Paper short abstract:

We intend to discuss 17th Century circulation of imperial and prophetical projects tracing the relations and connections among messianic members of the Portuguese-Jewish Community in Amsterdam, English millenarians, and Portuguese Restoration supporters and Fifth Empire believers.

Paper long abstract:

We intend to discuss the 17th Century circulation of imperial projects based on Fifth Monarchy ideas, i.e., the prophetical-political formulations derived from the interpretations of Book of Daniel's dreams. The main purpose is to trace the debates, relations and connections amongst messianic members of the Portuguese Jewish Community in Amsterdam; English and American millenarians; and Portuguese Fifth Empire believers, divided into sebastianists and joanists. In this millenarian network, the Portuguese Jewish Community emerges as a possible axis which articulated messianic hopes but also colonial interests of different spaces. One example was the trajectory of the short treatise Esperança de Israel. It was written by Menasseh Ben Israel, printed in Spanish and Latin (1650) and short after translated into English and published in London, with great interest, by the Fifth-monarchist Livewell Chapman. Added to its impact in England, several authors indicated a connection between the rabi´s text and the letter "Esperanças de Portugal" (1659), by Antonio Vieira, who met Menasseh when in a diplomatic mission to support the Braganzas and the restored Portuguese Empire. If ones assumes the Esperança de Israel's linkages (with Vieira and brigantines and also with protestants millenarians) as a plausible way to understand the diffusion of 17th Century messianic ideas, it is possible to draw a picture approximating Portuguese imperial propositions and English Fifth-Monarchists projects, by understanding aspects of some New-christians and New-Jews trajectories and theirs connections in Europe and in the Americas.