Isaac La Peyrère, a French Huguenot but with a name which reveals underneath its French guise a further descendant of the Iberian diaspora. His publication in Amsterdam and elsewhere of Prae-Adamitae (‘Men before Adam’) was one of the publishing sensations of 1655: reputedly it even became light reading for the Pope and his cardinals. La Peyrère was one of the most fervent apocalypticists of his day, and he urged Jews and Christians to reunite to bring on the Last Days, but his book, as its title indicated, threw the Creation story into the melting pot by arguing that there had been races of
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