Manoel Dias Soeiro (; 1604 – 20 November 1657), better known by his Hebrew name Menasseh or Menashe ben Israel (), was a Jewish scholar, rabbi, kabbalist, writer, diplomat, printer, publisher, and founder of the first Hebrew printing press (named Emeth Meerets Titsmah) in Amsterdam in 1626.
Life
thumb|175px|left|A portrait etching by [[Rembrandt probably depicting Samuel Menasseh ben Israel, a son]]
Menasseh was born in La Rochelle in 1604, with the name Manoel Dias Soeiro, a year after his parents had left mainland Portugal because of the Inquisition. The family moved to the Netherlands in 1610. The Netherlands was in the middle of a process of religious revolt against Catholic Spanish rule throughout the Eighty Years' War (1568–1648). Amsterdam was an important center of Jewish life in Europe at this time. The family's arrival in 1610 was during the Twelve Years' Truce mediated by France and England at The Hague. In Amsterdam he studied under Moses Raphael de Aguilar.
Menasseh rose to eminence not only as a rabbi and an author, but also as a printer. He established the first Hebrew press in Holland. One of his earliest works, El Conciliador, published in 1632, won immediate reputation; it was an attempt to reconcile apparent discrepancies in various parts of the Hebrew Bible. Among his correspondents were Gerardus Vossius, Hugo Grotius, Petrus Serrarius, António Vieira and Pierre Daniel Huet. In 1638, he decided to settle in Brazil, as he still found it difficult to provide for his wife and family in Amsterdam. He may have visited the Dutch colony's capital of Recife, but did not move there. One of the reasons his financial situation improved in Amsterdam was the arrival of two Portuguese Jewish entrepreneurs, the brothers Abraham and Isaac Pereyra. They hired Rabbi Manasseh to direct a small college or academy (a yeshibah in Spanish-Portuguese parlance of the time) they had founded in the city.
In 1644, Menasseh met Antonio de Montezinos, a Portuguese traveler and Marrano Sephardic Jew who had been in the New World. Montezinos convinced him of his conclusion that the South America Andes' Indians were the descendants of the lost ten tribes of Israel. This purported discovery gave a new impulse to Menasseh's Messianic hopes, as the settlement of Jews throughout the world was supposed to be a sign that the Messiah would come. Filled with this idea, he turned his attention to England, whence the Jews had been expelled since 1290. He worked to get them permission to settle there again and thus hasten the Messiah's coming.
With the start of the Commonwealth of England, the question of the readmission of the Jews had found increased Puritan support, but it was often mooted under the growing desire for religious liberty. In addition, Messianic and other mystic hopes were then current in England. His book, The Hope of Israel, was first published in Amsterdam in Latin (Spes Israelis) and in Spanish (Esperança de Israel) in 1650. The book was written in response to a 1648 letter from John Dury enquiring about Montezinos' claims. In addition to reporting Montezinos' accounts of Jews in the Americas, the book also expressed the hope that the Jews would return to England as a way of hastening the coming of the messiah. Menasseh also stresses his kinship with parliament, and explains himself as driven by amity for England rather than financial gain.