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There is quite a bit more to the Torquemada story than you apparently imagine. The standards of justice of the time were not our own. We rightly regard such standards as disgraceful by comparison with the religious freedom we take for granted in the USA today.

When Ferdinand and Isabella united first Aragon and Castille by their marriage and then the rest of Spain by conquest and political effort, their aim was to create a Catholic Spain and to expel others. This was a reasonably normal standard in their time. They famously expelled most Muslims. There were several kinds of people of Jewish ancestry resident in Spain at the time. Some had been baptized Catholic and had become Catholic believers and practitioners. They were not burned at the stake unless by grave error. There were Jews who remained Jewish by Faith and they were unjustly deported (not unlike the deportation of both Jews and Catholics from Sweden in the late 19th Century complete with confiscation of their property) and were, as a practical matter, forced to sell their property far below value. There were other Jews who were baptized but continued to practice Judaism in their homes. They were, I believe, known as Moranos. They were likely to be the victims of burnings at the stake because the medieval Church took very seriously the matter of baptism and its attendant obligations. Usurers of whatever ancestry or Faith were quite often burned at the stake after judgments of the Inquisition in many nations. There were others who were subjected to the auto da fe for other reasons.

My use of Torquemada is in reference not to Jews of any era but to other folks who call themselves Catholic but are in schism including the infamous Bishop Williamson who denies altogether the Nazi holocaust that killed 6 million Jews and 5 million others. I think I have as pro-Jewish a track record here as anyone not Jewish and, I note, that I would take out Ahmadinejad before he gets a chance to nuke Israel as I take it you would not. Whether you like my tagline or not is of no concern to me.

While we are on the subject, there was/is a family of Jews from Central Europe (Hungary and Germany) in the era of the Holocaust. They were/are quote Orthodox Jews. The family name was/is Reichmann. The patriarch of the family was from Hungary, an egg farmer and had organized a cartel of all Central European egg farmers, Jewish and non-Jewish alike to maximize all of their incomes. His German wife was of the Gestetner family. Eventually, after WW II, those Reichmanns who survived, escaped through Franco Spain which (unfortunately at the price of bribery that should not have had to be paid) for the moral opportunity of Spaniards to save their lives. They went on to Spanish Morocco with the blessings of Franco's government and organized relief efforts for other escaping Jews and to do whatever could be done for those in the camps. Eventually they founded and ran an international construction company of major note, known as Olympia and Yorke which was known for bringing in major projects quicker than promised, at higher quality than promised and at less expense that promised. There is a book about the Reichmanns which was written by a Toronto business reporter (they had settled in Montreal sfter the war).

The book details that Franco threatened that he would provide air bases to the US Army Air Corps in Spain to facilitate attacks on Axis countries unless Hitler allowed, inter alia, Spanish agents to comb the camps to effect the release of Sephardic Jews who could claim Spanish ancestry because Spain had a law of return and Franco was applying it to those descended from the Jews expelled in the 15th century. Franco gets little credit for this but it is true nonetheless.

Pope Pius XII, eloquently eulogized by Golda Meir before the UN at the time of his death, also gets little credit but is continuously libeled by those who follow the theories of Rolf Hochhuth (a communist and former member of Hitler Youth who wrote The Deputy). Pius XII did not save Jews from the Holocaust for human respect or for credit in popular imagination but because it was the right thing to do.

The Inquisition caused the Maid of Orleans (now St. Joan of Arc) to be burned at the stake and canonization of her as a saint is about as much of an apology as you will ever see the Church make.

Finally, infamously at Yalta, Stalin, pressing FDR for a soviet takeover of Poland and being resisted by FDR for political reasons having to do with the possibility of losing Catholic voters in the 1944 election, made the wisecrack to FDR: How many divisions has the pope? The answer was given during the pontificate of John Paul II (whose maiden name was Karol Wojtlywa and who, as you know was also Polish). The soviets were no friends of Jews either but John Paul II was (from childhood to his death).