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To: vladimir998; Pontiac; Tzfat

I suggest you read Benzion Netanyahu, the PM’s father and the foremost scholar of the Inquisition.

Further, Hitler also offered Jews to leave. But where were they to go?

It was even worse during the Inquisition as travel was way more difficult and deadly and costly. Your statement that they did not want to leave their wealth and possessions minimizes all the other difficulties.

Please explain Pope John Paul’s apology to the Jews, in part, for the Inquisition?

The Left uses revisionist history. I hate to see it here.


66 posted on 07/11/2011 11:03:43 AM PDT by dervish (women candidates, the last frontier)
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To: dervish

You wrote:

“I suggest you read Benzion Netanyahu, the PM’s father and the foremost scholar of the Inquisition.”

Already did. He is not the foremost scholar on the inquisition by the way. His great work on the subject is his Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain. He makes a number of errors which seem to show that his emotional attachment to his subjects (Spanish Jews in the late Middle Ages) got the better of him. BN sought to portray the Conversos as monolithically sincere converts. There is no doubt that many were, but clearly many were not. BN essentially says that all the original sources which showed some Conversos to be secretly practicing Judaism while publically claiming to be practicing Christians and all the while undermining Christian society to simply be fantastic literature. Such claims strain the credulity of things to say the least.

BN, for instance, wrote that the inquisitors:

“were incurably perverted by the various influences that shaped their thinking and their tendencies...these tendencies were expressed by the officials of the Inquisition, down to its lowest functionaries and agents, in a blatant disregard for human life; a fervid desire to flaunt power and exercise control over life and death; a capacity for repression that could crush any spirit; a morbid passion for inflicting torture and causing pain that could break all resistance; and apart from all this, a shameless rapacity designed to render the torturer also the inheritor of his victim’s goods.”

The simple fact is that we know torture was no so common as to suggest that inquisitors possessed “a morbid passion for inflicting torture and causing pain that could break all resistance”. If that were the case, wouldn’t all people have been tortured by the inquisition everywhere and all the time? Yet nothing even remotely like that took place.

Another interesting thing about BN’s book is how he undermines people in this very thread. People who claim the inquisition was founded to forcibly convert Jews must never have read BN’s book since - as he makes abundantly clear on page xix - that he is a confirmed believer that the Jewish converts to Christinaity were faithful and willing converts to Christianity who wanted to “remove themselves from anything regarded as Jewish, especially in the field of religion.”

“Further, Hitler also offered Jews to leave. But where were they to go?”

Hitler actually allowed some to leave for payment, while keeping others in Germany. As Hitler’s grip on Germany tightened, he was less and less favorable to Jews leaving, or at least less favorable to them leaving without the Nazis profiting in some way.

“It was even worse during the Inquisition as travel was way more difficult and deadly and costly.”

That is in fact completely untrue. As I already noted, half of the Jews left. Did half of Germany’s Jews leave before the war? Nope. The simple fact is people traveled across Spain all the time into France, North Africa, the Mediterranean, etc. It was not onerously difficult, deadly or costly to leave Spain. That’s how half of the Jews were able to do it.

“Your statement that they did not want to leave their wealth and possessions minimizes all the other difficulties.”

In what post did I make that statement?

“Please explain Pope John Paul’s apology to the Jews, in part, for the Inquisition?”

It seemed self-explanatory to me. John Paul II was free to make whatever apology he wanted to whomever he wanted for what ever reason he wanted. He never said the inquisition was wrong in itself.

“The Left uses revisionist history. I hate to see it here.”

What I use is accurate history. I love to see it here.


77 posted on 07/11/2011 7:57:50 PM PDT by vladimir998 (Sweden - one of the next Muslim countries)
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