Journal of the History of Ideas

Abstract:

Early modern Europeans organized important reflections on the nature of political society and the justice of warfare around their image of the American Indian. But Jewish parents and children, living in Europe at the mercy of Christian societies and states, also provided Europeans with the occasion to reflect on government and holy war. This article will describe the relevance of Christian theology to the experiences of one Roman Jewish family in the 1640s, before reviewing the place of forced baptism in Scotist thinking on politics in Rome, and establishing the connection between these doctrines and holy war.