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in 1085. While the Moors (with Berber rein- forcements) and Christians sparred in Spain for nearly a century, the Jewish people never regained their position of power.


Some of these Jewish people trickled across the border to France. But they found opposition there, too. In 1235, the Council of Arles required Jews to wear a yellow circular patch (does this sound familiar?), and the Jewish people began to stand out from the French population in an unavoidable and dangerously conspicuous way.


The Spanish Inquisition Problems for Jews in Spain accelerated


after Pope Clement IV authorized the Spanish Inquisition to investigate the lives of Jews and Jewish people who had chosen to join the church. Late in the fourteenth century, Spanish church leaders preached an increasing number of anti-Semitic messages, triggering such an epidemic of violence that in 1391, over a three- month period, fifty thousand Spanish Jews were killed in a total of seventy communities. When Queen Isabella of Castile and King


Ferdinand of Aragon united their kingdoms through marriage in 1479, they were con- cerned about the unyielding “Jewishness” of Jews who converted to Christianity to avoid death or persecution during previous persecu- tions from the Church. These Jews were called conversos or Marranos, which means “pigs” in Spanish. They were equally hated by uncon- verted Jews and by the Church. At the request of Ferdinand and Isabella, Pope Sixtus IV in 1480 established the office of inquisitor gen- eral and appointed Friar Tomas de Torque- mada to the post. Spain’s surviving Jews were given just four months to decide whether they wanted to leave the country or remain and join the Roman Catholic Church. As many as four hundred thousand abandoned their homes and businesses to flee Spain, after paying exorbitant exit taxes to officials. For some rea- son, fifty thousand Jewish people decided to remain in Spain. Many of them did not live very long.


Michael Brown reports in Our Hands Are Stained With Blood, “It is estimated that thirty thousand Marranos were burned at the stake in Spanish Inquisitions from the fifteenth century until 1808. In addition to this, in 1492, all non-baptized Jews were expelled from the country.”


Jews Offer to Underwrite Columbus According to Dr. Dell Sanchez, the pastor of a bilingual, multicultural church in San


24 | Jewish Voice Today JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011


Antonio, Texas, and author of The Last Exodus, there is historical evidence that on the night before Christopher Columbus set sail for his first voyage to the New World in 1492, Spain’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella met pri- vately with Minister of Finance Isaac Abran- banel and two wealthy nobles, Gabriel Rodri- guez Sanchez and Santangel. These three influential men were Sephardic Jews, and they offered to underwrite the voyage of Colum- bus. They knew the royal coffers did not con- tain enough money to pay for Columbus’s venture, even though for many years the Jew- ish population had been taxed and their property largely confiscated by the Church and the crown. In return for their investment, the three men begged the monarchs not to expel the Jewish people from Spain. Just as the royal couple accepted the


offer, the door burst open and the pope’s grand inquisitor, friar Tomas de Torquemada, ran into the room waving a crucifix and screaming that “the blood of all Jews” would now be on the hands of the king and queen. Ferdinand and Isabella took the money, but reneged on their agreement. Instead of pro- tecting the remaining Jewish people, they issued a decree ordering the expulsion of all


unconverted Jews from Spain. This amounted to a death sentence, since virtually all of Europe had already expelled the Jews from their borders. They were welcome nowhere. To make matters worse, the Spanish monarchs successfully exported their Inquisi- tion and persecution of the Jewish people to Portugal, spelling the doom of thousands who had fled there. This anti-Semitic spirit was even exported to the New World where it would surface with deadly wickedness in Spanish territory that is now Mexico, Texas and California.


Nothing matched the brutality and evil of the Spanish Inquisition—until Hitler and his Nazi henchmen. The Third Reich adopted and perfected the techniques and policies forged by Torquemada and the Church clerics of the medieval era. In his book, The Jews: People of the Future, Ulf Ekman quotes a question posed by a famous survivor of the Nazi death camps that expresses the way the victims of the Spanish Inquisition must have felt: “The [late] renowned Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal, has described how he was rescued from the bullets of a firing squad. While he stood there in a line awaiting execution, and Jews died


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