The Spanish Inquisition and the Jews

THE SPANISH INQUISITION AND THE JEWS

The meaning of the word "inquisition" is to examine. The Inquisitors "examined" alleged Heretics, those did not believe in the Roman Catholic Church, and they would be punished accordingly. Punishment meant torture and burning. The Spanish Inquisition lasted approximately five-hundred years, from the late 15th century to the mid 19th century. Many ironic elements were involved in the history of the Inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition lasted longer than any other preceding it and was the most cruel, bloodthirsty, and festive of all. The objective of the inquisition, in its early state, was to convert all Jews into Christians, but later it contradicted itself by making the new objective to rid the country of the newly converted Christians. In an age where the close bond between church and state existed, opposition to the church was intolerable. The Inquisition caused Spain to become intellectually backward, and economically and industrially damaged. The powerful influence of the Inquisition forbiddened social influences, such as books, from other parts of Europe to enter Spain. Because of this, the universities remained stagnant from the lack of understanding about other civilizations in the rest of Europe. They were unable to keep up with the rest of the early modern world. As a result of this, they came into the 20th century intellectually inferior and bankrupt. With the banished, tortured, and persecuted heretics in mind, it is possible that the Spanish Inquisition is perhaps one of the most cruel acts performed on innocent people in the name of religion.

Before the Spanish Inquisition took place, several other inquisitional movements appeared, but none quite so barbaric and brutal as the Spaniard's. Waves of opposition towards the church swept Europe in the Middle Ages. In the 12th century it was a modern belief that a peaceful, utopian government could be obtained if all of the population of the society were "pure" and Catholic. The Medieval Inquisition was famous inquisitional movement also. It started in France and Italy. During this time a group of people called the Albigensies lived in northern Italy and southern France. They had established a religion called Manichaeanism which was the belief in two gods, one for good and one for evil. Pope Gregory IX felt that it was right to establish the Inquisition as a church law to rid the Holy Roman Empire from the Albigensies in 1231 AD. This was the start of the first inquisition. After that it was a common practice in much of Europe to take Heretics before a trial, then inflict torture on them forcing them to convert. Those that did not convert were sent to a public burning or hanging. In 1252 AD, Pope Innocent IV agreed to use inquisitors to torture sinners who would not repent their sins and confess. By the fifteen hundreds, the Inquisition became wealthy, powerful, and greedy.

The Spanish Inquisition was motivated in part by the multi-religious nature of Spanish society following the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors (Muslims). Much of the Iberian Peninsula was dominated by Moors following their invasion of the peninsula in 711 until they were expelled by means of a long campaign of reconquest. However, the reconquest did not result in the full expulsion of Muslims from Spain, but instead yielded a multi-religious society made up of Catholics, Jews and Muslims. Granada to the south, in particular remained under Moorish control until 1492, and large cities, especially Seville, Valladolid, and Barcelona, had large Jewish populations centred in JuderÐ"­as.

The reconquest produced a relatively peaceful co-existence - although not without periodic conflicts - among Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the peninsula's kingdoms. There was a long tradition of Jewish service to the crown of Aragon. Ferdinand's father John II named the Jewish Abiathar Crescas to be Court Astronomer. Jews occupied many important posts, religious and political. Castile itself had an unofficial rabbi.

Nevertheless, in some parts of Spain towards the end of the 14th century, there was a wave of anti-Judaism, encouraged by the preaching of Ferrant Martinez, Archdeacon of Ecija. The pogroms of June 1391 were especially bloody: in Seville, hundreds of Jews were killed, and the synagogue was completely destroyed. The number of people killed was equally high in other cities, such as Cordoba, Valencia and Barcelona.

One of the consequences of these disturbances was the mass conversion of Jews. Before this date, conversions were rare and tended to be motivated more for social rather than religious reasons.[citation needed] But from the 15th century, a new social group appeared: conversos, also called New Christians, who were distrusted by Jews and Christians alike for their religious beliefs. By converting, Jews could not only escape eventual persecution, but also obtain entry into many offices and posts that were being prohibited to Jews through new, more severe regulations. But converting was a hard long process involving many crucial steps and could not be done overnight. Many conversos attained important positions in 15th century Spain. Among many others, physicians AndrÐ"©s Laguna and Francisco Lopez Villalobos (Ferdinand's court physician), writers Juan del Enzina, Juan de Mena, Diego de Valera and Alonso de Palencia, and bankers Luis de Santangel and Gabriel Sanchez (who financed the voyage of Christopher Colombus) were all conversos. Conversos - not without opposition - managed to attain high positions in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, at times becoming severe detractors of Judaism. Some even received titles of nobility, and as a result, during the following century some works attempted to demonstrate that virtually all of the nobles of Spain were descended from Jews.

In the late 15th century, Spain gained its freedom from the Moors. They were North African people that were Islamic and controlled much of Spain. The wealthy, educated Jewish population financially assisted the monarchy to take back Spain from the Moors. Large prosperous Jewish communities existed in Spain where they were respected, unlike other areas of Europe where the Jews were hated, persecuted and were victims of organized massacres in the late Middle Ages. In Spain they remained the financial and scientific leaders in the 15th century. Many of the Jews married into Catholic families, and as a result, many of Spain's Christian leaders were of Jewish descent. As Spain became a unified country, many Hispanics forgot the services from which the Jewish had provided them. All of the sudden, the economy was not in as good of a shape as it was before, and the Jews became the center of blame for everything that went