The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1035: Myths and Lies Regarding the Spanish Inquisition w/ Mark Weber

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

61 MinutesPG-13Mark Weber is the director of the Institute for Historic Review.Mark joins Pete to talk about the rumors, exaggerations, and outright lies told about the Spanish Inquisition.IHR.orgVIP Summit 3-Truth To Freedom - Autonomy w/ Richard GroveSupport Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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I'm happy to have him here. Mark Weber. How are you doing? Very good. Great to be with you. Right. Well, this is a subject that I've covered. You sent me a couple things from the IHR website that covered.

the Inquisition. And it's, I think we both agree that this is one of those subjects that has become a victim of history. Let's call it that. Where what happened and what is reported to have happened are either completely wrong or just so overly exaggeration. or truth or quote unquote truth has been added to it that well you have to really go searching for what the there were inquisitions in several countries specifically the Spanish

inquisition you have to go searching for exactly what it what it was so when did you start looking into the inquisition um I forget how this began we what is there on our website, there are two articles. One is a short, one which just basically makes the point that our understanding or the popular image of the Spanish Inquisition is very distorted. And the longer article is a review. It's really a review essay of a book by the father of the current Prime Minister of Israel. Benzion Netanyahu, his son Benjamin Netanyahu is the prime minister. His father devoted a lifetime to studying the Spanish Inquisition. And I think it was this book.

I forget how it came to my attention and what resulted in this lengthy review. But what is very clear, and I think what needs to be emphasized, a point you're making, the popular image of the Spanish Inquisition is very different than the reality. And the reason for that, the main reason for that, is because Spain, and England were major enemies for centuries, and that Protestant Spain and Catholic, I'm coming Protestant England and Catholic Spain, most famously, were enemies during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I first, when the Spanish Armada tried to invade England and take it over. This was tied up with a great religious question and a conflict of the

1500s, 1600s all across Europe. But so especially the British portrayal and common view of Spain was a very, very hostile one. And so in England particularly, and this is filtered over to America, the Spanish Inquisition was a shorthand for cruelty and barbarism and backwardness and darkness. is what is how Britain presented the Spain of King Philip II and Spain in general. And this has persisted, and that's carried over into America. And many people, their first time they ever heard of the Spanish Inquisition might be from the Monty Python show, where they did a skit about the Spanish Inquisition and so forth.

I guess it's true of me and for many other people. Our first taste of certain chapters of history comes from cartoons or, popular comic media presentations, and Monty Python has had great, very funny skits about different chapters of history, always from a very sort of English point of view, you might say. But anyway, I just want to underscore your point about how the Spanish Inquisition is presented is really terrible. Now, the review we've had that other people have made the point, courts in Spain were no more arbitrary or cruel than courts in Europe in general at that time, including in England, by the way.

But the courts of the Spanish Inquisition were actually in many ways more just or at least more diligent and more conscientious than courts in the rest of Europe at that time. Spain was not a backward dark country as English, especially Elizabethan propaganda portrays. But in Spain, the religion question was a very important one. And it was because of the history of Spain. It was in the end of the 15th century, 1400s, that Spain finally became united as a country when the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile united with the married. of Ferdinand and Isabella, the famous king and queen,

which who are also responsible for sending Columbus to the New World. He thought he was going to the Indies. And in the same year that Jews were expelled from Spain is the same year that Columbus set sail for what is now the Western Hemisphere. He thought he was going to the Indies. In fact, he died still thinking he had gone to the Indies. And then a few years after that, Spain expelled Muslims from Spain. Remember, it's very important to remember that for a long time, Spain, what is now Spain,

was under the control of Muslims. And the Muslims actually built a very impressive high level of civilization in especially southern Spain, in Cordoba, Sevilla, which I visited, by the way, some of these very impressive ruins, you might say, or leftovers from the Muslim period. Now, and so, but, so religion was extraordinarily important everywhere in Europe during this period of time, and not least in, in Spain, where it was tied up, not just with religion in a kind of strictly theological or religious way, it was tied up with the very identity of the country. To be Catholic was to be Spanish, to be Spanish was to be Catholic, to be anything other than Roman Catholic was not

not really English, not really Spanish. Whereas in England, people could still regard themselves as Roman Catholic and still be considered English. The British change was with Henry VIII when he broke with Rome for reasons having to do with high politics and establish the Church of England. Now, this is just a way of background. The focus that we're having, or at least the focus of this reveal, and for many people, is the very controversial role of Jews in Spain in the 15th and 16th centuries.

And this is important because a very important minority of Jews stayed in Spain after Jews were expelled who were nominally Christian, but in fact were secretly still Jewish. They were the so-called conversos or new Christians or in common parlance they called them Maranoes or pigs, really. And they were very, very influential, had very high-level positions and regarded themselves as a kind of, you might say, fifth column, because they retained a very strong sense of separate Jewish identity, even though they publicly claimed to be Christians. And the reason for the Spanish Inquisition was to identify and remove from power people who claimed to be Christian but were in fact still Jewish and regarded themselves as Jewish. Now, this is very controversial because not only England had this very harsh view of the Spanish Inquisition for centuries even beyond what the view in England was, Jews, of course, I'm using a generalization here, regard the Spanish Inquisition as one of the

most terrible, shameful, oppressive, awful chapters of history as far as they're concerned, because the Spanish Inquisition, much of its work and effort for a great period of time, was aimed at unmasking or identifying these secret Jews, these Conversos, as they call them in Spanish. And that's why it continues to be a very emotion-laden subject for many, many Jews. The history there before the 15th century is interesting, because if you go back to the Moorish invasion in the 8th century, 7-11, the Moors take over Spain. And famously, it's reported that they took the city of Toledo because the Jews opened the gates to allow the moors to come in. And basically that's set off 750 to 75 years of the Spanish not controlling their own country. And they had to have a reconquista that they could take it back.

And it took centuries and centuries and centuries in that time. as you mentioned, the Moors, the Muslims were building, especially in southern Spain, but also they allowed Jews to have rule over certain parts of the country. Bernard Bachrock talks about in his book, Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe, that the Jews took Christians as slaves, forced them to be circumcised, forced them to become Jews. So it's not that this, we don't get to 1492, and all of a sudden it's like, oh, everybody hates the Jews and we're going to kick them out. There's 700 to 800 years of history here that most people don't know because these history books are either trashed or the people who write the history books are people who want to hide this. Right. Well, to go to a specific point, one of the common accusations that people made about Jews in Spain is that they were traitors to Spain because they sided with the Moors. Well, the reason for that was because Jews had, in a sense, a better position under the Moors than they did under the Catholic, in Catholic Spain. And the reason for that is the Islamic religion, Muslims in general, regard Christians and Jews as fellow people of the people of the people.

book. Jews are regarded as a protected people, not as a people that should be converted, whereas Christians believe that everyone should be a Christian. And so in that sense, the Jewish role in Moorish Spain and in the Muslim world was actually a better one in a sense than it was in Christian Europe. Remember in England during this period of time, from 1290 to 1656, it was a crime to even be Jewish in England. Jews had been expelled in 1690, and Jews were not even allowed to live in Catholic and then Protestant England during this long period of time, whereas Jews were a subordinate but nevertheless protected minority in the Muslim world. So, yes, there's this long history, but anyway, that's one of the reasons why,

for many who were Spanish, Catholic, Rick Christian, they were already very dubious about Jewish role. One thing I just wanted to mention, one of the most influential Jewish newspapers in the United States is a daily paper called Forverts Forward, it later became a weekly, and for years, we had a subscription to the weekly edition of the Forward, then was published in English after a time, no longer in Yiddish. And I remember very well, there was a reproduction of a poster for an election in probably in 1908 or 194 urging Jews to vote for Theater Roosevelt. And the poster was in Yiddish. It had Yiddish characters, and the forward translated this.

And the interesting thing is it urged Jews to vote for Theater Roosevelt. because he was the rough rider who was fighting against the Spanish in the Spanish-American War in Cuba. And basically it said, vote for Thedore-Rosel because basically he kicked the Spanish ass. He was getting the Spanish, and we remember the Spanish, how bad the Spanish are. Now, the incredible thing is, imagine appealing for votes by people based, on what happened to your ancestors centuries earlier in that way. That's just an astonishing thing, but it underscores how, you might say, in the Jewish collective consciousness, Spain and the Spanish Inquisition are considered really buried, bad, dark chapters of history, and that

revenge for the Spanish Inquisition was a feeling of revenge was still manifest in appealing for votes for Theodore Roosevelt in the late 19th, early 20th century here in the United States. Those people who love going out shopping for Black Friday deals, they're mad, aren't they? Like, proper mad. Brenda wants a television and she's prepared to fight for it. If you ask me, it's the fastest way to a meltdown. Me, I just prepare the fastest way to get stuff, and it doesn't get faster than Appliancesdelivered.a.

Top brand appliances, top brand electricals, and if it's online, it's in stock. With next day delivery in Greater Dublin. Appliances Delivered.com, part of expert electrical. See it, buy it, get it tomorrow. Or you know, fight Brenda. Did you know, those Black Friday deals everyone's talking about? They're right here at Beacon South Quarter.

That designer's sofa you've been wanting. It's in Seoul, Boe Concept and Rocheburoix. The Dream Kitchen, check out at Cube Kitchens. Beacon South Quarter Dublin, where the smart shoppers go. Two hours free parking, just off the M50, exit 13. It's a Black Friday secret. Keep it to yourself. Ready for huge savings?

We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to value. Well as someone who through my father has traces a Spanish bloodline back to Spain, I'm willing to forgive them for the slavery and the, and what,

what happened from 700 to 1492 if they're willing to just get past what the reaction to what happened. Right. It's like, I, the only reason I ever bring it up is because, well, they won't forgive, they keep bringing it up. It's like, you know, the Kemmelnetsky uprising. I mean, you could point to the Kamlenzky uprising, you know, in Ukraine, Poland, whichever part of the world that was called at that time, to a lot of what's happening in the hatred of Russia and what's happening in Ukraine right now. They don't forget.

Kamelnetsky's, I think it's Hitler won Kamelniewski 2, Philip, the second three when it comes to their, like, hatred card. Well, you could take it all the way back to Moses and the Pharaoh. the Bible is very vague about who the Pharaoh was, but he's bad. And then, of course, the book of Ruth in the Old Testament is, give me, the book of Esther. And every year, a Jewish holiday that's celebrated to this day, Purim, is a day of celebration for having defeated the anti-Semites in what is now Iran. And that's still remembered. But my point is that that's part of the mindset, that Jewish history is not just events that happened in the past to someone.

They are tied up very much with the whole sense of ethics, and because ethics is measured to a very high degree in the Jewish community, not by a universal moral standard, but in terms of what's good for the Jewish people. And that's a fundamental difference. We could go into that in more detail. But the point is, it's a mindset that's very alien to most people in the world. For most people, moral, ethical standards are basically the golden rule, due to others as you would have them do to you. But the Old Testament, the covenant of the Old Testament, is one, a relationship not between God and humanity,

not between God and the individual, but between God and one people. And that is a, and from that flows a whole different ethical, moral sense compared to other religious groups and other people. But anyway, that's a larger point to be made, I suppose, because from that comes this never forgive, never forget attitude in which events that happened many, many centuries earlier, or even didn't happen. We don't really know if Moses even exists. or what his real role was. But for Jews, this is a very important part of the kind of collective consciousness. And from that kind of collective ethical system, a collective way of looking at issues even to this day,

including in the last several months in Israel, Palestine, Gaza. Well, getting back to the Inquisition, so 1492, Jews are expelled from Spain, unless they've converted to Catholicism. And the Inquisition, the Cortez, from what I understand the Cortez puts the Inquisition together, the Inquisitor's court, to find out whether Jews and Muslims who have converted to Catholicism have had actual genuine conversions. Joseph Demeistro talks about this in some of his letters where he explains that this, was the main concern was they had a list of questions to go down and certain things that they

could, certain ways of not interrogating, but having a conversation where they could tell whether they had had a genuine conversion or not. That's what you're understanding as well, right? Yes, that's correct. Yes. In the expulsion 1492, supposedly about a, estimates vary, but 165,000 to 400,000 Jews left the country, and about 50,000 converted or said they chose baptism. But of that 50,000, of course, this is what the, this is the crucial group we're talking about. Many of these people, in fact, and this is acknowledged even by Jewish historians, they regarded themselves and they secretly maintain this separate identity. They made sure their children married other people who were Jewish. They maintained the, and they

was a very important network in holding onto and keeping power in very high positions. And again, the situation also was similar, Bogdan Kamilnitsky, you mentioned earlier, because the king, these people had a very cozy relationship with the king because he would delegate these conversos to be tax farmers. That is, you're responsible for a certain area and all the taxes that you get a percentage of all the taxes that you can squeeze out of a given group. And of course, the king preferred to have as

enforcers, you might say, for his rule, Jews or conversos rather than Spaniards, because the Spaniards, the danger existed. If they were Spanish, they would have some sympathy for the common people, for the victims. And so the more oppressive the king was, the more there was dislike hatred against Jews because Jews were, as it were, enforcers or the enforcers for the king, especially in imposing taxes on the common people. That was a big problem, and that was much of the reason why there was this entity. And similar in what is now Ukraine, and in Poland, too, for a long period of time, Jews had this kind of privileged special status in Eastern Europe in which they were enforcing the role of whoever was really in charge.

And they could be counted on to be less merciful because they didn't have any commonality with the people who they were squeezing taxes out of and squeezing money on them. It reminds me of the stories I've heard about the opioid crisis being pushed in West Virginia and Florida. It started by they targeted non-American, non-white doctors to start pushing these forward, to start giving them out to people. And especially ones that had come from other countries because they felt like no questions would be asked. they would have, they would, you know, be more, because they came from somewhere else, they're under more scrutiny, maybe they had to go back to school, they're going to be more careful, they're just going to do what they're told, and they're going to pass it along, and maybe not even question, or even have a sympathetic thought for the white population that this was

targeted at. One of the criticisms that is made of the Spanish Inquisition, is that when it's carrying out investigations, it wanted to check on people's ancestry. And so it's considered very bad because they're, and in fact, Jewish writers will say, well, that's a pre-runner of the Hitler era. That's what they will say. But in fact, the people who are most concerned about purity of blood, as they would, as they say in Spanish, were Jews. It was Jews who emphasized this importance of ancestry. in fact, not merely in Spain, but even in the Jewish community to this day.

The state of Israel allows immigration and automatic citizenship for people coming into Israel, not based on their religion, but based on their ancestry. A person who is even one-quarter Jewish by ancestry qualifies for Jewish citizenship, even if the person is an agnostic or an atheist. And in Israel itself, of course, many people who many Jewish citizens of the state of Israel are very indifferent to religion. In fact, the founders of Israel, modern Israel, were rather indifferent. So the emphasis already fundamentally, and for centuries, among the Jewish community,

has been on ancestry by blood, not just by whatever the religion is. But the Spanish Inquisition, as part of its investigation, would look into whose ancestors somebody was, because that was often a very important indicator of whether this person was likely to be really a Catholic, really loyal to Spain or not. Well, where does it come in that the priests and the people on the inquisitor's, court now start torturing people and putting people on the rack, which there is no evidence that that even existed at the time. How did this come about when basically they just want to find out whether they're true or whether they're true Christians or not, then they're just going to expel them from the country? It almost makes it sound like they were going to torture people into

becoming Christians or some kind of just because you lied, this happened. It really, it makes no sense that the whole torture thing makes no sense. It would just be for violence's sake. It would just be for the sake of torturing somebody. Well, that's the impression that one gets from Monty Python or one gets from modern representations of the Spanish Inquisition is that the people just delighted. In fact, and again, I'm quoting from the Encyclopedia Britannica, Volume 21, the 1957 edition. And it says, it cannot be denied that the Inquisition in Spain was guilty of abuses and cruelties in the course of its long history, but it was no more unjust or inhumane than most other courts of Europe of its day. And it goes on to say, yes, sometimes it did use torture.

But so did everybody in Europe at that time. So did they do in Spain or in England or in other European countries. But torture was very, very seldom used. The image of the Spanish Equisition as people who got some sort of gleeful joy out of torturing people is quite inaccurate. There was even a series on BBC some years ago about the Spanish and Spain and the Inquisition. And it made the point that one of the reasons we know so much about the Inquisition is that its investigations and its hearings and its conclusions were recorded very meticulously. The records exist of the Spanish Inquisition, and they are very detailed and they're very voluminous. So we have a very good idea of what actually happened when the Spanish Inquisition, the Inquisition in General and Courts operated in Spain.

And they had very high level of regard for the guidelines, for the standards, for the regulations that the Spanish Inquisition was supposed to operate by. And again, this is completely contrary to the image of the Spanish Inquisition as basically a gang of sadists who were out to gleefully torture people almost just to see people. suffer. That's the impression that one often has. And it's a very misleading one. Another thing, too, is when one looks at the whole history of Jews in Spain, especially during the period after the expulsion of 1492, is just how they held power through not just the networking of their own efforts, but by bribing, cajoling, flattering non-Jews to come to their defense. In other words, it was very important that they find people who are non-Jewish to support them. Another thing, too, are the parallels between how Jews held power, held on to power in Spain before and

in the case of conversos after the expulsion, with very clever arguments. They would come up with, there was a whole lot of literature published by conversos and their allies to give intellectual support to their position and to criticize those who were anti-Jewish, who were hostile to the Jews. And Jews, of course, were very well educated. their arguments are often intellectually impressive, although they're, of course, very biased to promote their own interests.

But my point is I'm trying to make here, though, is how useful non-Jews were in promoting Jewish interests by these are people, non-Jews who are paid, supported, and so forth. There's a famous incident when, in 1419, In 1992, supposedly, Isabella and Ferdinand are meeting with a Jewish delegation, which is offering them 20,000 ducats, or 50,000 gold ducats, if they will rescind the expulsion order. It's an apocryphal story, but it's been widely repeated because it sort of illustrates a point. the king and king, Isabel and Ferdinand, are meeting with this Jewish delegation, and the Jewish delegation is making all sorts of clever intellectual kind of arguments

about why they shouldn't be expelled, but then they strengthen it by offering essentially a huge bribe to the king and queen if they will allow Jews to stay in Spain. And supposedly at the moment when the king and queen are just about to approve, the Jewish request, Torquamato comes into the room. And here's about this, he comes into the room. And he says, our Lord Jesus was betrayed for 20 pieces of silver. And you are ready to betray our people for 30,000 gold ducats. And at that point, they're embarrassed. And then the king and queen decide not to accept the money. Now, it's an apocryful story, but the point is, it underscores the efforts that were

made by the Jewish community, both before and after the expulsion, to hold on to power by flattering, cajoling, bribing, and supporting those who were going to be helpful for their interests, and by suppressing those who were their critics and harmful to their interests. I think one of the more telling pieces of evidence that the Inquisition wasn't a, you know, wasn't meant to crack down on and punish conversos is the fact that after they spoke to many of them, they were allowed to stay in the country. This wasn't a court that was designed to make a decision and here's your decision, wink, wink. You know, you're going to be fair, wink, wink, but we're going to kick them all out. No, there were conversos who were interviewed by the court, and the court was like genuine conversion. They're allowed to stay.

They're Spanish citizens. That's right. That's true. And the question is, I mean, some people have intellectual scholars have tried to say, well, to what extent were the conversos? sincere in their conversion and to what extent were they deceitful. And one of the biggest proofs or evidence of how deceitful they were is that in case after case, conversos would leave Spain, and they would go to, in many cases, to Holland, Netherlands, or to other countries.

And immediately after arriving outside, in a country outside of Spain, they immediately publicly declared themselves to be Jewish. In other words, the proof, it's very obvious, even Jewish scholars will concede that the so-called conversion, for the vast majority of these so-called conversos, was insincere, that they were not really Catholic, and by extension, they're not really loyal to Spain, at least as the Spanish themselves saw it. That's the real crucial point here, I think. Well, once trials to find out whether they are, they've had a genuine conversion pretty much end, it seems like the Cortez liked the procedure and the way they handled themselves so well that they actually,

what people think that this is just 400, you know, 400 years, 315 years of religious persecution. But no, they actually became the court in the country, and robbers and murderers were brought to them. And they were, apparently this system had become so well respected that they were the ones who would give not guilty or a guilty. And they were trusted to do this. Well, this is a point, again, that quite a few historians have. emphasized, and as I said, there was even a British television series on this point, that the inquisition was meticulous. It had very stringent guidelines, standards by which it was supposed to weigh evidence and evaluate evidence, and that we know this because it had such careful records.

It was not some, this was not a Stalinist court or something like that, where they're just determined to get somebody and with the with the sentence already decided before the court even even meets. But yeah, this is a important point, is that these Inquisition courts were diligent and conscientious and operated according to standards that were adhered to. there was even one story that I read in de Maestra's book where the there was a man I was going to look up his name real quick because he actually even mentioned it but he was found convicted of selling like fake potions sex potions to the people and the court decided that his punishment would be that he would be that he would be paraded through the town that he victimized the most, and the people would be able to do whatever they wanted to him. And the people brought him out wine and cakes.

Hmm. It's, it's, it's, when you, when you hear stories like that about the inquisition where it's like, well, you know, if he did this to the people, the people, the people should decide what, uh, what should be done to him. And they decided to, uh, forgive him. obviously. So yeah, and when you take into consideration that the Inquisition went to about, I guess, 1812-ish, 1815-ish, and over the span of that, the best estimate that we can have of people who were actually put to death because the Inquisition found them guilty, and that's what they recommended, was around 3,000 over the span of 315 years.

3,000 puts a death in that time, in that time in our history, in one country over 315 years, is unheard of. Other countries were doing that in a year, in a year's time, in two years' time. Well, of course, we're very aware, of course, about how many people lost their heads

in the French Revolution. in a period of maybe one year, two years, three years. And of course, in England during this period of time, when Bloody Mary, of course, killed Protestants, and then when Elizabeth was back on, she had many Catholics. It was a crime in Elizabethan England for a Catholic to openly propagate or hold mass and so forth. That was also punished by death. And, of course, Henry VIII, the founder of the Church of England,

he had even several of his wives put to death because having sexual relations with anybody other than the king was considered treason because the king incorporated the nation. And so betraying the king as a person was betraying the country and the penalty for that was death. But no, I mean, this is also a time in which in England, Netherlands, Germany, France, many, many women were put to death as witches, for heaven's sakes and died in very horrible ways. And, of course, one of the most famous punishments was, of course, Joan of Arc, the woman who became a symbol for French freedom against the English in France. And she was captured by the English, declared to be a witch, a heretic, and burned to death. But anyway, my point is this was a cruel period. This is in history all over Europe.

And the Spanish Inquisition actually comes out at least as good or, if much, much better than the comparable courts or judicial agencies in other countries in Europe at that time. And even in the United States or, well, there wasn't any really United States at that time, but in Europe. Pam. What would you, what's your opinion when you look at the, the inquisition, how long it lasted, and the fact that it coincides with what's called Spain's Golden Age? You think it had anything to do with that? Well, this is, this gets into a very interesting thing about history and how Jews see their own role. Very often, a narrative or a point. that's made by Jewish writers is that a cultural blossoming, a cultural greatness is not possible without Jews.

That's in effect what they say. Without Jews, things would, television in America would look like the shopping network, or it would be a little more than reruns of grand old opera and he-ha or something. And that's really ridiculous. One of the most obvious examples of that is the most fruitful period in English literature was during the Elizabethan period. Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and this is at a time when the government was by modern standards a dictatorship, an autocracy. and there wasn't any freedom of religion. Jews were not even allowed in the country.

Catholics who practiced their religion were punished. But the cultural life that was the era that gave birth to Shakespeare. In fact, well, or in Europe, I mean, Bach is considered a great composer, but he lived in a cultural life that certainly wasn't a diverse one, wasn't a multicultural one. It was very just the opposite. And in fact, I think it's fair to say that the development of a high cultural expression of any society is when it is most faithful to itself, when it is a real expression of its own cultural heritage, its own culture, and any effort, efforts to be a culture for everyone or universal, are pitiful.

Because if one is trying to be everything, one ends up being nothing. But, and there's some other examples I could give. But the point is this, Spain, earlier this past year, I read Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes, a work that has, survive for centuries and has been an enormous inspiration, even to the point of being inspiration for a very popular musical, Man of La Mancha. But this is during this period. One of the interesting things about reading, I think the book is rather repetitious. There's some modern editor would have cut out a lot of things in the book, but it's a brilliant book and of course a brilliant writer. But over and over, there are references to Jews in the book in which they're not depicted in a very friendly or happy way, you might say.

I'll just leave it at that. But anyway, this triumph of Spanish literature was produced during a time when Jews were not even allowed in the country. And the culture in the culture was very, very Spanish, a very, you might say, well, it was a high manifestation of a very particular culture, not an attempt to be a universal one. Right. Yeah. It always seems like whenever a culture comes together and really narrows itself, you have times of great art. You have times of great music. You have times of, even if there aren't great rich, even if it's not the richest culture, it's not a culture that's suffering degradation. It's not a culture that is in danger of losing its identity.

And when you look at how orderly monocultures are, I mean, just look at recent, for certain attacks on certain weaponized immigration attacks. You can go and look at Sweden, and you can look at their crime rates before this attack. They were some of the lowest in the country. I mean, even liberals in this country, even Bernie Sanders would talk about how Sweden is the, that's what we want to be like.

That's the model. And it's like, well, we can't do that. And there's a reason we can't do that. And now, look at Sweden. Sweden's still doing good, still doing well when it comes to, manufacturing when it comes to business. But look at the crime rates. Why would the crime rates go up in Sweden?

What happened that caused crime rates to go up? Why is there, why have they redefined what rape is? Why have they, why are there grenade attacks in the streets? Well, this is what happens when you introduce two completely different cultures and completely different worlds together. And, you know, anybody who knows that Barbara Ler-Spector was in Sweden 15 years ago talking about this can put two and two together. Back to what you said about culture, though, and cultural life. We often hear the term that a piece of art or music might be called decadent or degenerate, and oftentimes the words are used interchangeably.

But they mean very different things. A degenerate comes from Latin, meaning it's alien. It's not from one's own genus, one's own people. And by implication, when art becomes unruited, from a culture, from one's own culture or a culture, then it becomes inferior. It becomes decadent. But very few people, I think, realize that the word degenerate means

it's become unrooted from one's own people, one's own cultural heritage and legacy. And it does not mean the same thing as decadent. And yet the effect is the same. That is, art that is highly individualistic or highly universal ends up being really not art at all. It becomes very, the standard inevitably is lowered. In the same way that attempts to create an egalitarian society mean inevitably lowering standards of quality and achievement and accomplishment across the board in order to achieve this elusive goal of equal outcome. of equity, they say.

Yeah, people don't realize, people forget that in the word equality, quality is right there. And if you're going to, equality is basically, you're degrading it. You're making it something less. You're actually watering it down. And that seems like something that we can point to in history whenever anybody tries to make people's equal, that there's just a water. down and a lot either side is going to lose their who they are you know it's people a lot of people complain about the prussian schooling system and how it was brought here and you know that's they

blame they say oh well you know they brought the prussian schooling system and the prussian schooling system it didn't work here it does that means it didn't work there no it worked perfectly there And why did it work there? Because it was homogenous society. They were trying to figure out where people fit into their culture, where people fit into their society. And when it was brought here, not only did it just basically begin to strip not only the founding stock of who they are and their culture, but every other culture is well suffered because you're turning everybody into these, you're trying to turn everybody into cogs in the machine. And that really only, you can really only work that out if you're in a culture that is willing to, that's related to each other and that is homogenous is, is of one. Once you introduce that into a culture where there's more, where there's more than one culture, you're just going to, it's just going to create war.

I'd like to just read a brief passage from this review that appears, review essay that appears on her essay. And it's about intellectual life as it relates to the Inquisition and the role of Jews in 15th and 16th century Spain. And I'm going to read this. In their intellectual struggle, the conversos, that is these secret Jews, recruited prominent and respected old Christians, that is Spanish Christians, to their cause. Lope de Barientos, an old Christian and bishop of Soenka,

was recruited by Converso Fernand Diaz to write a tract supporting the Christian orthodoxy of most conversos and condemning their enemies. And although the tract was actually a little more than a revision of one that Diaz himself had actually written, Yeah, in this struggle, the conversos recruited prominent and respected old Christians, a strategy commonly employed by Jews through the ages.

Even in the ancient world, they're developed an entire apologetic literature written by Jews masquerading as non-Jews. And in modern societies, Jews have often covertly funded organizations headed by prominent non-Jews that combat anti-Semitism or otherwise promote Jewish interests. And examples of this phenomenon in 20th century America include the successful campaigns to establish a U.S. trade embargo against Zoroast Russia, to revise American immigration policy, to promote maximum racial and cultural pluralism. But very often, Jews will find some non-Jewish person to be a kind of frontman or for their interests because they think. understandably that people will be more sympathetic to that than when it's really, even if the money behind it is very heavily from Jews, the front people who are representing their interests

are going to be very often non-Jewish. And we see this in political life, we see this in cultural life. But another point too, I just want to make a final one, is that intellectually the Jewish and converso, you might say secret Jewish proponents, were generally more sophisticated than the people who were their adversaries. They were very well educated. And this is another point from this essay. A striking feature of the struggle over the new Christians in 15th century Spain was that their defenders were intellectually far more sophisticated.

than their opponents. Collectively, they dominated the literature of the period. And this has often been true in other areas as era as well, including the Dreyfus affair and in the United States today. Now, the reason I'm bringing it up is because we see this in America today. I think it's fair to say the New York Review books, the New York Times, are on a higher intellectual level. They're more polished writing.

they're more sophisticated, generally speaking, than their adversaries than others. And that's unfortunately the case. And it's important that when these battles take place, it not only be, it has to be fought, just it might say in terms of numbers or money or something, but also intellectually. And that is because the people who are leaders in any society, with some exceptions, I mean, generally, leaders have to feel that their arguments are rational, reasonable. They're supported by the evidence. And not to be impressed by arguments that seem to be rational, reasonable,

which in fact are to a large degree sophistry. That is, they're impressive, but actually based on premises and assumptions, which are in fact not true. But we're seeing this increasingly, I think, remarkable things are happening in America and in Europe. And there's more and more people coming to the fore, I think, who can hold their own against the intellectuals of the New York Times or CNN or public broadcasting or national public radio.

Yeah, it seems the propaganda, even the propaganda. is starting to slip. It's starting to fall. The quality of it is starting to degrade. And I don't know whether that, I don't know what the reason, I can't tell exactly what the reason is for that. But it definitely seems like the things that, things that people would have bought into in the past, especially when it comes to Ukraine or it comes to the Israel, Israel, Gaza. And, People just aren't buying into it now, and more and more people are just saying no. Now, populism, I don't really think populism changes things. I think small groups and elites change things.

But the more people who start waking up to this, the more they can at least recognize it, at least not fall for it, and at least not promote it. And then maybe the elites that are in charge now just weaken that much. much more. I think unquestionably a major factor in this awareness is that Jews around the world now have a country that they say is their country, namely Israel. In the past, Jews could say in America or France or England, Germany, and say, well, we're really loyal citizens of our country, this country, and you're just persecuting us because

we're a different religion or something like that. The rise and the reality of the state of Israel makes Jews far more they themselves identify with this country and its policies and interests, and thereby make themselves more obviously identifiable as a people whose first and priority loyalty is not to the country in which they live, but to this international Jewish people, Zionism, Israel, and so forth. And we see that now just in the last few months when American Jewish leaders, of course, are very supportive of the policies of a country that's not the United States, namely Israel. But Israel's interests are not the same as the interests of the United States or of Europe or any other country. It's their Israeli interests, but Jews in America, Jews in Europe, identify with it.

Again, because in the world we live in, religion is not the main way in which we think of ourselves in terms of identity and our goals, our vision of ourselves. We have a very different one. So it's in that way very, very different than 15, 16th century, Spain and Europe in which the religious identity was so much, was inextricably tied up with one's own historical. and ethnic cultural identity as well. Well, we're coming up on an hour here. Was there anything else that from the work you have there or the notes you have there that you thought was important that you'd want to interject?

Well, it's just that almost every, well, what we try to do, I try with the IHR in general and in the kind of discussions we're having is we talk about history that is relevant for our times. What lessons, what can we learn for what, happened in this or that period. That's why we're not particularly interested in the history of the War of the Roses or the chapters of history that don't have at least some sort of relevance to the times in which we live today. And by the same token, we try to look at what's going on in

our world today from a historical perspective. That is, what parallels can we see in what's happening now compared to the cycle of events that took place 100 or 200 or 500 or 500 or 500 years ago or even of 2,000 years ago. Because history, as people commonly say, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. That is, no events are exactly the same, but patterns do persist. And we're seeing today parallels in the news we get day by day, week by week. with events that did happen in the past, and we can learn from, we can better understand what's happening in our world by understanding of the parallels with other times, other societies,

not only in America, but around the world, 50, 100, 200, 300, 300 years ago. As we both know that when you start talking about these patterns and you start pointing them out to people has been like, here, we think we've been through this before. So what are we going to do about this? We have an example here. You get called hateful and you get called a bunch of different things and people try to cancel you. But I think there is no, how do you not talk about it? How do you not talk about the period of the founding of the United States and slavery and what the decision to bring slaves here, what that caused, and how do you not bring these up? And when you do that, you have to bring up a certain race, a certain race of people. It's just, it's, it's, it's utter

foolishness, and it really is a sign of the times that you can't talk openly about group of people as groups that are interested and have group preferences and group and group interest. I mean, you know, I guess it's okay for pretty much every group to have interest except for white people. Right, right, right. Well, okay. Well, I've enjoyed being on with you, and I'm glad we had this conversation. And I encourage people, of course, to take a look at our website and look into other books, which have also tried and other sources that have also tried to look at a lot of these questions

from a historical point of view. Thank you, Mark. I appreciate it. I look forward to the next time. Thank you. very much, Peter.