Isaac La Peyrère

La Peyrère is best known as a 17th-century predecessor of the scientific racialist theory of polygenism in the form of his Pre-Adamite hypothesis, which offered a challenge to traditional Abrahamic understandings of the descent of the human races as derived from the Book of Genesis.

Born to a Huguenot family, possibly of Portuguese Jewish converso or Marrano heritage,[1]: 22-23  La Peyrère was pressured to renounce his views and publicly converted to the Catholic Church towards the end of his life, though the sincerity of this conversion has been questioned.

"[1]: 5  While questions exist regarding a Jewish heritage, Richard Popkin presents evidence to the argument, that La Peyrère was of Marrano ancestry on his mother's side.

[1]: 5 La Peyrère served as secretary to the Prince of Condé, on whose orders he lived for one month in 1654, in a house in the Southern Netherlands adjoining that of the recently abdicated Queen Christina of Sweden.

[2] During this time both Christina and La Peyrère met with Menasseh Ben Israel, who was later invited by Oliver Cromwell's government to England to negotiate the readmission of Jews to that country.

It has since emerged that, in fact: "Condé, Cromwell and Christina were negotiating to create a theological-political world state, involving overthrowing the Catholic king of France, among other things.

The existence of pre-Adamites, La Peyrère argued, explained Cain's life after Abel's murder which, in the Genesis account, involved the taking of a wife and the building of a city.

In his later life, La Peyrère was an influence on fellow Oratory of Jesus member, Richard Simon, who has been called "father of the higher criticism.