"No one who could say, "I have always been a Jew and never claimed to be anything else" was touched by the Inquisition."
Stop with the BS. Pope John Paul apologized for it. Was he lying?
Jews who did not eschew their faith were thrown out of Spain. Getting thrown out of your home, your country seems like being "touched" to me.
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In the same month in which their Majesties [Ferdinand and Isabella] issued the edict that all Jews should be driven out of the kingdom and its territories, in the same month they gave me the order to undertake with sufficient men my expedition of discovery to the Indies." So begins Christopher Columbus's diary. The expulsion that Columbus refers to was so cataclysmic an event that ever since, the date 1492 has been almost as important in Jewish history as in American history. On July 30 of that year, the entire Jewish community, some 200,000 people, were expelled from Spain.
Tens of thousands of refugees died while trying to reach safety. In some instances, Spanish ship captains charged Jewish passengers exorbitant sums, then dumped them overboard in the middle of the ocean. In the last days before the expulsion, rumors spread throughout Spain that the fleeing refugees had swallowed gold and diamonds, and many Jews were knifed to death by brigands hoping to find treasures in their stomachs.
The Jews' expulsion had been the pet project of the Spanish Inquisition, headed by Father Tomas de Torquemada. Torquemada believed that as long as the Jews remained in Spain, they would influence the tens of thousands of recent Jewish converts to Christianity to continue practicing Judaism. Ferdinand and Isabella rejected Torquemada's demand that the Jews be expelled until January 1492, when the Spanish Army defeated Muslim forces in Granada, thereby restoring the whole of Spain to Christian rule. With their most important project, the country's unification, accomplished, the king and queen concluded that the Jews were expendable. On March 30, they issued the expulsion decree, the order to take effect in precisely four months. The short time span was a great boon to the rest of Spain, as the Jews were forced to liquidate their homes and businesses at absurdly low prices. Throughout those frantic months, Dominican priests actively encouraged Jews to convert to Christianity and thereby gain salvation both in this world and the next.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/expulsion.html
"Stop with the BS. Pope John Paul apologized for it. Was he lying?"
Stop with the false dichotomies. He didn't apologize for fictions.
"Getting thrown out of your home, your country seems like being "touched" to me."
More confusion. The Inquisition did not throw them out; the monarchy did. Further, expulsion is not the equivalent of torture and execution in any rational person's book.
"On July 30 of that year, the entire Jewish community, some 200,000 people, were expelled from Spain."
Dern, that's about the population of Boise, Idaho.
"Tens of thousands of refugees"
I am so sick of rehearsing these old grievances, especially since they get worse with every retelling.
Give it a fricking rest, already.
"Dominican priests actively encouraged Jews to convert to Christianity and thereby gain salvation both in this world and the next."
And is that supposed to be a bad thing, too?
Yes and that apology was a statement made at the beginning of a symposium of historians and researcher gather by the Vatican in 2000 to examen previously unreleased inquisitorial documents. The end result of which was the conclusion by those researchers that basically most of the evil myths about the inquisition are just that, myth.