ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 examines the earliest discussions of the Hebrew Republic before turning to Hugo Grotius (b. 1583–d. 1645) and Petrus Cunaeus (b. 1586–d. 1638), Dutch polemicists who also sought to escape Habsburg oppression. Like other Dutch Protestant intellectuals who considered their struggle to escape the Habsburg monarchy to be similar to the struggle of the biblical Jews to escape Egyptian slavery and establish the Hebrew Republic, Grotius and Cunaeus revered the nature of governance in this biblical polity. Unlike the discriminatory religious hierarchy that fueled the divine-right Habsburg monarchy, the Hebrew Republic was governed by a divine law to which each individual Jew was subject and that was not superseded by a temporal civil authority. Grotius and Cunaeus moved within intellectual circles where they would have come to know Morteira’s ideas, and from this milieu emerged two opposing depictions of a new political order. Attitudes toward the Hebrew Republic by Protestant thinkers contrasted with those that surface in writings linked to the emergence of Amsterdam’s community of rejudaizing conversos, in particular those of three figures whose writings provide the most important testimonies of the interest within this community in Old Testament biblical governance: Saul Levi Morteira (b. ca. 1590–d. 1660), Baruch Spinoza (b. 1632–d. 1677) and Miguel de Barrios (b. ca. 1625–d. 1701).
