Jonathan Kirsch > Quotes

“Then as now, demonization of the victim is the necessary precondition for genocide.”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual

“...free-associative sexual libel...is typical of the impulses of religious authoritarians to demonize all heretics by attributing to them every manner of outrage that a perverse human mind could imagine.”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual

“The persecutorial impulse - 'the urge to purify the world through the annihilation of some category of human beings as imagined agents of corruption and incarnations of evil' - seems to be hardwired into Western civilization.”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual

“Precisely because the Inquisition provides a blueprint for building and operating the machinery of persecution...the Inquisition was and still is a danger to human life and human liberty.”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual

“No offense against moral order was too trivial to escape the attention of the Spanish Inquisition.”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual

“Once available, the inquisitorial toolbox could be put to use by any authoritarian regime with the will and the means to unpack and use it.”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual

“...heresy was often perceived by the Church as a financial or political threat rather than merely a theological one.”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual

“Like the victims of the historical Inquisition and its other modern equivalents, the men and women who were targeted during the McCarthy era were not guilty of any wrongful acts; rather, they were accused only of thought-crimes.”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual

“The human imagination abhors a vacuum, after all, and seeks to fill in the blanks in a life or a history”
― Jonathan Kirsch, King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel

“Interrogation...was the highest art of the inquisitor.”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual

“...the workings of the Inquisition did not fundamentally change over its six-hundred-year history. The Inquisition was a machine with interchangeable parts, just as its inventors had intended...”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual

“All the weaponry and tactics that have been deployed in the war on terror are justified by precisely the same theological stance once invoked by the war on heresy.”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual

“...human beings as a species have never failed to find reasons to regard one another with fear and loathing and thus to offer violence to one another.”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual

“The faith of ancient Israel, according to some scholars, was not Judaism or even Yahwehism but “Davidism.”
― Jonathan Kirsch, King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel

“Above all, we cannot and should not try to distance ourselves from any of these inquisitions by reassuring ourselves that no abuse of 'moral justice' could occur in the American democracy.”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual

“Indeed, the greatest single innovation of the Spanish Inquisition was to turn heresy from a thought-crime into a blood-crime...”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual

“What Hitler and Stalin had in common was the same aspiration that animated the first inquisitors - the simple but deadly notion that it was both possible and desirable to rid the world of anyone whom the regime deemed to be unworthy of life.”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual

“Changing one’s undergarments on Saturday, for example, was sufficient evidence to justify the arrest and interrogation under torture of a New Christian on charges of being a secret Jew.”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God

“Above all, Revelation is now—and has always been—a potent rhetorical weapon in a certain kind of culture war, a war of contesting values and aspirations, that has been waged throughout human history.”
― Jonathan Kirsch, A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization

“countless thousands before him. The last of the inquisitors”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God

“Inquisition punished not only heresy itself but also the mere suspicion of heresy, whether “light,” “vehement,” or “violent”—and since “hearsay, vague rumors, general impressions, or idle gossip” were all regarded as equally admissible in the proceedings of the Inquisition—the line between accusation and evidence was virtually nonexistent. What the witnesses were willing to say, or what they could be forced to say under the threat or application of torture, the Inquisition was willing to embrace and use.48”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God

“Nor did the Inquisition content itself with victims who had reached adulthood. Boys as young as ten and a half, and girls as young as nine and a half, were deemed to be culpable, according to some church councils, and the strictest authorities “reduced the age of responsibility to seven years.” Starting at the age of fourteen, a boy or girl could be lawfully subjected to torture during interrogation, although some jurisdictions insisted that a “curator” be appointed for boys and girls accused of heresy.”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God

“grievous heresy and blasphemy concerning the nature of God.”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God

“as ‘an explanation of ignotum ab ignoto’”—a theory that relies on the unknown to explain the unknown.”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Woman Who Laughed at God: The Untold History of the Jewish People

“Salazar y Frias concluded that the witch panic had been called into existence by the witch-hunters: “I have not found the slightest evidence,” he reported, “from which to infer that a single act of witchcraft has really occurred.”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God

“he stood up in church and apologized for the spilling of “innocent blood.”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God

“Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), a celebrated polymath and an early advocate of the Copernican theory of the universe, on charges of holding erroneous opinions about various aspects of Catholic dogma, including the divinity of Jesus Christ, the doctrine of transubstantiation, and the virginity of Mary. Bruno had offered only a halfhearted recantation rather than the abject confession that the Inquisition always demanded, and he was burned alive as an unrepentant heretic.”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God

“You have found the word!”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God

“only a few victims of the Great Terror were afforded even the parody of due process that constituted a show trial.”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God

“Now shall the vow of Jephthah be visited on”
― Jonathan Kirsch, The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible