The
Dublin Review
"A
Quarterly and Critical Journal"
October
1932
London:
Burns Oates and Washbourne Ltd., pp. 232-252
ART.
6.
Reply
to Dr. Cecil Roth
by
William
Thomas Walsh
Dr. Roth begins by accusing me of reading Spanish history "with the eyes
of the wildest anti-Semite". There are two errors here. The term
"anti-Semite" is inaccurate. Surely Dr. Roth does not mean that I am
against the Arabs, Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, and other Semitic
peoples? He really means that I hate Jews. And that is false. If anything, I
commenced my researches with a prejudice in favour of the poor persecuted Jews.
It was a popular prejudice that shrank considerably in the strong light of
historical truth. He finds me "in some respects lamentably
ill-informed" (although he has written above that my book is competent and
"well-informed"!); and to my note on page 621, proving that in the
Catholic Church philosophy and faith have been reconciled, whereas in Jewry
they have been at odds, he retorts that it is impossible to mention even a
single Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages who was not a rabbi! If he will
read my note more carefully, he will see that it does not refer to the Middle
Ages alone, including, as it does, Cardinal Mercier and the neo-Thomists. Since
he raises the point, however, I will observe that the greatest mediaeval Jewish
philosopher, Moses Maimonides, of whom the Jews have said "From Moses to
Moses there is no one like Moses", was only an imitator of the Moslem Averroës.
He was, to be sure, a rabbi as well as a physician. Nevertheless he illustrates
the conflict I refer to: his work was bitterly attacked by pious Jews; after
his death his followers were excommunicated, and his Guide of the Perplexed,
the greatest of his philosophical works, was publicly burned. Among later
Jewish philosophers, Spinoza was excommunicated by the rabbis with terrifying
curses, and Acosta was driven by the attacks of the orthodox to despair and
suicide. I have never heard that either was a rabbi. As for the Jewish colony
at Saloniki, the single sentence in which I refer to it, and which Dr. Roth
singles out for specious criticism, was not intended to convey a detailed
history of the community; and it was based upon information I received from Dr.
Morris Cohen of St. John's College, New York, whose accuracy I have had no
reason to believe inferior to Dr. Roth's.
The less proof my mentor has to support his violent and gratuitous assertions,
the more angry he is. My "crass credulity" in believing that Jews of
the first Christian centuries "had cut out of the Old Testament the
prophecies that seemed to Christians to refer so definitely to Jesus"
grievously offends his crass incredulity. It does not require a very credulous
mind, I think, to believe as I do, when one considers the astonishing hatred
with which Jews, even to this day, attempt to explain away the teachings and
miracles of Our Divine Lord, if not His very existence. However, I can give
authority for my statement. Saint Jerome declared that the Septuagint
suppressed the doctrine of the Holy Trinity in Osee xi, 1, Isaias xl, 1, Zach.
xii, 10, Prov. xvii, 1, Isaias lxiv, 4. Saint Justin mentions passages from
Esdras and Jeremias that the Jews had cut out of the Scriptures. When Dr. Roth
offers only his unsupported word against the testimony of saints, he will not
consider me discourteous, I hope, if I declare myself, to borrow a phrase from
Disraeli, on the side of the angels.
He accuses me of showing "a strange want of proportion" (p. 264) in
placing the number of Conversos, or converted Jews in Spain, at three millions.
He ignores my explanation on page 260: In Castile the Jews alone "paid a
poll-tax of 2,561,855 maravedis in 1284. As each adult male Jew was taxed three
gold maravedis, there must have been 853,951 men alone; hence the total Jewish
population may well have been from four to five millions—and this leaves out of
account large communities in Aragon and other sections." Allowing for the
growth of the Jewish population during the following century, and their losses
by the Black Death and other misfortunes, the estimate seems very moderate.
Dr. Roth blandly repeats the old Jewish error of attributing Jewish blood to
King Ferdinand the Catholic, in spite of the fact that I demonstrate clearly on
page 214 of my book that contemporary sources refute the theory. The Jewish
ancestry of Cardinal Torquemada is questionable. Luis de Santángel, who
financed Columbus's first voyage—and out of public finds, as I have shown in my
book—was, to be sure, a powerful secret Jew; it was in his house that the
conspiracy to murder St. Peter Arbues was organized, and he later did public
penance as an abjuring heretic. Even the Jewish writer, Jacob Wassermann,
admits that his interest in Columbus is still to be accounted for! And it is,
unhappily, a fact that, in writing to the great Marranos of the court, Columbus
mentioned, among the advantages of the islands, that he had discovered a supply
of slaves. However, far from "putting forward" the "fantastic
theory" that Marranos supported Columbus in the hope of profit from the
slave trade, I state (page 433) that proof is lacking!
As for the derivation of Marrano, I am not willing to accept, without
further investigation, the opinion of Dr. Roth, that the hypothesis I mentioned
is the most remote and discreditable. In any event, the point raised is one of
academic interest only. By way of illustrating his otherwise unsupported
statement that "Mr. Walsh . . . accepts unquestioningly, with the utmost
naivety, all accounts, however improbable, which reflect the prevailing popular
prejudice against the Jews and conversos", Dr. Roth accuses me of
recounting "with horror" how "the Jews of Spain encouraged, or
even invited, the Arab invasion of 709". He must have noticed that my
authority for the statement is the Jewish Encyclopaedia (vol. xi, p. 485).
Far from "recounting with horror", I merely quote this Jewish
authority verbatim as follows (page 17): "It remains a fact that the Jews,
either directly or through their coreligionists in Africa, encouraged the
Mohammedans to conquer Spain." Dr. Roth says there were no professing Jews
in Spain at the period. I am convinced that there were. "Quod gratis
asseritur, gratis negatur." Again he says that I "regard
the decadence of Spain in the seventeenth century as the result of the
deliberate machinations of the Marranos". I gave the machinations of the
secret Jews as only one of the causes, though probably an important one; and
here again my authority, as I stated (page 586), was the Jewish
Encyclopaedia, which I quoted as follows:
There
can be no doubt that the decline of Spanish commerce in the seventeenth century
was due in large measure to the activities of the Marranos of Holland, Italy,
and England, who diverted trade from Spain to those countries .... When Spain
was at war with any of these countries, Jewish intermediation was utilized to
obtain knowledge of Spanish naval activity. (vol. xi, page 501)
Furthermore
(vol. v, page 168):
They
formed an important link in the network of trade spread especially throughout
the Spanish and Portuguese world by the Marranos or secret Jews. Their position
enabled them to give Cromwell and his secretary, Thurloe, important information
as to the plans of Charles Stuart in Holland and of the Spaniards in the New
World. Outwardly they passed as Spaniards and Catholics; but they held prayer
meetings at Cree Church Lane and became known to the government as Jews by
faith.
Here we have a Jewish authority boasting of the part the crypto-Jews played in
ruining the nation that had rejected them; but when a Christian writer repeats
it, it is evidence of his uncritical naivety, if not of his mediaeval ignorance
and credulity! Yes, Dr. Roth, I do realize "that the sole cause for the
Marrano emigration was the persecutions of the Inquisition", but I do not
grant that these persecutions "sent myriads of inoffensive persons to the
stake for no other crime than practising in secret a few harmless ancestral
rites". Of the 2,000 persons burned during the lifetime of Isabella many
were criminals who would have been sentenced to death in any case by the State
courts. The Inquisition punished bigamists, blasphemers, church robbers,
usurers, religious impostors, pseudo-mystics. Granting, however, that many of the
Conversos were executed for their opinions alone, it is unfair to ignore the
fact, as Dr. Roth does, that those opinions at that time were considered
treasonable, if not worse, by a large majority of the people. The Spanish were
at war with a brutal, remorseless Oriental enemy, whose successes and
atrocities were reported daily. They had been defending Christendom from that
enemy for seven hundred years. The Jews within their borders, having incited
the Mohammedan conquest in the first place, still sympathized with the enemy,
sharing their hatred of the Church of Christ, and desiring the destruction of
Christian civilization—facts amply attested by Jewish writers. The Jews and
Conversos had angered the people, moreover, by their ostentatious display of wealth,
by their turbulence, by their usury, by their immorality, by their corrupting
of Church and State, by their purchase of the taxing privilege and their abuse
of it, by their open gibes and foul blasphemies against the Christian faith,
and particularly against the Blessed Sacrament and against Mary the Mother of
God. Does Dr. Roth ask us to attribute these charges to "mediaeval
bigotry" alone, in face of all the evidence supporting them? And does he
seriously expect the historian to reject them as slanders, when it is obvious
to any well-informed person that the Jews (as a race) are playing the same part
in history today that they played in the Middle Ages? From the time they caused
the crucifixion of their Redeemer and called down upon themselves the curse
that so unmistakably has followed them, they have been the persistent enemies
of Christian culture. Jewish writers boast of it. They boast that the Jews not
only incited the terrible ravages of the Moslems, with the consequent shedding
of so much innocent Christian blood, but actually bored from within so
successfully that they had something to do with setting in motion most of the
great heresies that have divided and corrupted the Western world; they boast
that the Jews encouraged the pernicious Albigensian sect and fostered or
instigated Protestantism. And today, when the atheistic tyranny of Communism
assumes the place that Mohammedanism once held as the arch-foe of Christian
liberty and decency, we find that it was a Jew, Marx, who laid down its principles,
that it was a Jew, Trotsky, who, with Lenin, translated it into action, and
that nearly all its active apologists in Western Europe and America are Jews,
who look forward to the destruction of the present social order because they
conceive that under Communism the Jew will rule openly at last over the races
he considers inferior. In America the Jews are becoming as insolently assertive
as in fifteenth-century Spain. The New York Times of 7 December, 1930,
quoted Rabbi Stephen S. Wise as demanding, in a sermon, "Is Western
civilization with its grimmest, grimiest social injustice and wrong, worth
saving? Or is it not the function of the Jew to bring about the supercession of
that decrepit, degenerate, and inevitably perishing civilization, so-called?"
What is really at the bottom of Jewish hatred against our civilization is
revealed every now and then in attacks by Jewish rabbis on Christ and the
Church of Christ in the principal American magazines; and only last year Jewish
publishers brought forth a foul and blasphemous book by a Chicago Jew, Ben
Hecht, in which one of the Jewish characters is made to say something that I
set down with great reluctance, and only because I believe the cause of truth
demands it: "One of the finest things ever done by the mob was the
crucifixion of Christ. Intellectually it was a splendid gesture. But trust the
mob to bungle it. If I'd been there, if I'd had charge of executing Christ, I'd
have handled it differently. You see, what I would have done was had him
shipped to Rome and fed to the lions. They could never had made a saviour out
of mincemeat." And he, Roth would have us believe that the Jews in the
Middle Ages did nothing to earn the resentment of the populace!
"Any person who plays a discreditable part in the history of the period is
ipso facto set down by the author as a New Christian," says
Dr. Roth. This is not so. I did not say that the degenerate King Enrique IV was
a New Christian; nor the quarrelsome Archbishop Carrillo; nor the fatuous
Charles VIII of France; nor the insane Juan de Canamas, who stabbed King
Ferdinand—I could multiply instances. But to most of Dr. Roth's gratuitous
charges a gratuitous denial on my part must suffice. I did not suggest
(page 182) that the Jews and Conversos had a "monopoly" of bribery in
Spain. I did not say that "it was by their Converso brethren"
that the Jewish exiles were despoiled. And surely I do not "condone
the pogroms of inoffensive citizens of Segovia, Toledo, and elsewhere";
whoever says that I do, whether a Times reviewer or Dr. Roth, says what
is not. First, I do not grant that they were inoffensive; even the Jewish
Encyclopaedia says that the "Spanish Jews were quarrelsome and
inclined to robbery, and often attacked and insulted one another even in their
synagogues and prayer houses, frequently inflicting wounds with the rapier or
sword they were accustomed to carry".
In Segovia the most brutal of the massacres of Conversos was perpetrated by
soldiers paid by Don Juan Pacheco, Marqués of Villena, a Converso descended on
both sides from the Jew Ruy Capon; and I said (page 125) that this massacre
"brought upon his memory the just scorn of Christians and Jews
alike". Is this condoning the massacre?
The Córdoba massacre was occasioned by the throwing of a bucketful of dirty
water from the upper window of a rich Converso's house upon a statue of the
Blessed Virgin which was being carried past. The mob retaliated by massacring
the secret Jews. This incident I related (page 124) objectively; adding (page
125) that even more deplorable was the reaction in other cities. Is this
condoning the massacres?
The massacre of Conversos in Toledo in 1467 was the result of the oppression of
the poor by Jews. They had bought up the obnoxious privilege of taxing bread.
On page 74 I related the consequences:
A
Christian of influence named Alvar Gomez ordered an alcade to beat the
Jews and drive them out of the city. This was done. The canons had the alcade
arrested, but while they were deliberating as to his punishment and the
settlement of the whole dispute, Fernando de la Torre, a wealthy leader of the Conversos,
decided to take the law into his own hands. A rash and violent man, he
announced that the Conversos had secretly assembled 4000 well-armed
fighting men, six times as many as the Old Christians could muster; and on July
21, he led his forces to attack the Cathedral. The crypto-Jews burst through
the great doors of the church, crying, "Kill them! Kill them! This is no
church, but a congregation of evil and vile men!" The Christians in the
church drew swords and defended themselves. Others ran to their aid, and a
bloody battle was fought before the high altar. Christians came from
neighbouring towns, hanged Fernando, and massacred the Conversos.
Is this "condoning" the massacre, and were those massacred all
"inoffensive" persons?
Furthermore, on page 128 I speak of the proposed massacre in Valladolid as
"nefarious work". And I went to some pains to demonstrate that one of
Queen Isabel's aims in establishing the Inquisition was to put an end to the
massacres, in which innocent Conversos so often perished with the guilty. It
was her purpose to establish a tribunal with legal sanction, from which
hypocritical Conversos, immune from the secular courts, which they controlled
or corrupted, might be brought to justice. The Inquisition did in fact put an
end to the massacres. When, in 1485, during the most critical period of Queen
Isabella's ten-year struggle against the Moors, the Jews and Conversos of
Toledo conspired to seize the city and slay the leading Christians, the plot
was discovered by the Inquisition. The ringleaders were executed, but there was
no massacre.
Dr. Roth is equally inaccurate when he accuses me of accepting, tacitly or
otherwise, the story of the ritual desecration of the Host in 1405. The point I
wished to make was that the Spanish people implicitly believed the Jews guilty
of this and other crimes. The Spanish people have been found guilty by Jewish
and other anti-Catholic historians of butchering the secret Jews and driving
the professing Jews wholesale out of the country, without cause or
justification. Yet it is plain that the Spanish believed themselves justified.
They pointed to certain crimes which they ascribed to Jews. There devolves upon
the historian, then, the difficult task of judging whether or not the alleged
crimes were committed. The record usually says that certain Jews were executed;
they were found guilty of such and such a crime. Jewish writers generally admit
the fact of the execution, but deny that the crime was committed. Why admit
part of the record and reject the rest? At any rate, there is no escape from
this dilemma: either the Jews were guilty, or their judges sent innocent men to
a cruel death.
I am not willing to give the Jews a general acquittal, four or five centuries
later, on a priori grounds. I will not commit myself to the principle
that Jews are incapable of committing detestable crimes, when I see evidence in
the world about me that Jews do commit detestable crimes; when I see a Chicago
judge convicting two young Jews, sons of two of the wealthiest Jews in the
United States, of the fiendish and cold-blooded murder of a boy; and when I see
a jury in the town of my birth convict a Jew of having his store burned by
another Jew to collect insurance, and causing two little Christian boys, who
lived over the store, to be burned to death in the night. I am not willing to
admit, without a critical study of the facts, that, when a Christian judge or a
Christian bishop in the Middle Ages condemned certain Jews to death, the judge
or the bishop must always of necessity be guilty of barbarous injustice, and
the Jews must be innocent. It is a question of fact, and those glib historians
who have assured us, after several centuries, that certain accused persons,
such as Alguadés and his companions, were innocent, and their judges guilty of
heinous and perhaps deliberate wrong, seem to me quite as presumptuous as he
who categorically maintains the contrary. I do not assert the guilt of the accused;
neither will I venture to proclaim them innocent. My book gives no account of
the alleged desecration of the Host in Segovia in 1405 and the consequent trial
and execution of Mayr Alguadés (the Dr., by the way, was a misprint for
the Don which appears in the text of the source document). I devoted only one
sentence to it, and the context shows that my purpose was to explain the bitter
feeling against Jews that existed among the citizens of Segovia.
Dr. Roth does not mention the source of his version of the alleged crime. I
assume that it was the usual one, the Fortalitium fidei (fo. 223) of
Fray Alonso de Espina. He wrote his account in 1458, fifty-four years after the
occurrence, so that there must have been men living who remembered the
occurrence and could contradict any errors in the principal features of the
story. He was a man of great learning, noted as a preacher. His unusual
judgment and ability are indicated by the fact that he was for many years
superior of the house of studies of the Franciscans at Salamanca, and in 1491
was made Bishop of Thermopylae in Greece. Incidentally, he was a Jewish convert
to the Catholic faith.
Now, turning to this learned Jewish priest's account of the alleged desecration
of the Host, I find the discovery of the sacrilege attributed to a
"supernatural feature", indeed; but not to the one which Dr. Roth
mentions. The text relates a miracle that may astonish and scandalize him even
more. It appears that the Jews plunged the Host into boiling water, and that it
arose and stood in the air before them.
Tunc
indeus quidam medicus emit sacratissimum corpus christi a quodam cupido
sacrista ecclesie sancti facundi eiusdem civitatis. Judeus ergo ille
sacramentum illud accipiens et suis immundis manibus pertractans ad synagogam
cum aliis suis complicibus perduxerunt, et in bullientem aquam sepe
projicientes, in altum elevabatur ante oculos eorum.
The Jews in terror took It to the prior of the Dominican convent. The Bishop
investigated. The physician and several other Jews confessed under torture, and
were executed. Of the synagogue Fray Alonso simply records:
Synagoga
vero ubi accidit, facta fuit ecclessia (sic) et vocatur corpus
christi.
No one can deny that this story contains improbable elements. But only a mind
blinded by rationalistic prejudice will deny a fact, if it is a fact, merely
because it is improbable or even supernatural. The sole question is whether or
not the evidence is adequate; otherwise no value is to be attached to any human
testimony, and all history, including even the alleged birth of Dr. Roth and
his alleged election to the Royal Historical Society, must be set down as
unproved and unprovable. The curious intellectual perversity which denies the
miraculous by appealing to a general principle which is a universal
negative—"miracles never happen"—is as unscientific as if a man were
to deny that any electric fishes have been found in the Atlantic, because
"there are no electric fishes". Many miracles, modern as well as
mediaeval, are as amply supported by trustworthy testimony as any fact in
history. And among these are numerous miracles by which God, at His own chosen
times, has confirmed faith in His great mystery of the Eucharist, and
confounded those who desecrated it. Incidentally several of the occurrences
clearly demonstrate that Dr. Roth's rationalistic explanation, based upon
"recent researches" into the habits of the micrococcus prodigiosus,
falls ridiculously short of covering the facts of the case. In 1273, at
Bolsena, a Bohemian priest, celebrating Mass, saw not merely stains resembling
blood, but as many as twenty-two drops of blood fall from the Host upon
the corporal. He took the corporal to Pope Urban IV, who in the following year
instituted the feast of Corpus Domini; and twenty-seven years later Pope
Nicholas IV laid the first stone of the Duomo of Orvieto, where the corporal is
preserved to this day, with the miraculous bloodstains still visible upon it.
Drops of blood fell from the Host in the Church of Saint Mark of Astip in
Piedmont, in 1533, and Pope Paul III, who investigated the miracle and made
certain of its truth, granted special indulgences to those who should visit the
church. Sometimes the miracle has occurred to expose the guilty, as in Paris in
1290, when a Jew, filled with diabolical hatred of the Sacrament, bought a
consecrated Host from a woman, stabbed it with a penknife, and saw blood gush
forth. In 1608, while the Blessed Sacrament was being exposed in the chapel of
the Benedictine Abbey at Faverney, a fire consumed the tabernacle, the linens,
and the entire altar, but the ostensorium remained suspended in air, without
support, for thirty-three hours, during which period it was witnessed by
thousands of persons. One of the two Hosts in the ostensorium is still
preserved in the parish church at Faverney. This undeniable miracle is of
particular interest here, because the suspension of the Host recalls that of
the Host in the affair at Segovia in 1405.
Equally inept is Dr. Roth's argument that the desecration of a Host by a Jew
would be "completely paradoxical". To say nothing of the possibility
that a Jew, having no faith in the presence of the body of Jesus Christ in the
Eucharist, might yet insult the Host as representing Christ, whom Jews often so
bitterly hate and blame for their misfortunes, the question again is one of
fact; and the evidence that Jews have, in many places and in many centuries,
desecrated the Host is overwhelming. Human conduct, moreover, is full of
paradoxes. It is paradoxical for a man to lay down his life for others, but
many have done so. It was a gigantic paradox for the Jews to expect the Messias
for centuries, and then, when He appeared at the time and place and in the
manner predicted by their own prophets, to have Him crucified. The history of the
Jews ever since has been a paradox, and every thinking Jew knows this in his
heart.
The rabbinical oath denying the blood-accusation is, as Dr. Roth quotes it,
most solemn and impressive, and I, for one, have no wish or reason to doubt its
sincerity. Its value as evidence in the present discussion would appear greater
to me, however, if I did not recall that the Kol Nidrei, a prayer of
Talmudic origin, has for centuries been recited in the synagogues each year on
the eve of the Day of Atonement. The Jewish Encyclopaedia (vol. vii, p.
539) gives the text of this prayer as follows:
All
vows, obligations, oaths and anathemas, whether called "konam",
"konas", or by any other name, which we may vow, or swear, or pledge,
or whereby we may be bound, from this Day of Atonement until the next (whose
happy coming we await), we do repent. May they be deemed absolved, forgiven,
annulled and void, and made of no effect; they shall not bind us nor have power
over us. The vows shall not be reckoned vows; the obligations shall not be
obligatory; nor the oaths be oaths.
The Jewish Encyclopaedia explains that
it
cannot be denied that, according to the usual wording of the formula, an
unscrupulous man might think that it offers a means of escape from the
obligations and promises which he had assumed and made in regard to others. The
teachers of the synagogues, however, have never failed to point out to their
co-believers that the dispensation from vows in the "Kol Nidre"
refers only to those which an individual voluntarily assumes for himself alone
and in which no other persons or their interests are involved. In other words,
the formula is restricted to those vows which concern only the relation of man
to his conscience or to his Heavenly Judge.
Whether the oath of the two rabbis falls in one category or the other I leave
it to my learned critic to explain.
The Colmenares passage to which Dr. Roth objects so violently has been omitted,
to be sure, from some Spanish editions, most probably through the influence of
the descendants of Jews remaining in Spain. But that is no reason why I should
refrain from quoting it, and I make no apologies for so doing. I quoted it as
an example of the crimes imputed to the Jews. I did not accept it as a
fact. However, since Dr. Roth raises the question, I am equally reluctant to
dismiss it as a fable, especially when I consider that the judge who condemned
the seventeen Jews to death was himself the son of converted Jews. Dr. Roth
says this makes no difference, since the New Christians often attempted to
avert suspicion by a special display of zeal for the faith. Yet I cannot
believe that such zeal would carry a sane man of any principle so far as to
condemn seventeen innocent men to be burned. History gives Don Juan Árias de
Ávila quite a different character. So loyal was he to the memory of his parents
and grandparents that he dug up their bones, when there was danger of their
being disturbed by the Inquisition, and hid them away. Denounced in consequence
by the Inquisitors, he defied them, and fled to Rome, where he lived under the
kindly protection of Pope Alexander VI for several years. He was a man of
courage and conviction, whose Catholic faith was as sound as his filial
devotion. Yet it was he who passed sentence of death, as a judge, on the
seventeen Jews. If he was mistaken—and there is no doubt that torture sometimes
extorted false confessions, though not invariably, as Dr. Roth appears to
assume—what new evidence have we on which to reverse his judgment after five
centuries?
So much, as Dr. Roth says, for the general question.
His account of the La Guardia case is just such a piece of misrepresentation
and evasion as I exposed in Lea—precisely the sort of thing that made it
necessary for me to summarize the evidence as fully and objectively as
possible, that the reader might judge for himself. And it is precisely because
my book gives the most adequate version of the trial yet published in English
that Dr. Roth goes to such pains to seek to discredit it. He has the effrontery
to mention the work of Dr. Lea, Mr. Sabatini, and M. Loeb, as though I had not
demonstrated how much even the lengthy account of Mr. Sabatini left to be
desired, and how utterly misleading were the other two. The case may have been
a commonplace in Jewish circles, but the reading public in English-speaking
countries knew little or nothing about it, and Dr. Roth knows this to be true.
It is a piece of insufferable impudence on his part to object to the
publication and examination of the evidence in a case of such crucial
importance, historically, that it not only furnishes the best information we
have on the actual working of the Spanish Inquisition, but provided the final
argument that moved so enlightened, just, and capable a ruler as Queen Isabella
the Catholic to decide, rightly or wrongly, upon the expulsion of the Jews from
Spain. It is a piece of impudence paralleled only by his accusation that I had
revived the ritual murder charges against the Jews, when the very passage he
quotes from my book shows that in considering the crimes confessed by certain
Jews I took care not to indict the whole race.
The charge seems to have travelled a long distance, unhappily, before the
printing of my book. The "ignorant police official" who revived it in
a Middle Western state, according to Dr. Roth, is not an isolated phenomenon.
The accusation was made in the State of New York in 1928; in the State of
California, where a twelve-year-old girl was found mutilated during Lent, in
1931; and, lest Christian bigotry alone be blamed, among the Arabs in Palestine
within the last year or two. This I deplore. The fact that Jews have been
massacred on account of the blood-accusation I deplore. But so have myriad
innocent Catholics been put to death by people who believed false accounts of
the Inquisition circulated by Jews; and yet I know of no reputable Catholic
scholar who would object to the publication of a single fact concerning the
Inquisition or any other historical subject.
Dr. Roth has no such devotion, so far as I can discern from his article, to the
cause of abstract truth. He does not even attempt, he does not dare, to meet
the issue I raised about Lea's intellectual honesty. Instead, he shifts his
ground, and tries to throw dust in the reader's eyes by stooping to the tu
quoque argument, which is no argument at all. My mistranslation of a
subjunctive verb as if it were indicative, thereby changing the meaning of a
clause, is obviously unintentional, obviously such a slip as any man is bound to
make somewhere in the course of a 600-page book, and one that fortunately does
not concern the major issues of the La Guardia case. This is the only point he
makes in all his long tirade to which I must say, "Mea culpa."
The slip will be corrected in the next edition of my book, and I will thank
Dr. Roth to point out any other errata that may have escaped my eye. But
the "slip" of "that superb historical craftsman", Dr. Lea,
is of an entirely different sort, and Dr. Roth knows it.
In his four-volume work on The Inquisition of Spain, Dr. Lea, far from
"amply" discussing so crucial a test-case, dismisses it with a sneer
in two pages, as "evidently the creation of the torture chamber".
Here is a false statement to begin with. The record of the trial of Yucé
Franco, made by a notary, shows clearly that he confessed without torture. The
notary seems to have had no compunction about recording the tormentos when
they were used; in one place he says that Yucé was threatened with the
"water cure", and the threat sufficed to draw further confessions
from him. He describes the torturing of other prisoners. Dr. Lea says further
that when Benito Garcia, a Converso, was arrested in June 1490, with a stolen
consecrated Host in his possession, the story of the crucifixion of a Christian
boy emerged only after another year spent in torturing the accused. This too is
false. In the following month (July 1490) Yucé Franco, one of the Jews
implicated in Benito's confession, and held in ignorance of the accusation
against him, confided to a supposed rabbi that he must have been arrested for
the murder of a boy after the manner of "that man"—a term used among
Jews to designate Christ.
In a footnote Lea refers his readers to his Chapters from the Religious
History of Spain, and there he devotes twenty pages to belittling the
evidence. He says (p. 452) that the Prosecutor, or Fiscal, Guevara, on December
17, 1490, accused Yucé merely of "a conspiracy to procure a
consecrated Host with which, and the heart of a child, a magic conjuration was
to be wrought". Lea then adds:
Curiously
enough, up to this time, the crucifixion of the victim and the insults offered
to Christ, which ultimately formed so prominent a part of the story, seem not to
have been thought of .... It was not until the close of the trial …. that on
October 21, 1491, the Promotor Fiscal asked permission to make to his
denunciation an addition which charged the crucifixion of child, with the
blasphemies addressed to Christ.
This can be called a "slip" only by one who sees no difference
between a slip and a falsehood. For the record plainly shows that on 17
December, 1490, Promotor Fiscal Guevara swore a solemn oath in court that he
believed that Yucé "was associated with others in crucifying a Christian
boy one Good Friday . . . mocking him and spitting upon him and giving him many
blows and other injuries to scorn and ridicule our holy Catholic Faith and the
Passion of our Saviour Jesus Christ". The crime was committed, he said,
"somewhat in the way, and with the same enmity and cruelty with which the
Jews, his ancestors, crucified our Redeemer Jesus Christ (—"quasi de la
formaé con aquella enemiga é crueldad que los judios sus antepasados
crucificaron á
nuestro Redentor ihesu
christo," etc.). He demanded sentence of death, saying, "And I swear
before God and before this cross, on which I place my right hand, that I do not
make this demand and accusation against the said Yucé Franco maliciously, but
believe him to have committed all that I have said."
Two lawyers were assigned by the Inquisitors to defend Yucé, and a third, of
his own selection, was added at his request. He made his confession
voluntarily, hoping to put the blame on certain Conversos. Unfortunately their
confessions incriminated him. After the various defendants had confessed
separately, they were confronted, and confirmed their depositions. Some of them
were tortured. All repeated their confessions at the stake before death.
If Torquemada's inferiors were deceiving him, they certainly went about their
work in a strange way. For they took the pains to submit the evidence not
merely to one, but to two separate juries; first to a jury of seven of the most
distinguished professors at the University of Salamanca, and later to five of
the most learned men of Ávila. Now it seems to me that in trying to get at the
truth of this matter we should allow considerable weight to the fact that,
besides the Inquisitors, twelve men of more than average intelligence reviewed the
evidence, not only the process of Yucé which is available to us, but several
others as well, and that these twelve men, living at the time and near the
scene, found the accused guilty and worthy of death. It is quite as improbable
that twelve such men should conspire to send several innocent men to a horrible
death as that several Jews and Conversos should murder a child and desecrate a
Host in hatred of Christ and with the superstitious hope of some gain. Yet of
the two juries Dr. Lea has not even a word, either in his major work or in the
twenty pages of his "separate study".
As for M. Loeb's contentions, they have been refuted long since by Father Fita
(who, by the way, is quite as erudite as the Abbé Vacandard, and better
informed on Spanish matters), and even by that indifferent scholar Mr. Rafael
Sabatini. No one, to my knowledge, has ever disputed M. Loeb's assertion that
the wretches who confessed that they had planned to make a charm by using a
consecrated Host with the heart of a Christian boy, in order to cause the
Inquisitors to die and all the Christians in Spain to go insane, so that
the Jews might possess the land, were, if guilty, involved in black magic. It
is not true, however, that the outrage "had nothing to do with any
religious question". If by that M. Loeb meant that the foul ceremony is
not a part of the Jewish religion, and cannot be charged against Jews as Jews,
I grant the argument, as I plainly did, and as Dr. Roth admits, in my book. But
when the prisoners confessed to having scourged, crucified, and mocked a boy of
some four years of age, to injure Jesus Christ through him, and all Christians
as well; when they called the Blessed Virgin "a corrupt woman", and
cried, "Death to this little traitor, our enemy who goes deceiving the
world and calls himself the Saviour of the world and the King of the
Jews!"—it can hardly be claimed that this "had nothing to do with any
religious question", call it ritual murder or black magic or what you
please. And as for the assertion that the perpetrators were "baptized
Christians, and not Jews", it is demonstrably false. Five of the alleged
conspirators were New Christians; and five, including the ringleaders, were
Jews. Tazarte, the physician who performed the filthy rite and related a vile
anecdote about the person of Jesus Christ, was a Jew. Yucé Franco, who admitted
without torture having shared in the crucifixion of the innocent victim, was a
Jew. His father, Ca Franco, was a Jew. His dead brother was a Jew. "The
name of the child remained unknown", says Dr. Roth, "until nearly one
hundred years after the event." The Memorial in which the boy's
name is given as Christopher was written in 1544, seventy-four years after the
alleged crime. It professed to be based on the process of Benito Garcia; hence
the author seems to have had access to information not available to us. It
cannot be said with certainty that the name remained unknown until that time.
The discrepancies as to the boy's place of origin are easily reconciled, if one
remembers that certain of the prisoners were trying to incriminate one another.
They all agreed at last; and one of them admitted having brought the boy from
one of the gates of the Cathedral at Toledo. "No body was ever
found." The record shows that one of the accused took the Inquisitors to a
place where they found a hole, in which he said the body had been buried. It is
possible that it had been removed by friends or relatives of the accused. Nor
can it be proved that "no enquiry was ever made to ascertain whether any child
who answered to the description had actually disappeared". From the
assiduous questioning of Yucé on the subject of the child, it is evident that
the Inquisitors were highly curious as to his origin and identity; and it would
be strange if they did not enquire elsewhere. When M. Loeb declared that no
body had ever been found, and that the "pretended martyr never
existed", he questioned with equal boldness the existence of Rabbi Moses
Abenamias, to whom one of the wretches confessed a Host had been sent for
conjuration purposes. But another document found in the archives of the
Inquisition at Valencia shows that the rabbi did exist! Documents still hidden
may shed further light upon the boy. And the discrepancy as to the provenance
of the Host is more apparent than real. The evidence indicates that two, and
perhaps three, Hosts had been stolen, at various times and places. The
sacristan of the Church at La Guardia, nephew of one of the accused, later
confessed to having provided one of the Hosts, thus confirming the testimony of
Yucé. The discrepancy as to the time of the alleged crime likewise appears less
formidable upon examination. Dr. Roth has already said that "a priest
posing as a rabbi had obtained a confession" from Yucé. He does not tell
us that this priest was a learned master of theology, Fray Alonso Enriquez,
himself a converted Jew whose name originally was Abraham Shesheth. Meanwhile
the Inquisitors had a physician, Antonio de Ávila, listening; and it is in his
sworn deposition as to what he had overheard that the apparent discrepancy
occurs. He said he heard Yucé tell the "rabbi" that the crime had
happened eleven years before. Now it must be admitted that a man overhearing a
conversation, perhaps, from another room might easily have made a mistake. Yucé
certainly would not have shouted such a damaging confession, and, as Father
Fita suggests, the physician might even have been somewhat deaf. The ear of
unbelief must be dull indeed if it cannot discern a certain similarity between Shte
(two) and one of the elements of a word for eleven, Ngashte-Ngassre. It
is quite conceivable that a preceding word, imperfectly heard with Shte
following, may have conveyed the impression of "eleven" to a man in
the next room. The record, moreover, does not say that they spoke in classical
Hebrew, but in a jumble of Hebrew and Romance, a dialect of the Jews in Spain.
All these discrepancies together are not weighty enough to destroy the
probability that a crime was committed, but they do effectually dispose of the
hypothesis of some Jewish critics that the Inquisitors manufactured the story
to justify the expulsion of the Jews. They do demonstrate that Torquemada could
not possibly have made it up out of whole cloth. They are the naive
discrepancies of actual life, the discrepancies that are inevitable whenever
half a dozen men attempt to relate the same happening. They are like the
apparent discrepancies in the four Gospels, which, while they resist the
efforts of some Jews to prove their history inconsistent, refute the claim of
others that it is an invention, and leave it standing like a rock before the
winds of unbelief. This is not to claim divine inspiration for the Inquisitors
of Ávila; but their story does read like the artless and sometimes puzzling
account of something that did happen. If it is not quite consistent enough to
be an invention, it is far too consistent to have been wrung from separate
imaginations by torture. Men may have bad dreams, but seldom do several have
the same nightmare. And if any further argument were needed to justify the
printing of this evidence, the long and successful attempts to suppress it, and
the persistent distortions of it by those who have discussed it, would indicate
a fear that is highly significant—a fear that, if the complete story were told,
it might be believed.
For the rest, my book itself must remain the refutation of the false charge
that I have striven to stir up prejudice among Catholics. I have sought, with
God's help, only to clarify one small portion of the vast field of historical
truth, believing, as I do, that truth, strong truth, however unpleasant for
some to look upon, and not the sort of sentimental "tolerance" that
flatters and cajoles while it secretly waits to destroy, is the only ground,
the only rock, on which Jews and Christians can ever stand in true and lasting
amity. It is a pleasure therefore, to read his paragraph, omitted from his
original article in a Jewish paper, about his efforts to bring about a better
appreciation of the noble ideals and traditions of the Catholic Faith among his
coreligionists. I sincerely hope that, continuing to walk in the direction of
truth he will at last be able to interpret it a little more accurately to them
from the clearer perspective of one within its walls, and that when that joyful
day comes he will confer on them the immeasurable benefit of turning their
faces toward the Light they have refused to see, and to demonstrate to them
what is so clearly written in the pages of history, that all their miseries, for
which I could weep, are not the result, fundamentally, of the hatred and
misunderstanding of others, but the consequence of their own stubborn rejection
of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ who predicted in unmistakable language
exactly what has befallen them.
WILLIAM THOMAS WALSH