration, their frame of reference was theological, rather than secular in nature and they were not calling for religious pluralism as is understood today. The early and mid Seventeenth century was also marked by a rise in Hebraism, the study of Jewish scriptures, which were often used to discuss political issues such as the existence of a monarchy or republic, and religious toleration. This debate used Jewish sources to justify its conclusions. The most prominent scholar in the field was the MP and jurist John Selden, whose thought was influenced by Thomas Erastus and Grotius. Selden proposed minimal government intervention on matters of religion, a view he modelled on the Hebrew Commonwealth. He in turn influenced similar approaches in John Milton (whose plea for freedom of the press, the Areopagitica (1644), directly named him), Thomas Hobbes and James Harrington (the latter of whom proposed settling Jews in Ireland in his book The Commonwealth of Oceana). Overall the strongest political group of the 1640s and 50s, the English Puritans, had a negative view of toleration, seeing it as a concession to evil and heresy. It was often associated with tolerating the heresies of Arminianism, the philosophy of free will and free thought, and Socinianism, a doctrine of Anti-trinitarianism. But despite this Puritan hostility to toleration, England did see a certain religious laissez-faire emerge (for instance, the Rump Parliament repealed the recusancy laws in 1650). This was partly due to the impossibility of stopping religious free expression, but it also