Review: The Spanish Inquisition

 

      

The Spanish Inquisition has become a code word for human cruelty and injustice.  Who will ever forget the three red-robed cardinals in a Monty Python skit breaking into someone’s living room shouting, “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.” During his term even President Obama equated the Inquisition with the atrocities perpetrated by ISIS Moslem fanatics in devastated Iraq.

 

Some years ago I pored through Benzion Netanyahu’s massive study of the Spanish Inquisition. If the name sounds familiar, it is because the author was the father of Bibi Netanyahu, the current Prime Minister of Israel. Although Benzion Netanyahu took a leading role in the founding of the State of Israel, he will perhaps be best remembered as a great scholar. His field of study was the Spanish Inquisition and his masterpiece, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, revolutionized the study of the subject. 

 

Few people understand that the Inquisition in Spain was not directed against Jews in Spain but against Christians. The Inquisition had no authority to persecute or even investigate the Jewish population. It was specifically chartered to deal with popular charges leveled against Christians of Jewish ancestry and their families who had converted to Christianity. These converts were known as “conversos,” and there were elements in all levels of Spanish society who suspected that the conversos were not sincere Christians, even if their families had converted more than a century before.

 

Periodically charges were made that the conversos had only converted to gain political or financial advantage. Indeed, they were often suspected of adhering to their Jewish beliefs and practices in secret, and even working to undermine Christian society. Some regarded them as a kind of “fifth” column in the struggle against the Moslem Kingdom of Granada.

 

It is true that many of the conversos had prospered during the century before the creation of the Spanish Inquisition. Some had risen to high places in the administrations of the various Kings of Castile. Aristocratic grandees who regarded themselves as pure-blooded Christians without any trace of Judaism in their veins were often jealous and contemptuous of these conversos in high places. Among the lower classes it didn’t help the reputation of the conversos that some of them had become tax collectors for the Royal government.

 

Netanyahu’s 1000 plus pages demonstrated that the charges leveled against the conversos were false. He marshaled an enormous amount of evidence to show that the conversos were almost always sincere, even dedicated converts to Christianity. Like many converts, before and after, these converts from Judaism to Christianity in medieval Spain could even be more zealous or committed than the cradle Catholics of the time. 

 

Descendants of conversos often became theologians and clergymen. Some bishops and abbots of famed monasteries could trace their origins to converso forebears. Even Torquemada, the first head of the Inquisition in Castile and a favorite of Queen Isabella, had converso roots.

 

Nevertheless, in times of political turmoil, military defeat, or economic hardship the conversos were often blamed. Sometimes the charges erupted into mob violence and riots. It was to deal with these charges and riots in very difficult times, that Ferdinand and Isabella sought permission from the Pope to set up an Inquisition in Isabella’s Kingdom of Castile.

 

The young Isabella had inherited the throne under the most dangerous of circumstances. Castilian grandees or warlords disputed her right and authority. The King of Portugal put up a rival claimant to the throne and launched an invasion of Castile. Once these threats were somewhat subdued, the young Queen had to turn her attention to the constant border menace of the Moslem Kingdom of Granada in the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula.

 

Islam was a real threat. In 1480 an Islamic naval expedition had landed on the Adriatic coast of Italy and destroyed the city of Otranto. The invaders tortured and killed 12000 of the 22000 inhabitants of the city. Every priest was murdered and the Archbishop of Otranto was sawed in two. Those who were not killed were forced to convert or taken into slavery. In Spain there was constant border fighting and raids with Moslem Granada.

 

It was a time of great peril from both within and without and fear led to the inevitable outcry of charges against the conversos. Isabella established an Inquisition in Spain to deal with the charges directed against the conversos and unite her country in the war effort. One modern historian has called the Spanish Inquisition “a disciplinary body called into existence to meet a national emergency.”

 

The word “inquisition” has the same root as the word “inquiry.” The inquisitors were to look into the charges, call witnesses, and take testimony. The fact that the great, great majority of the conversos accused before the tribunal of the Inquisition were released is a testimony to Netanyahu’s thesis that they were innocent, sincere Christians, and that the charges leveled against them were baseless. Since the publication of Netanyahu’s book, historians have had to alter their perspective on the Inquisition, its methods and its results.

 

In many ways the Inquisition represented an enormous improvement in methods of justice prevailing throughout the European and Moslem worlds at the time. The proceedings of the Inquisition were carried out in public and not in secrecy. Its prisons were only temporary detention centers with conditions much better than in local jails. There were no pits with giant swinging razor sharp pendulums. Torture was rarely used in contrast to the methods almost universally used in other European and Moslem countries. Even when torture was applied, there was little danger to life and limb.

 

Studies of the Spanish Inquisition that followed upon the publication of Netanyahu’s masterpiece have shown that the “scenes of sadism conjured up by popular writers…have little basis in reality,” and that the inquisitors “had little interest in cruelty and often attempted to temper justice with mercy.” Indeed, as one historian noted: “The proportionally small number of executions is an effective argument against the legend of a blood thirsty tribunal.”

 

Nevertheless, the Spanish Inquisition has become synonymous with barbaric cruelty and injustice. In the wars of religion that followed upon the Protestant Reformation, a “Black Legend” arose primarily in Protestant England, which found itself involved in a life and death struggle with Catholic Spain. The Black Legend has gained mythical status and is still used as a weapon to batter Spain and the Catholic Church. It was one of the factors behind the hatred engendered in modern history by the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.

 

In one of history’s interesting footnotes, the bitterness and hatred engendered by the Spanish Civil War did not prevent Spain under Generalissimo Franco from standing almost alone in offering sanctuary to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. The Franco government maintained neutrality throughout the war, and insisted that all Jews who could claim Spanish citizenship be given safe conduct back to Spain from Nazi occupied countries. The Franco government even went so far as to offer Spanish citizenship and sanctuary to all Jews who could trace their ancestry back to the time of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.

 

Benzion Netanyahu’s masterpiece is now recognized by scholars like Joseph Perez and Henry Kamen who have followed his lead. Nevertheless, their findings will probably never eradicate the myths still propagated today. Politicians and ideologues will still continue to grind their axes, as will popular TV shows like Monty Python. 

 

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Tucker Carlsen Interviews Vladimir Putin

Last week my wife and I watched Tucker Carlsen’s interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The interview lasted a little over two hours, and it took us two nights to get through it, but it was well worth the effort. So far, the interview has received over 18 million hits on YouTube although the American media seems reluctant to mention it.

Credit must go to Tucker Carlsen not only for scooping the rest of the journalistic world, but also for allowing us to see Putin unfiltered by media bias. Carlsen limited himself to a few questions and then just let Putin respond with hardly any interruption. It was a breath of fresh air. In the beginning Putin asked if it was going to be an interview or a talk show, and for the most part Carlsen was content to hear him out, and not engage in incessant back and forth.

I did not take notes but here is my recollection of some of the insights provided by the Russian leader. Putin came across as extremely articulate, experienced, and levelheaded with a deep grounding in Russian history, as well as in current world affairs. Indeed, he prefaced his response to Carlsen’s first question on the Ukraine war with an almost 30-minute disquisition on the history of Russia in which he went all the way back to its ninth century origins. In that discussion he included an historical analysis of the origins of what is now known as Ukraine, a word that means fringes or borderlands in Russian. Indeed, he believes that Ukraine has always been a part of Russia, and that the Ukrainians are Russian, and not a separate ethnic group. 

To Putin the war in Ukraine is a Civil War and not an invasion of a foreign country. He traced the current conflict in Ukraine back to 1991 with the demise of the Soviet Union. In the West, we call it the collapse of the Soviet Union, but he regards it as an attempt by the then Soviet leaders to normalize relations with the West and usher in an era of mutual security and prosperity. He even stated that he had asked President Clinton if Russia could join NATO. Initially, Clinton seemed agreeable but after consulting with his security advisors, the offer was rejected. Instead of a partner, the US would continue to regard Russia as an adversary.

Moreover, he claims that after 1991 Russia received assurances that the NATO alliance would not extend any further east, but that the promise was subsequently broken, especially during the Obama administration when the door seemed to be opened to Ukrainian membership in NATO.  Putin traced the start of the war in Ukraine to 2014 when a coup in Kiev overthrew the then pro-Russian government. He believes that the coup was engineered by Western security services, and that the new government in Ukraine then began to seek close ties with NATO. He also believes that the new Ukrainian leadership contains many who had fought with the Nazis against Russia during WWII.

Nevertheless, he insisted that he is open to a negotiated settlement of the war and argued that he had agreed to one only months after the fighting started. At a meeting in Istanbul both sides had agreed to a settlement but at the last minute, Boris Johnson, the then British Prime Minister, had stepped in to quash the deal, obviously with the backing of his NATO and US allies. 

Johnson has retired but the war goes on. Putin claims to be still open to a negotiated settlement. He also believes that the war is hurting the West more than Russia. Western sanctions have not hurt Russia whose economy is now the largest in Europe, but they have forced Europe to pay exorbitant prices for imports of liquified natural gas. Speaking of that, Putin did not claim to know who blew up the Nordstream gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea, but pointed out that the culprit would have to have had both a motive and the capability to pull it off.

These are just a couple of the issues that Putin discussed with ease and calmness, but I would like to end with Carlsen’s last question concerning a reporter from the Wall Street Journal who has been imprisoned by the Russians for espionage. Actually, Carlsen asked if Putin, as a goodwill gesture, would release the jailed reporter to him for return to the USA claiming that everyone knew that the reporter was not a spy. Putin responded that the man had been caught red-handed with classified documents but that he would prefer to leave his fate to the negotiations currently going on between the security agencies of both countries. 

In this interview Putin did not appear as a madman or a Hitler out to dominate the world. As mentioned above, he spoke with calm, self-assurance. He knows his geo-politics. He is aware that China has overtaken the US economy, and that India is in third place. It is a new world, and the West must learn to live with it. Tucker Carlsen has been criticized for even conducting this interview. Some have even called him a traitor, but we are not at war with Russia, and Carlsen deserves great credit for letting us see the Russian leader with our own two eyes.

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Note: By now it is difficult to find the whole interview on YouTube but it is well worth viewing in its entirety. Here is a link.

Ash Wednesday

 

                                             

A few years ago around Ash Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by Michael S. Roth, the President of Wesleyan University, on the reluctance of modern students to consider topics like the soul and salvation. In addition to his administrative duties Roth taught a class in which he tried to inculcate historical imagination in his students by asking them to consider and discuss the questions that deeply concerned people in the past. However, he was disconcerted when he discovered a particular blind spot among his students.

Whenever he tried to discuss the interest of philosophers and other thinkers in the past with questions about the soul and salvation, he found a decided reticence on the part of his students to engage. Although usually eager to discuss any of the pressing issues of the day, the students generally clammed up and avoided eye contact by looking down into their notebooks. 

Unfortunately, Roth did not go into the reasons for the students’ reserve but took most of his essay explaining why it was important to understand why such issues had such importance to great thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas. Roth admitted that he was a secular Jew and an atheist, and insisted that he was certainly not trying to “convert” the students. 

It’s too bad that Dr. Roth did not ask his students about their reasons for shying away from any discussion that smacks of “religion.” I can think of a number of reasons why the students might have been reluctant to engage, but I’m only guessing.

The first that comes to mind stems from the high probability that most professors at Wesleyan, then and now, neither believe that they have an immortal soul, nor think that they require salvation. Any student professing such beliefs would likely be ridiculed by teachers and regarded as a pariah by their classmates. Actually, I think that the animus towards religious subjects was inculcated even before the students went to college. It is part of the media world that they have inhabited since childhood.

Despite Dr. Roth’s good intentions, I doubt if he ever would have become President of Wesleyan if he had been a church going Methodist. Even though the school is one of many named after the eighteenth century religious reformer, a school like Wesleyan would probably never name a President today who shared John Wesley’s beliefs or concerns.

Practically all the great institutions of learning in Europe and America were founded by churches, but today a belief pervades modern society that there is a total disconnect between religion and reason when it comes to the search for truth. Nevertheless, our universities have not become centers of reason and science. Credulity of all kinds still prevails. Someone once said, “when people cease to believe in God, they will believe in anything.”

Look at the popularity of the supernatural and occult in films and videogames today. Vampire films are box office bonanzas. My grandson went to a Jesuit Catholic university where he could hardly find a course on Catholicism to fulfill his religious studies requirement. He had to fall back on a course on Voodoo taught by a truly committed believer. 

Ironically, Dr. Roth admitted that despite his atheism, he still felt the need to say the Jewish Kaddish for his deceased father. Of course, tradition would not allow him to say it alone and so he had to find a group of ten. It wasn’t easy for a non-practicing Jew but he eventually found a group. Not only was he able to say the prayers for his father, but he also found in the group a congenial community. So Dr. Roth is not really an atheist. Either he reserves his religion for special situations, or he just has gone back to ancestor worship, the earliest form of religion.

I suspect similar motives drive modern Catholics when they go to Church on Ash Wednesday. Years ago on a visit to our daughter in California, my wife and I attended the local church, St. Joseph’s Basilica, in Alameda. The church is an enthusiastic community made up of the descendants of the original settlers of the island right next to Oakland, as well as more recent immigrants from Mexico, the Philippines, China, and Vietnam. The dynamic but self-effacing young pastor from India scheduled five masses for Ash Wednesday. The morning mass that we attended was packed with people waiting to receive the ashes on their foreheads.

Maybe people don’t like to think about the soul and salvation any more but down deep they seem to want to be reminded that they are dust and to dust they will return.

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A Fine Romance

 

My wife Linda and I celebrate our 61st wedding anniversary today. We were married at St. John the Evangelist Catholic church in White Plains, NY on February 9, 1963. 

We originally met about two years before on a blind date. I was a senior at Fordham College in the Bronx thinking of going on to graduate school to study and eventually teach History. She was a nursing student at Cornell University on pace to get her BSRN the next year.

Both of us were unattached. I had broken off with a girl I had dated for months and wondered if I would ever find the right girl. She had also parted ways with a recent boyfriend. I guess that is why a friend of mine at school asked his girlfriend at the nursing school to find me a date so that the four of us could attend the annual Fordham glee club concert.

Maybe because I was Italian, his girlfriend thought of Linda Gardella. When she couldn’t find her, she asked a friend of Linda’s if she thought Linda would be interested. “Of course,” she answered without bothering to even ask her. Linda was a little upset but did agree to go. I guess that’s how fate operates.

Anyway, in those days men were not allowed entrance to the nurses’ quarters. I had to give my name to a receptionist who would let Linda know I was there to pick her up. On this occasion she was already ready in the lounge, a kind of waiting room. I can still see her now. I don’t know if it was love at first sight, but not only was I struck by how beautiful she was, but also by how mature she seemed to be. 

I think the first date was kind of a flop. The glee club concert was a major affair for the school and held every year at New York’s "Town Hall", not far from the nursing center on the East Side. The concert was on Friday evening, March 3, but even though the chorale was premiering a new piece, the only thing I remember was that Linda fell asleep during the concert. In those days nursing students actually worked in the hospital wards and she had had a busy day. I don’t recall how we got back to the nursing center. I dropped her off and that was it. There was no holding hands or good night kiss.

Nevertheless, it was a start and despite my shyness, I got up the nerve to call her up and ask for another date.

As an aside, there were no cell phones in those days. There wasn’t even a phone in my grandparents’ home where I lived. I used pay phone booths that could be found on street corners. Any fan of Superman will be familiar with them.

She agreed to go out with me again and we began to date. In those days New York City was a wonderful place for a budding romance. Quiet bars (the drinking age was 18), coffee shops, and neighborhood restaurants were everywhere. Movie houses, theaters, and concert halls were nearby, and inexpensive. You could get seats for a Broadway play for less than $20 and half price tickets were readily available to students. Central Park was a short walk from the nursing center, and the lovely East River walk was around the corner.

In that beautiful spring of 1961, we held hands for the first time while watching “The Days of Thrills and Laughter” at a local movie house. We kissed for the first time one night in Central Park by the Lake. I had certainly fallen for her, and unbeknownst to me, she told her mother that she would probably marry me. 

Nevertheless, when summer vacation came, she went back to White Plains and while she didn’t exactly break it off, she went incommunicado. I’m still not sure of the reason. I was so despondent that I even grew a beard. 

After a couple of months, I was finally able to get through to her and she agreed to see me again. Persistence paid off. Of all places, I took her to Belmont Park, one of New York’s premier racetracks. Guys in my neighborhood in Queens loved the races, and I had become a little bit of a fan myself. Fate took a hand again. I had a couple of winners and was able to take her out to dinner at a nice restaurant back in White Plains.

After that we were a couple. I guess all she needed was time and space to make up her mind. In the meantime, I had graduated from Fordham, and had been accepted in the graduate program at Columbia University. She still had a year to go in nursing school. We dated regularly, wrote incessant love letters which she recently burned, and began to plan for the future.

 Shortly after she graduated in 1962, I proposed and she accepted. Of course, I went through the formality of getting her father’s permission. By then he knew I was not really a gambler. Years before, in Catholic elementary school the nuns had us open up a savings account with a local bank. I think we would deposit a nickel every week. In 1962 I took the little more than $200 life savings that I had in the account and bought a diamond engagement ring from a jeweler in New York’s Diamond district on 47th Street. Maybe, I got taken but she still wears it 61 years later. 

 It has been, and still is “a fine romance.” In the  1936 film "Born to Dance", a young Jimmy Stewart sings this charming love song to Eleanor Powell that reminds me of those walks in Central Park.