Toward the Inquisition: Essays on Jewish and Converso History in Late Medieval Spain

by Benzion Netanyahu

One of the world's foremost scholars in the fields of Spanish and Jewish medieval history, B. Netanyahu revolutionized accepted belief concerning the causes of the Spanish Inquisition in his magisterial volume of 1995, The Origins of the Inquisition. Locating that origin not in the supposed persistence of Judaism among the New Christians but in a concession the kings were forced to make to powerfully anti-Jewish popular sentiment, he radically altered the whole landscape of Hispano-Jewish studies. Toward the Inquisition is another major contribution to this historiographic revolution. Made up of seven of Netanyahu's essays, published over the last two decades and collected here for the first time, it further illuminates Jewish and Marrano history from the mid-fourteenth century to the end of the fifteenth century. The essays throw light on such long-obscured phenomena as the rise of the Nazi-like theory of race which harassed the conversos for three full centuries, or the abandonment of Judaism by most conversos decades before the Inquisition was established.

267 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Benzion Netanyahu(Benzion Mileikowsky), (born March 25, 1910, Warsaw, Russian Empire [now in Poland]—died April 30, 2012, Jerusalem), Polish-born Israeli historian and Zionist activist who was the father of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a longtime advocate (and one-time secretary) of Vladimir Jabotinsky, whose uncompromising Zionist Revisionist movement was pivotal in the fight for the state of Israel. The elder Netanyahu rejected a “two-state solution” as well as the possibility of political compromise between Jews and Arabs, and he publicly criticized his son’s apparent willingness to make concessions to foster peace with the Palestinians. Netanyahu was the son of a Zionist rabbi who moved his family to British-mandated Palestine in 1920 and changed their name from Mileikowsky. He studied history at Hebrew University of Jerusalem (M.A., 1933) and at Dropsie College of Hebrew and Cognate Learning, Philadelphia (Ph.D., 1947). He spent his academic career teaching in Israel and the U.S., notably at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., from which he retired. He also served as the editor of the Encyclopedia Hebraica and other Jewish scholarly publications and wrote extensively, though his critics denounced him as an ideologue and his books as polemics. His best-known work was the massive The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (1995), in which he argued that the persecution of the Jews during the Inquisition was based entirely on racial hatred and not on the belief (mistaken, in Netanyahu’s view) that they were not genuine Christian converts.

http://www.britannica.com/biography/B...