The New Atlantis of Francis Bacon

House is described as ‘the noblest foundation that ever was upon the earth, and the lanthorn of this kingdom’. It merits that title precisely because it was not the Academy, not the Lyceum, not the Garden, not the Porch. It was based on a different set of values.

To this point we shall return again, but we must first meet the second of the three informants of the visitors to Bensalem, and the only one with whom the narrator establishes a personal relationship. The first of the informants was the Governor of the House of Strangers. The third was to be one of the Fathers of Solomon’s House. The Englishman’s relationship with both these is with an official. But this one is just an agreeable acquaintance, who is thus introduced: “By that time six or seven days were passed, I was fallen into straight acquaintance with a merchant of that city, whose name was Joabin. He was a Jew, and circumcised: for they have some few stirps of Jews yet remaining among them, whom they leave to their own religion: Which they may the better do, because they are of a far differing disposition from the Jews in other parts. For whereas they hate the name of Christ, and have a secret inbred rancour against the people amongst whom they live, these, contrariwise, give unto our Saviour many high attributes and love the nation of Bensalem extremely.’ If we remember that the Jews were expelled from England under Edward I, and not readmitted until the time of Cromwell, we may find it sufficiently remarkable that Bacon should choose to place in his utopia a Jewish community, undisturbed in the practice of its religion and, apparently, admitted to full citizenship. So much, indeed, is this the case, that Joabin is the narrator’s principal source of information on the social life of Bensalem and is also the one who is able to secure for him the supreme privilege of an audience with a Father of Solomon’s House.

Here, as so often, Bacon was ahead of his time. This was the age of Marlowe’s ‘Jew of Malta’ and of Shakespeare’s ‘Merchant of Venice’. In the first of these the Jew is a monster, and in the second his humanity has to be established by argument (‘Hath not a Jew eyes? . . . If you prick us, do we not bleed?’ and so on). But in Bacon’s fiction, nothing of the sort. Joabin is the one man in Bensalem with whom the narrator ‘enters into a straight acquaintance’. And if he laughs at him for certain ‘Jewish dreams’,

9