John Robertson explores the terms in which Spinoza adapted sacred history, as recorded in the Jewish Bible and Christian Old Testament, to support his political thinking in the Theological–Political Treatise (1670). Rather than reading this work in the light of Spinoza’s philosophy, the focus of most scholarship, Robertson argues that Spinoza sought to understand sacred history on its own terms, as constituted by the three ‘constants’ of revealed religion: prophecy, a sacred text, and the ‘Word of God’ contained within the text. Spinoza’s understanding of these concepts is shown to have shaped the lessons which he proceeded to draw from the history of the Hebrews, their religious customs and their commonwealth. Spinoza’s approach to sacred history is then compared with that of Hobbes, drawing out both similarities and differences. A final section asks what became of this interest in sacred history as a source for political thinking in the Enlightenment, suggesting that its repudiation by some (such as Rousseau) was offset by a shift in the interest of others (such as Vico) from the Hebrews to the gentiles.

This chapter examines (1) the connection between the movement of return and a messianic redemption, (2) the distinctively Jewish teachings on the Messiah, and (3) the relation between Jewish messianism and a Jewish understanding of history as sacred history. The key to these connections lies in the principle that our humanity is rooted in a responsibility to and for the other human being, which is ultimately a messianic responsibility: If the Messiah tarries it is because we tarry, because we are forever late for the appointment, late in answering, “Here I am for you,” to the anguished outcry of our fellow human being, beginning with the stranger, the other, the child of Adam. This blindness to what Emmanuel Levinas calls “the exigency of the holy,” in the face of the other, which is fundamental to Judaism, lies at the heart of antisemitism.

Chatper 5 examines the growing influence of the papal Congregation of the Propaganda Fide in the administration of the Custody after 1622. It argues that its intervention reflects the importance given to the Holy Land as both a frontier, and spiritual center, of an increasingly global Catholic tradition.

This final chapter explores competition between Franciscan reform traditions over jurisdiction in the Custody to understand the Holy Land's importance as a Franciscan sacred landscape, and custodial administration as a manifestation of Franciscan authority and legitimacy.

Chapter 2 investigates growing competition between the Franciscan (Latin) and Greek Orthodox community over the legal and material possession of altars to understand these as vessels of political and spiritual legitimacy.

Chapter 2 attends to the latter decades of Thomas Hobbes’s life and the writing he produced during those years. These writings, concentrated in the later 1660s and early 1670s, responded to a revolution at the royal court and a crisis in Charles II’s relations with the established church. Concerned chiefly with the history of heresy, these writings are often presented as defensive in nature. This chapter reveals them to be assertive efforts to recalibrate and repackage Hobbes’s religio-political project. Confirming the widespread contemporary association of Hobbism with politique toleration, Hobbes’s later writings rallied against confessionalism and the enforcement of orthodoxy and recommended a reformulated and minimal set of Christian fundamentals. The chapter concludes that Hobbes’s previous deference to conscience and ecclesial voluntarism (or Independency) was recast as a narrower freedom of philosophy