A false Jew

Full title: A false Jew: or, A wonderfull Discovery of a Scot, Baptized at London for a Christian, Circumcised at Rome to act a Jew, rebaptized at Hexham for a Believer, but found out at Newcastle to be a Cheat. Being a true Relation of the detecting of one Thomas Ramsey, born of Scotch Parents at London, sent lately from Rome by a speciall Unction and Benediction of the Pope; who landed at Newcastle, under the name of Thomas Horsley, but immediately gave himselfe out for a Jew, by the name of Rabbi Joseph ben Israel, Mant. Hebr. soon after baptized at Hexham, by Mr. Tillam, and by a speciall providence of God, found out by the Magistrates & Ministers of Newcastle upon Tine, to be an Impostour and Emissary of Rome, and since sent up to the General and Councell of state to be further enquired into.

 

4to. pp. [8], 14, [2], 12. Signatures: A-D⁴ E². Bound in later 19^th-century calf with blind tooling and guilt spine title. Circular stamps of the Selbourne [private] library on A1v and E2r. Imprint from C4r and D. Wing (ed.), Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700. 4 vols. New York, 1982-98 (2^nd ed.), W-1266.

 

First edition of an account of Thomas Ramsay, the London-born son of a Scottish physician, who, after studies at Glasgow, Edinburgh, Bremen, Würzburg, and Rome, became a convert to Roman Catholicism and entered the (secret) service of the Papacy, undergoing circumcision so as the pass for a wandering Jew. Robert Ware (Foxes and Firebrands, Part II (1682), Bib# 4656313/Fr# 394 in this collection) discusses Ramsay as ‘a great Scholar, well vers’d in Physick, and an Excellent Linguist, yet a rank Papist’, posing not only as a learned instructor of Hebrew at Newcastle, but in London as a poor Bohemian priest who had been enslaved in Turkey, in which disguise he had gulled William Prynne. Imprisoned in the late 1650s for suspected Catholic activism, he later migrated (Ware relates) to Ireland, turning willing informer; he married twice and died at Derry in 1679 or 1680, possibly poisoned by Jesuits. Ware’s extended account was unknown to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), which dates a ‘last glimpse’ of Ramsay to March 1660 – relying only on the present pamphlet, whose author Thomas Weld is best known as a former emigré to Massachusetts in 1632-34, and cotranslator of the versified text of the ‘Bay Psalm Book’ (1640).

 

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