Quotes on the Spanish Inquisition

[Menydh]

I will add here some quotes on the Spanish Inquisition by different Historians, extracted from the book El Imperio y la Leyenda Negra (The Empire and the Black Legend), by José Antonio Vaca de Osma.

Vaca de Osma is, by trade, a Diplomat, and by vocation, an Historian.


Note: the historians mentioned below are counted among the best expert academics on the period of history of Spain dealt with.

[Menydh]

"Numerous Hebrew families had embraced the Christian religion. These converses were looked at with distrust, but many practiced their first religion in secret. They were known as judaizers, and the wrath of the people was unleashed against them. The kings did nothing but reflecting the general opinion of the country.. they had a need to dispose of a legal tool, an eclesiastical tribunal, and so they demanded that the Pope established in Castile the old tribunal of the Inquisition. It must be said that such tribunal existed since the XIII century, and that it worked in Southern France against the Albigensi heretics. Therefore, what Pope Sixtus IV was allowing via his Bull of 1478, was the creation of the Tribunal in the lands of Castile. The issue of the Inquisition has arised much polemics. The victims of it have been exaggerated, and political passion has spoken without any evidence of the greed of the familiars of the Holy Office inquisitors. As a human institution, it committed wrongs, which were properly punished. Comparing its procedures with other tribunals, even in later centuries, the superior organisation of the Tribunal of the Inquisition is clear. All European tribunals used torture... "

Antonio Ballesteros Beretta, Síntesis de Historia de España, Salvat Ed. 1950

[Menydh]

"Since 1459 Catalonia had her own Inquisition, established by demand of the chancellors of Barcelona, who were worried about the infiltration of judaicing elements in the city...
The Inquisition was then transformed into a permanent organism which insists in directing the Spanish mentality and the conscience through a road of pure orthodoxy. Whichever positive or negative effects can be derived from that is something that is not for an historian to say."

Luis Suárez Fernández, Historia de España, tomo XVII, vol. II, Espasa-Calpe, 1969

[Menydh]

"The Holy Office was the sour fruit of the religious sensibility that arouse in the Peninsula as a result of the long centuries clash between Christians, Moslems and Jews. Some can claim that it had Hebrew roots, like Castro^* has done. But it was passion which gave birth to the Inquisition. The passion of everyone, of the Christian majorities and of the Mahomedan and Mosaic minorities, and it is unfair to assume that the former were integrated by wolves and the latter by lambs. The passion... of a consentious authoritarian articulation that was struggling to save the Spanish society of the anarchy which had made her sterile for a century... "

Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, España, un Enigma Histórico, Buenos Aires, 1956


(*) Américo Castro (see post below) is an Historian of Jewish ancestry. He wrote a history of Spain, España en su Historia (Spain in her History), with a multi-cultural (Christian, Moslem and Hebrew) agenda. Sánchez Albornoz, the Dean of the Spanish Medievalist Historians, refuted this book of Castro with his opus magnum, España, un Enigma Histórico.

[Menydh]

"We start, thus, to realize that the strange identification established in Spain between the Church and the State cannot be separated of the christian-islamic-jewish context... The Inquisition and the disquiet for the pureness of blood satisfied the real bents of the Hispanic peoples; the customs of their souls at the start of the XVIth century rested over foundations of eight hundred years of profoundness. The establishing of the Inquisition is related to the Mesianism that blossoms wildly between the XVth and XVIth centuries... "

Américo Castro, La Realidad Histórica de España^*, ed. Porrúa, México 1962


(*) After the magistral refutal of his book España en su Historia by Sánchez Albornoz (see note on post above), Castro did not release more editions of it. Years later he published this new book, La Realidad Histórica de España, which was in reality a reviewed version of his earlier work.

His words had been refuted, but apparently the agenda had to keep going.

[Menydh]

"The Inquisition was, contrary to what is widely believed today, a popular institution... The feeling of "being in good hands", that the King on the one hand, and the Church on the other, veiled for them, was common among the people of that time and, in consequence, the restrictions were considered as necessary."

Fernando Díaz-Plaja, Otra Historia de España, Plaza-Janés, 1972

[Menydh]

"All that the establishing of the Inquisition in Spain does is to conform with the general policies followed by all the nations of Western Christianity: to consider the cohesion of the social embodiment that Faith represents... It can be argued that the creation of the Inquisition has without any doubts characters of modernity, since it at that time it already epxressed the preocupation of the Catholic Kings for their subjects."

Joseph Pérez, Historia de España, coll. Austral, Espasa-Calpe, 2003

[Menydh]

"Fr. Bartolomé de las Casas begged Cardinal Cisneros in 1516 to send the Holy Inquisition to those islands in the Western Indies... Las Casas himself proclaimed a particular Inquisition in his diocesis of Chiapas."^*

Henry Kamen, Imperio, ed. Aguilar, Madrid, 2003


(*) It was some denounces of abuses in The Americas that Fr. Bartolomè de las Casas wrote, that were taken by the Jews and the English to feed the fallacies of the Black Legend. Many years later no subject of the English Crown would dare (or care) to write about abuses by English coloners in their colonies.

[Menydh]

"However, although the establishment of the Inquisition was a religious measure destined to keep the pureness of the Faith in the domains of the kings of Spain, its political importance was big...; the common Faith that united Castilians, Aragonese and Catalans in the goal of ensuring the triomph of the Holy Church... a common religious devotion had evident political repercusions and, therefore, a practical value that Ferdinand and Isabella were quick to profit. There was no clear division line between the religious realisations and those political, rather a constant interaction..."

J. H. Elliot, La España Imperial, ed. Vicens Vives, London, Barcelona 1965

[Menydh]

"Neither a social position nor a public high dignity could save from the pawns of the Inquisition to suspect conversed Jews. And although the possibility of being tortured and executed was real, the figures of the accused who were sentenced to death comprehended a small minority of the victims... By the end of the XVth century, most of the New Christians observed their new faith with sincerity."

W. J. Callahan, Religión e Iglesia, in El Mundo Hispánico, of J. H. Elliot, ed. Crítica, 1991

[Menydh]

Quod erat demonstrandum

[Perun]

Ever read Henry Kamen's book on the Inquisition?

[Turbamulta]

Originally Posted by Perun

Ever read Henry Kamen's book on the Inquisition?

Yes. I don't know how is his new book about this, but the work of 1965 was only a little less ridiculous than the previous official propaganda. We can call it "politically correct revisionism". Kamen is an hispanophobe, just like almost all the foreigners so-called "hispanists". The difference of Kamen is that he always writes searching the controversy, and controversy = sold books, and he knows that revisionism about Spain in the Anglosphere is very controversial. Don't believe for a minute that he is interested on the truth. The best author on this issue is the French Jean Dumont, and his book Procés contradictoire de l’Inquisition espagnole. The book is published in Spanish, but not in English, give me time to translate a pair of articles about the Inquisition based on this book.

[Menydh]

"With regards to the death casualties the figures that have been spread are hugely exagerated. One of the last researchers, Henningsen, a Dane who attended the Vatican Congress, made a calculus where he concluded that --leaving aside the first fifteen years of which there are no reliable data-- during the entire history of the Spanish Inquisition there was a total of two thousand executions. If we take into account that only in Germany there were many more people sentenced to death for witchcraft in the XVIIth century, that figure makes the issue of the Inquisition relative with respect to other institutions."

Prof. D. José Ignacio Tellechea
Chair of Church History at the Pontifical University of Salamanca

--
Note: even Benzion Netanyahu, Jewish Historian father of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in and interview following the publication in Spain of his book The Origins of the Inquisition in the Fifteenth Century, admits this figure of 2,000 for the entire period of the Inquisition, which lasted four centuries. Although he goes on saying that it constitutes a records "of an extraordinary cruelty, although it is not equal to six million assasinations without a minimum pretext of criminal activity but simply death for the crime of being of Jewish ascendency."

[Pagandawn]

Originally Posted by Mynydd

"With regards to the death casualties the figures that have been spread are hugely exagerated. One of the last researchers, Henningsen, a Dane who attended the Vatican Congress, made a calculus where he concluded that --leaving aside the first fifteen years of which there are no reliable data-- during the entire history of the Spanish Inquisition there was a total of two thousand executions. If we take into account that only in Germany there were many more people sentenced to death for witchcraft in the XVIIth century, that figure makes the issue of the Inquisition relative with respect to other institutions."

Prof. D. José Ignacio Tellechea
Chair of Church History at the Pontifical University of Salamanca

--
Note: even Benzion Netanyahu, Jewish Historian father of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in and interview following the publication in Spain of his book The Origins of the Inquisition in the Fifteenth Century, admits this figure of 2,000 for the entire period of the Inquisition, which lasted four centuries. Although he goes on saying that it constitutes a records "of an extraordinary cruelty, although it is not equal to six million assasinations without a minimum pretext of criminal activity but simply death for the crime of being of Jewish ascendency."

I saw your post below on the international brigades. But , it was much worse. The spanish gov. during the civil war was almost completely governed by the communists in Moscow.

But to the issue here. You have of course heard of the "conversos"? The Jews ruled Spain before the inquisition. This created a reaction among the Spaniards. Thus the inqusition. The inquisition was completly governed by the conversos=the Jews. It is true that one result of the inquisition was that the Jewish population in Spain were expelled and ended up in the netherlands Turkey etc.

The first Grand inquistor of the inquisition (and the second) Torquemada, the great Catholic hero was a Jew/converso.

And I agree with mynydd that the inquisition wasn't as bad as it been portrayed in history. But, what I am saying is that it was completely a Jew affair.
I am objecting to the reference to the Jewish father of Israeli PM.

Read this review of this ISRAELI HISTORIAN AND FATHER OF ISRAELI PM of his book of the inqusition.

It will blow your fokkin minds. You can take it Mynydd

The Origins of the Inquisition in 15th Century Spain (review)