The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1072: The Spanish Empire 1492-1659 - Pt. 1 - The Disputation of Tortosa w/ Paul Fahrenheidt

Episode Date: June 27, 2024

61 MinutesPG-13Paul Fahrenheidt is a husband, father, podcaster, writer, and founding member of the Old Glory Club.Paul joins Pete to start a series on Spain's Golden Age. He begins by talking about what can be known of the Disputation of Tortosa.A Country Squire's NotebookOld Glory Club YouTube ChannelOld Glory Club SubstackPaul's SubstackPaul on TwitterAntelope Hill - Promo code "peteq" for 5% off - https://antelopehillpublishing.com/FoxnSons Coffee - Promo code "peter" for 18% off - https://www.foxnsons.com/VIP 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.

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 Liddle 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. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design, they move you, even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range For Mentor, Leon and Terramar Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2000 euro Search Coopera and discover our latest offers Coopera

Design that moves Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited Subject to lending criteria Terms and conditions apply Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regular by the Central Bank of Ireland.

If you want to support the show and get the episodes early and ad-free, head on over to freemam Beyond the Wall.com forward slash support. There's a few ways you can support me there. One, there's a direct link to my website. Two, there's subscribe star. Three, there's Patreon.

Four, there's substack. And now I've introduced Gumroad, because I know that a lot of our guys are on Gumroad, and they are against censorship. So if you head over to Gumroad and you subscribe through there, you'll get the episodes early and ad-free, and you'll get an invite into the telegram group. So I really appreciate all of the support everyone's giving me, and I hope to expand the show even more than it already has. Thank you so much. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show, returning after a little bit of a hiatus.

Mr. Paul Fahrenheit. How are you doing, Paul? I'm doing very well, Mr. Pete. Thank you for having me back on. Well, been looking forward to this. You had mentioned it to me after the last time, or maybe the next to the last time we recorded,

talking about the Golden Age of Spain, specifically King Philip the Second's reign. But you have to start somewhere, and you normally just don't jump in. You need some kind of context. So, yeah, you told me about, you know, maybe we should start with a disputation or sort of. Always, always the pronunciation on it, and I'm supposed to be, I'm supposed to be Spanish. Disputation of Tortosa.

Yeah, so, you know, where do you want to start? So, okay, so before I go into the disputation of Tortosa, right, you know, you. You can never talk about any historical topic on any sort of audio-driven content without actually talking about literally the prior 300 years. But I'm not going to bore the listeners with that. But what I would like to give is a little bit of how the Iberian Peninsula particularly is very unique amongst Western European polities, particularly during the Middle Ages. All right. So as you all know, also a little bit of my background, Spain and the Iberian Peninsula and Portugal were among my specialties in undergrad. And when I, when I, you know, I actually, I don't mean to like throw my credentials out there, but I do have a literal history degree, which is why I talk about it so much. And one of the one of my specialties, one of the areas I concentrated in, if you ever find the Paul

Fahrenheit YouTube channel, the much mythologized YouTube channel. There's only one video that I've actually done that isn't, you know, playing video games with my Russian friend who lives in Sicily, Bobby. What is it? There's this video I did on Spangler's treatment of the Spanish in his essay Prussianism and socialism, which I'd highly recommend all of you read. It's great. It's a great essay and it really, I think people will be surprised at just how much he looks at the Spanish golden age as like maybe the pinnacle of European civilization. What Florence and Paris were for like, you know, for European cultural production, the Spanish Empire at the height of its reign at with Philip II was the peak of Western sort of military and political culture.

if you understand what I mean by that. But yeah, like so, so, but I, I talk about the Spanish. I love the Spanish, which is made even stranger by the fact that I'm a diehard Protestant. But I really like the Spanish as a people, as, you know, the Portuguese as well, but they're, they're kind of beyond the scope of this. So this is something that I've, it really is near and dear to my heart. and I want to give them the fairest shake that I can. And I actually, I really, I really do believe that they're in, not only, you know, their character and behavior as a people, but their intentions and

actions as a people really do reflect on their quality. And I have nothing but admiration for the Spaniards and for their various cultural offspring. But what I want to start to emphasize is the difference that the Iberian Peninsula has from the rest of Western Europe. Italy kind of shares it, but it's not the same with Italy, right? Because what is it? So the kind of, I'm trying to think of the metaphor, the elephant in the room about Spain is that it's a borderland, right? It was ruled by the Muslims for, from about, one was last? 7-11 to really technically 1450, 1492-ish. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're, you're Right. Sorry, I was, I was remembering a different battle. I was remembering the opposite

battle actually, which, which ended their dominance, which was Las Navas de Tolosa, which occurred in 1212. Yeah, but it took another 250 years to get them out. I'm trying to remember what the what the battle that the Visigoths lost in. Wow, yeah, what a, what a, yeah, the battle that's right. What a great Spanish historian doesn't even know the battle that the mother's Muslims conquered the Visigoths. Yeah, anyway. But yeah, at a functionally broad overview in like 30 seconds of Spain's history, right?

Initially settled by like some pre-Western hunter-gatherer tribes, etc. Celts move in, start interbreeding with the indigenous, not indigenous, but I don't know. Start interbreeding with the tribes there. Create this group of people called the Celtiberians, all right? Um, they're just as, you know, Celtic with, you know, sort of different folkways as the ones in Brittany as the ones that would later end up in Ireland and in Highland, Scotland and in Gaul. Um, really famous for metalworking, very famous metal workers. Um, really good at, um, shaping bronze, shaping steel when it, and iron when it get, when they get introduced. Um, and when the Romans conquer Hispania, um, they actually, um, they actually, um, adopt the the Celtiberian sword as the gladius the gladius was not a roman innovation they took it

from the tribes in iberia um you know rome romanizes uh hispania it actually as um as mainland italy gets more and more full and more and more controlled by landowners roman legionaries move over to hispania more and more because the climate's very similar uh there's a lot more land and you know the last land was a lot cheaper. So that's that's kind of how Hispania works. The city of Valencia, which I think means valor, was established exclusively as a city for Roman veterans to live in. But Rome Falls, the Visigoths, which are one of the various tribes, conquer all of Iberia, well, not all of Iberia, the Lusitanians up in the, up in the mountains of Galicia,

and Asturius resist them. But for the most, but for the most, most part conquer all of the non-remote parts of Iberia and most of Southern Gaul. The Franks kicked them out of Southern Gaul, but they mostly hold hold in Iberia. Have you done a show on the Visigothic kingdom? I remember for some reason that you that you did some shows on the Visigoths. I could be wrong on that. No, I promote American Krogan who has a, he has a long series on it. Yeah, yeah. That's right. Yeah, that's who I'm remembering. Yeah, American Krogan has a very long series on the Visigothic kingdom, and I'm not even going to attempt to touch that. So I would, I would, yeah, that's right. I remember someone did something like that. Yeah, I'd recommend all of you, because I've watched that. I recommend all of you go over and watch that. Because he treats it with a lot more detail than we can here. But the prophet Muhammad creates and Islam starts spreading. by the tip of the sword, Arab armies start moving like a snowballing steamroller throughout

all of a large amount of former Roman territories. The vandals get essentially deleted. They were a Germanic tribe, which had settled in North Africa. And they functionally got deleted. And then Islamic armies made up largely of Berbers and Arabs, and I think some former vandals, they cross the Mediterranean to Gibraltar, which gets its name Jabal Tarik from the commanding general of the Arabian, or not Arabian, of the Islamic forces. They fight at, as you just told me, the Battle of Toledo in which the Visigothic forces are more or less crushed in one single battle, and a certain segment of the population that is living in Toledo opens the gates to ensure that, you know, the whole of the Visigothic

kingdom falls to the, to the, uh, Islam accords. So, and this is the general, the general, um, you know, idea of Spanish history. Now the, the, the, the, I don't know if it was Al-Andalus at first. It was the, uh, first it was the Abbasids. And then when the Abbasids, not the Abbas, it was the Umayyads first. And then when the Umayyads fell and the Abbasids took over, the Umayyad's, fled out to the remaining Umayyads fled out actually to Iberia. And then, you know, Al-Andalus and the various northern Christian kingdoms, you know, everyone who's played Crusader Kings too knows the kingdom of Asturias, which then later splits off into Navarre, Castile, Leon, Galicia, which gets absorbed by Leon, and then Leon,

which gets absorbed by Castile. And then, you know, the Crusades come in. But like, like the idea of the Reconquista had already kind of started before the Crusades really started. And so now that I fast forwarded through that first 1,000 years or so of Spanish history, and I stopped on this point, what differentiated Spain and the Iberian Peninsula from just about every other Western European polity, including even Italy, which was somewhat similar, was the fact that Spain was a borderland between the Islamic world in North Africa and the Christian world in Europe. This was largely, you know, you had not only, not only did you have a Muslim kingdom right next to a Christian kingdom.

You had like even down to the micro, to the local level, you had Muslim towns next to Christian towns or, you know, Muslim neighborhoods next to Christian neighborhoods. within or even like Muslim houses next to Christian houses, like they were on top of each other. And modern scholars love, they absolutely love to fall over themselves pointing at this period. They call it Convivencia or the coexistence period. They love to point at this and they're like, oh, wow, this was such a great period of tolerance. And, you know, they talk about, you know, how tolerant the Christian kings were. unlike those icky Christians today, how tolerant those wonderful Christians were back then in doing things like, you know, not enforcing their own religion's precepts, you know,

which we love it when they do that. We love Christians when they do. I don't mean to be, I don't mean to sound so freaking snarky, Mr. Pete, but like this is, this is kind of the attitude you get from these modern day scholars. But amongst all of the Christians and Muslims was a very large population of Jews. They, they have been living in the Iberian Peninsula really since Roman times. They never went away. They ended up, would later end up developing what was called the Sephardic tradition, which some of you are familiar with. And their close proximity to Christians, particularly as, you know, as time went on, especially after the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, when the momentum very much switched from the Muslims in Al-Andalus to the Christian kingdoms,

Castile, Leon, Navarre, and then later Aragon, which was established later on, which is going to be the center of a focus for this show. Twelve minutes in, we finally got into the place where we're going to talk about. within these different places, Christians and Jews living in close proximity in a way that they did not live in other places in Western Europe and even in Eastern Europe, like France, Germany, the low countries. There weren't really, there were very few Jews in England. And, you know, at the time of the Reformation in Scotland, there were no Jews in Scotland. And I've been told that that's because the Scots can teach the Jews a few things about money. but they were all over the place in the Mediterranean world, but more so, largely so in Iberia,

because the Muslims had their custom of Jizia, which was, you know, the religious tax. And so they just allowed Christians and Jew, you know, they call peoples of the book Christians and Jews to just live among them. And if they just paid a tax, they were considered dimmys. And a lot of times they didn't even enforce that, that, you know, it was, it was very, it was a very libertarian place, Mr. Pete. It was, it was like the closest, there's a reason that all those Wild West cowboy movies were shot in Spain is because in the Middle Ages, the Iberian Peninsula very much was sort of like a borderland. It was like the wild west and the sense of it's like, you know, there's all of these competing jurisdictions from these like totally alien worlds that are just so close to each other. and you can just kind of ride that. You know, you can just hop.

Pst, 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. You catch them in the corner of your eyes. I. Distinctive, by design. They move you, even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon, and Terramar.

Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2,000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Coopera, design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services, Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28th to 30th because the Liddle 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-Newbridge Warehouse sale 28th to 30th of November little more to value well Spain always had those you know the autonomous zones autonomous areas and one of the things when I was when Carl Dahl was on recently we were talking about the Spanish Civil War you know I said I asked them I said do you think that that is you know what basically led to the splits that we eventually saw because When you have decentralization, when you have a not so nationalistic kind of feeling, according to Israel, Shahok, it's very easy.

Jews thrive very well in countries that are liberal, decentralized, don't have a very nationalistic kind of attitude. towards them. And as soon as nationalism starts to rear its head, they start running into problems. Yeah, that is true. Or at least I could very, I could very, I could very easily see the argument for that. And if that argument is true, then Spain in the Middle Ages would have been one of their favorite places, and it was because they could play the Muslims against the, Christians against the Muslims or whatever and, you know, and pop between courts and, you know, they had all of this knowledge from their, from their old archives that, I don't know was, was, they would take, they would take knowledge from the Arabic archives and, you know, sometimes come and sell it to Christian princes who didn't have access to those texts at the time. There was this, this, this growing trend of specifically Jewish physicians within, within Iberia.

They were very well renowned as physicians because they had retained a lot of the medical science that the Arabs had kind of taken from the Byzantines. And they started reintroducing it to the Western European countries that didn't have as well developed of a practice of it. But what was it? As the Christian kingdom started gaining more political influence, started conquering more territory in this sort of convivation. what was also called the typha system of everyone was just paying tithe to each other, Muslims to Christians, Christians to Muslims and all that. You had, you know, bands of Christian knights who would fight for Muslim lords and bands of like Muslim, you know, horsemen fighting for Christian lords. It was, it was a big old mess. It was a really big mess. This is where the story of El Cid comes from.

And, yeah, but one of the, this, this, this all of the, this, this, this, this, all of the, this, this, this, this, started causing what is it a lot of a secular and religious leaders because the Catholic Church wanted to start extending more and more influence over this newly acquired territory of Hispania and the Dominican order very specifically which which was you know primarily focused upon spreading of the Catholic faith by force if necessary. They ran the medieval inquisition, which is different from the Spanish Inquisition,

which most people think about. Small little aside here, right? I'm a Protestant, but one of the worst polemical attacks that Protestants can take against the Catholic Church is trying to go after it for the Spanish Inquisition. The Spanish, that's like, what is it? That's like historical revisionists.

It would be like a World War II revisionists going after the United States for going to war with Japan. You know, it's like, it's a totally foreign entity. Like the Inquisition was pointed at a completely different people. And personally, I thought it was warranted, given the situation that they were found and that this disputation we're going to be talking about sort of led to. Yeah, I've covered the Inquisition from Joseph De Maestro's letters on my show. And, yeah, the Inquisition, once it served its initial purpose,

They just basically stayed on as probably one of the most useful and edifying court systems of all time, legal systems of all time. Absolutely. And, you know, like I said, I think there's more constructive conversations we can have instead of just, you know, polemically slinging stuff at each other about the Inquisition, which, as you said, like, just the historical record speaks for itself. was like unbelievably fair and balanced for what they were working with. The main thing that people try to bring up is, oh, there were priests cutting people's heads off, and none of that happened. They just basically, they did the investigations, and they examined people to see if they were in the faith,

to see if they had a genuine conversion. And then after that was, that era went away, they would bring murderers. to them. They would bring people to them and they would investigate them. And then they would just report back to the Cortez their findings. And then the Cortez would do whatever, you know, they would decide, well, you know, we're going to kill these people. So, and, you know, as Thomas pointed out in our Spanish Civil War series, and the whole time the Inquisition was going on, which was about 350 to 400 years, you, you catch them in the corner of your eye, distinctive by design. They move you, even before you drive.

The new Cooper plugin hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon, and Terramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2,000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Coopera. Design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services, Ireland Limited, subject to lending criteria.

Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Pst, 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. there were about 3,000 people that the court says put to death. And in the first six months of the Spanish Civil War, the Republicans, the anarchists,

and the communists killed upwards almost 10,000 clergy people. Alone? Yeah. Yeah. So let's clergy seminarians, lay people in the church. So, yeah, let's slow down a little bit, you know. No, I'm absolutely with you on that. You know, there, anyway, but so what did, what, what started occurring in the 1200s, was these, this, this phenomenon of disputations.

All right. There was, I think there was, there was, you know, the first one I want to think of is the disputation of Barcelona. But there were, this was a common thing in, or at least this started becoming popular. after the sort in the in the high middle ages after the the the crusades kind of come to a close um in the high middle ages when europe starts kind of building itself up a little bit these these disputations started becoming popular you know any you know all these christian rulers wanted to you know win back the the the lost sheep of the faith the people who had not who had the same texts but you know hadn't recognized the messiah and of course you know these christian rulers

had very little, if any, familiarity with the Talmud, which is the actual text that most of these Jewish communities were organizing themselves off of. And so these medieval disputations, the first one was the disputation of Paris, which was ordered by St. Louis, Louis X. between the Franciscans and a bunch of, what is it, and a bunch of distinguished rabbis.

And, you know, the debate didn't end very well for the latter party. And St. Louis, Louis, the 9th of France, condemned the Talmud to be burned. And the, you know, the Talmud was sort of rooted out of France during King Louis' reign. then about 23 years later, the disputation of Barcelona occurs before King James of Aragon, James I. And this was between an individual who was by the name of Pablo Cristiani,

who was a convert from Judaism. He became a Dominican friar. And the very famous Nachmonides, which a lot of historians of the Middle Ages, love to fawn over as like, oh, he was this, he was this great man of learning and, and and refinement and all this other stuff. And that one kind of ended in the favor of the, of the latter party, mostly because

King James, I don't think he was, I don't think he was very interested in, I don't think he's very interested in advancing the Christian faith, just based off of his judgment that he had in that in that disputation. And he very famously cause, he very, very famously says to Nakamonide's that he's never heard

an unjust cause so nobly defended. However, Naimonides was exiled after it and, you know, and the Talmud was censored, but it was kind of a,

kind of a sort of a minor thing. Those are the two big ones, the disputation of Paris and the disputation of Barcelona. But what we are going to talk about is specifically the disputation of Tortosa. Now, Jewish histories will write all about the disputation of Barcelona. They love the disputation of Barcelona because they can keep, you know, they can keep pointing at, you know, at, you know, how great Nagmone days is, is, you know, oh, he was just this, this wonderful man of learning. us a little bit of personality culting with them.

But they absolutely despise the disputation of Tortoza. And I was telling you before we went live, it was very difficult to find any sort of sources about this specific medieval disputation that weren't very heavily weighted in a particular direction. You know, like you can you can Google it right now, the disputation of Tortoza. And the first like 50 results you're going to get were all they're all on like some Jewish website or some or have some sort of a pro-Jewish polemic to them in that oh it was an unfairly weighted dispute. You know they were the rabbis were under duress. You know, their homes were being threatened. Their people were being threatened, et cetera, et cetera. And they couldn't actually like they were they were arguing with two hands tied behind their back. what is it but anyway to actually get into the disputation of tortosa itself all right it occurs in tortosa

which is a city in aragon from the year 1413 to the year 1414 all right so this is in the late middle ages this is um about I want to this is about the time that Portugal starts expanding into I think it's about the time Portugal conquers Seuta, or near the time Portugal will conquer Seuta. And the Reconquista is drawing up to a close. Europeans are starting, you know, the pre-Renaissance is starting to flower in Italy. The late Middle Ages, the court of Burgundy has sort of knightly chivalric culture reaching a fever pitch throughout Europe.

So this is about the time when, you know, you can start seeing these great European nations start to take their first breaths. Jan Hussein has his has his Hussite, begins the Hussite Reformation. Trying to think of anything else. The Northern Crusades are, you know, it was the great, there's a, that was the great German out ofandering into the east. German ethics are settling in the east. This is very much a time of transition.

All right. And it's also interesting because it occurred during the time of the Western schism. What was the Western schism? The Western schism was when the papacy functionally split in two. You had, I think it was like a 50-something year period where it was not a short period. where you had two papacies, both were claiming to be the real papacy, and both were claiming the other papacy was the false papacy. And there was a point where there were actually three anti-Popes at one time.

There was a third papacy that was set up. And this was the, you know, the Avignon papacy and the Rome papacy. And this, the disputation of Tortosa specifically occurred under the anti- Pope Benedict the 13th and I believe he was from the Avignon line I could

yes he was from the Avenue online and he was I think the last of the Avignon of the Avignon popes but he was from Aragon and he was an Aragonese nobleman and he really really liked religious debates

and his anti-papacy was losing a lot of pull, a lot of legitimacy at about this time. Because the Romans were, you know, were, and was the, I think it was, Martin the fifth that was elected in Rome. And he kind of did this really showy thing. And with, with smacking down the Jews that were presenting him a page of the Torah upon his coronation and started, you know, going after them in his, in his, in his side of Christendom. And so kind of in response to this, Benedict the 13th, the Avignon, there's another Benedict

the 13th. That's not him. Calls for this religious debate to occur, particularly at the prompting of his personal physician, who is going to be the central character of the rest of this episode, Heronimo to Santa Fe. All right. Heronimo to Santa Fe is a very interesting individual. He was the physician of Benedict the 13th, and he converted to Christianity.

I have read different sources that say he was a rabbi and other sources that say he wasn't a rabbi, and I have no clue what to believe. But whether that is true or not, he was very well studied in the Talmud, very well versed in it, knew what it contained and knew exactly. And specifically what he started to do in the way that only a genuine in-spirit converso knows how to do started drawing all of the attention of his, of his Christian rulers onto this specific book. And what he basically said that he could do to his boss, Benedict the 13th, he said, I can prove to these Jews that the Messiah has already come using their own text. All right. Um, and so this is what he proceeds to do. Um, any, any, any questions so far,

anything you want to hit before I, before I keep going on this. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive by design. They move you. Even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range for Mentor, Leon, and Teramar. Now with flexible PCP finance. and trade-in boosters of up to 2,000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Coopera. Design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited.

Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Pst, 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 Rosh Bu Bois. 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 Liddle 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 Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to value. I was just going to say many such cases and a lot of people possess hubris. Yeah, it's true. And yeah, so a bunch of really famous, or at least,

famous at the time in Aragon, a bunch of Jewish nobles were called up from these big Jewish families. I have their names. Profiat Duran, who later falsely converted to Christianity and fled Spain. And then as soon as he fled, well, Aragon at the time, and as soon as he fled Aragon, immediately went back to his old ways. Joseph Albo, Aftroq Ha Levi. And these are all, these were like Albo wrote some like book of principles that I'm that Heronimo de Santa Fe would later quote in the debate. And it was this like like schizophrenic text. And a bunch of other rabbinical scholars were involved. I think it was something like 30, 30 rabbis were present in total from all of these families in Aragon.

On the Christian side, the two most important people are the aforementioned Heronimo de Santa Fe as well as Vincent Ferrer who would later be canonized as St. Vincent Ferrer, who was a Dominican, who proselytized many, many Jews in Iberia. And so how the debate initially went was they all gathered in a room and they started presenting arguments like it was a trial. It had, I think, it had, I think, three stages to it. All right. Three stages to it. Um, and what was it? And so Heronimo de Santa Fe primarily targets the, what is it? Primarily targets the rabbis, uh, using the, um, uh, was it, the midrashic, the midrashic method, right? He emphasis, he goes after the midrashic passages. within the Talmud that basically state the Messiah has already come.

Midrash is a very particular way of, I'm not a Jewish scholar, so I'm kind of, I'm a little bit over my skis here. However, from what I understand it, it is a me, now it's a method of reading the text, but back then it was like it was a literal set of texts within the Talmud that that specifically stated how the, what was it, how the Messiah was going to come back. Mr. Pete, you might know more than me on this, but from what I understand, the Talmud is, you know, Talmudic Judaism. The Talmud was composed in Babylon in the 7th century after Christ of a bunch of rabbinical traditions and like extra, extra canonical things that existed outside of the Torah and the prophetic books.

that was then imported back into Western Europe. Even at the time of Christ and before Christ, there was oral tradition being handed down over the next after, when we got into AD, looking at about 200. I'm reading, he was going over the history in the book I'm reading right now. But basically what you have, you come down to is to Babylonian Talmud,

We go up to 500 AD. Things go dark. There's really nothing from 500 AD to 800 AD. And that's when there's a couple other Talmuds. There's the Palestinian one and the, I can't remember the name of the other one. But the Babylonian Talmud is put together. It's pretty much finalized by 200. They keep working on it.

500, it's pretty much completed. But then I said, like I said, you have about 300 years where we really don't know. Even Jewish scholars don't really know or something's being hidden. And then pick up again in 800 AD. And that's where the history, then you go, they did a pretty good job of keeping it secret up until of what was in the Talmud, which, you know, I have Jewish friends who are like, Talmud's really not that important. And I'm like, well, why were they keeping it secret? Why didn't they want Christians to know what was in it? And then the situation you were talking about, what I think it was Louis the 9th.

That was the first basic, basically the first time that its contents became public. And you saw the reaction. I mean, so much so, just for a side tangent really quick. when the whole BLM stuff was going on, and they were tearing down monuments. In St. Louis, there is a statute of St. Louis. And a female lesbian rabbi riled up BLM to say Louis was a racist, and she was able to rile them up enough where they demanded the statute to be taken down. Did it succeed or is it still standing here?

Oh, it succeeded. Oh yeah. Yeah. And this kind of tells you, you know, at my speech at the event, I kind of talked about this a little bit, but you know, this kind of tells you the character of these people even today is that they just, they don't, they, they can't let any bygones be bygones. They have to, they have to remember everything and they have to like get one back for everything. Even if it's like in a random place on the whole other side.

of the world, you know, they always have to like, they, they have to like, like get their comeuppance, you know, no forgiveness. Or, you know, or, you know, or they'll just straight up make things up. Um, but yeah, so functionally, I don't want to, I don't want to, you know, I know, I know, I know we're here to talk about the whole disputation, but the whole, the whole, the whole point of this is, you know, you could sum this up in a sentence. Heronimo de Santa Fe, a Jewish convert to Christianity, well versed in the Talmud, basically run circles around these rabbis who are constantly changing their words. And it's the exact same arguments that they did. In the, in the argument, he went into the, it was it, he went into the midrashic tests and said, you know,

it says that the Messiah was born at this point. What was it? And, you know, and they, the rabbis responded basically saying that, you know, it's like, oh, it relies on a meaning of this word. And Oh, this word doesn't mean this, but also, you know, Nachmonide said in the disputation of Barcelona that we're not even obligated to believe in this sort of thing. And then, and then what is it? And then, you know, Geronimo responded. He's like, well, then if you're not even obligated to believe in this thing that I've just said to you proves that the Messiah hasn't, that the Messiah has come from your own text, then you're heretics by the measure of your own religion, you know? and you know and it kind of it kind of keeps going on like this for the whole and this was all in person

this was on the first the first you know little bit of a section all right um and after a little while basically the the what is it the the the dominicans which were overseeing the debate functionally said we can't even hold this in a verbal format we have to switch or we can we have to switch this to written because the the rabbis are changing their words every five minutes and we can't pin them down on anything. So we're going to force them to write it down. So we can specifically like have a text to hit. And you know, it kind of, it goes on the same way. You know, what is it? The Jews claim that, you know, the Messiah hasn't come because they're still in exile and the temple in Jerusalem hasn't been reconstructed.

Um, you know, very obviously the, the Christians are like, well, that's not what the Messiah came to do. That's what, you know, the Pharisees believed he came to do. And it's, it's more back and forth of the same, right? It's more back and forth of the same. Um, you know, uh, that there's an argument that comes out about, you know, sacrifices and how, you know, the Jewish sacrifices are different from pagan sacrifices. And, um, And the Christians very obviously are like, well, no, the sacrifices were ended once the, once the law was fulfilled in Jesus Christ. And so, you know, it goes on. And then right at about the end of the disputation, it just kind of, you know, the Jews are just basically, you know, they basically are contiguously stating, oh, the Christians are not treating us fairly. They're, they're misusing our text. You know, they're not letting us even assert a single thing about our text. and they're also threatening to take our homes and a lot of the rabbis just quit the debate

entirely, but this is more or less, you know, how it went. You know, it's, it all particularly centers around. I don't mean to keep hitting this, right?

But Heronimo de Santa Fe basically, you know, responded to every single one of their arguments with specific Talmudic knowledge. and functionally made them all look like fools in front of the the Aragonese court. A lot of these debates had somewhere around 2,000 people like live attending these things. So these were public affairs.

These weren't just limited to the courts. These weren't just limited to like the king and his and his court. It was a lot of the was a lot of the peasants in the surrounding countryside or the educated, more likely the educated men in the city, watched this stuff and started talking about it. And quite more than a few, more than a few Jewish people watched it. And there was this interesting thing that happened is as this former rabbi,

this con, I don't know if he was a rabbi or not, but this former convert, this convert from Judaism, Hieranamo to Santa Fe and St. Vincent Farer, basically made these rabbis look like clown shows repeatedly, quoted from the text that a lot of the times the rabbis didn't even know the part of the Talmud that they were quoting from.

You know, the parts of the Talmud specifically referring to, you know, what the Jews thought about Mary and Jesus Christ and other saint venerated people in Christianity was brought out to very great effect. And upon the conclusion of the debates, all throughout Aragon, there were these mass conversions of Jews to Christianity. And a lot of these rabbis, you know, either themselves converted, the ones in the in the disputations, or just left, you know, went into exile. And, you know, shoot, like, like, and the only, whenever you read about it today, whenever you read about it, Instead of like a generally good, what is it, a summary of the debate, the only thing it will tell you is, oh, this was the Christians forcibly converting the Jews under psychological pressure and propaganda campaigns. And it wasn't real. It wasn't like a free and open and honest debate, which we love in liberal societies.

It was more or less enforced on us. And I don't really get that vibe from it because why would they, what was? it why would the the pope now admittedly this was trying to help shore up the anti-pope benedict the 13th failing legitimacy in the eyes of his subjects but what was it um why would they go through the trouble why would this why would this jewish convert this jewish convert heronimo to santa fe is the one who suggested all of this in the first place he was the one who was um who was suggesting it to his boss that hey we should we should have a disputation here like we've had in other places.

You know, and I know the text that they use and, you know, I can prove to them not only and specifically to the people that these rabbis claim to lead. Most of these people don't even know what's in the book. They just listen to the rabbis, you know? And so if we can humiliate these rabbis in front of them from their own book, they'll recognize, you know, that, you know, they'll recognize the truth of the Christian religion that surrounds them and they'll leave. and join the rest of us and become

arrogance or probably at that time national identities weren't really a thing become good Christians like the rest of us you know so that's you know and yes you know what is it like in a religious society open blasphemy against the Christian religion will not be tolerated but at the same time

and this is a point that that what is it one of the rabbis during the disputation basically cries out to Heronimo's like, you don't even let us say a single thing about our rabbi and you hold this over our heads and you're trying to take our homes away from us and all of that. What makes this functionally?

What makes this fair? And Hieranamo says, and he quoted the Old Testament, I think, is, you know, if you had faith, you would stand before kings and, and, you know,

and nobleman. And I forget the biblical, I forget the specific passage of the Bible he was quoting, but it's like, though you know if you know if you had faith in god you would freely stand before noblemen and those persecuting you and the princes of the earth and you know have it in your heart without any conviction you know without any or without any um what's the word not conviction um doubt you wouldn't have it without any doubt without any um fear without you know with all complete

assurance that you are completely correct you know and i think that's kind of what sums up this whole debate is that little exchange. Is this is this convert, this very genuine and very obviously repentant convert to Christianity, functionally telling these rabbis is like, you know, if you were, if you were like the early church under persecution, you know, and you really had faith in what you were doing, you would stand up to us and stand for it like the Christian martyrs did. But you don't have faith. You just want to keep this stuff hidden from us because you're afraid of what we're going to

find out when we find, or what we're going to do to you when we find out what you've been doing behind our backs all these years. And I know that's like a 21st century reading into it, but that's, you know, more or less what happened. Oh, here it is. I remember, I will speak of thy testimonies before kings and will not be ashamed. Psalm 119, verse 46. He must have been such a great orator that,

you would have conversions right there. You would have people asking to be baptized. You would have people seeking to join the church. And that must have, that kind of thing is going to make the ones who don't and the ones who look bad just that much more against, you know, what was being done there.

and that much more resentful against, you know, Spanish rule. And, yeah, it takes another 80 years after that to basically all come to a head. Well, I mean, like, let's take a look at the immediate aftermath, right? The Avenue in Pampasie, I think that Benedict the 13th was the last one of more or less collapses after his death. you know, Heronimo de Santa Fe kind of disappears after this from the historical record. I guess he had his moment and then he was gone. But he was able to get, you know, like in Aragon, like in France, he was able to get the Talmud censored. He was able to get it, you know, was it very basically the leading lights of Aragon's Jew reconverted.

And Judaism and Aragon functionally ceased to exist. And what was it? And, you know, there were, there were all of these conversions and all of that. But, you know, after after the next king, which was, I think, Alfonso the 5th, took over in Aragon. I'm trying to remember who the king that this happened under, because this happened under particular, it was under the order of Benedict the 13th. It was under Ferdinand I first.

That was the king that this took place under Ferdinand I first. but after Alfonso V took over from Ferdinand I first he immediately reversed all of this anti-Jewish legislation that occurred in Aragon and undid a lot of what Hieronimo de Santa Fe got passed and it basically undid all the work. However, the deal, the blow had already been struck and they had more or less ceased to exist in that part of the Iberian Peninsula. So not even like, you know, yeah, like it's like, it's like, you know, one step, or two steps forward, one step back, you know, this, this was a long, convoluted process that if you actually get down into the weeds to, you know, yeah, there's the broad general movement in one direction, which does come to a head in 1492. But, you know, for the most part, it was really fought out in the trenches.

And I don't, I can't over-emphasize the conversos. I genuinely believe, you know, a lot of the converting strength of Spanish Catholicism that they would later bring to the new world came from the lessons that they learned with the, with the Muslims and very specifically the conversos themselves. The conversos themselves, the Jews who genuinely converted to Christianity, I believe in that, not only not only that, but like the, the true. tradition of that. You know, that was a tradition which had existed for centuries at that point, you know, to the point where they're almost their own category. I really believe that was a large part of the reason that the Spanish were able to spread the Catholic religion as effectively within their conquered territories in the new world as much as they were, you know, off of those lessons that they learned in these disputations like this, even before the Spanish state even came

in a being. And one of the ways that you know that a lot of these conversions were actually genuine is when you do get down to the Inquisition, it's not like everyone that's brought before and questioned is told to leave the country. No, there are, there are, I think it's more than 50%. I think that's the number of Maestra talked about. who were marched before the Inquisition questioned, and the Inquisitors were like, genuine conversion.

They get to stay. You know, so, yeah, I know that people look at the Inquisition, and it's like, oh, they just wanted to, you know, do harm and kick the Jews out of the country and everything. It's like, I mean, the ones that converted and had genuine conversion stayed, it was the Moranos that, you know, needed to be, needed to be weeded out under their, you know, under what their law was going to be from that on. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that's, that's, that's, that's pretty much how it went. I mean, and they, the Iberian Peninsula was more or less moving in this direction. And Kristen, I mean, it was the harshest there because they were, you know, they were frankly living in the most close quarters with the, with the foreign outside elements. And a lot of the, a lot of the, uh, a lot of the, the Jews who, left Spain, found refuge in northern European countries, the low countries, which were still nominally Spanish territories, but like, you know, places where the, the, later on, they were Spanish territories. But, you know, no one really cared what was going on there. Um, yeah, I mean,

I mean, you know, that's the one thing. That's, that's, that's what's what really intrigues me about this particular disputation is, you know, is the fact that there are, in the historical record, almost zero Christian converts to Judaism, particularly in the Middle Ages. But you have, when you look at Jewish converts to Christianity, and particularly those who had a very specific desire to to show their, you know, newfound brethren what the Jews really believe. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, there's a lot of them, you know, not just Hieranamo de Santa Fe, and there's the earlier mentioned example of the, um, of the friar who argued in the disputation of Barcelona. And, you know, and I'm, it's, it's, it's, it really is,

I think, a testament to the eternal value of the Christian faith. particularly how it can be used by someone who is exceptionally familiar or was raised completely outside of the tradition as a hammer against a false tradition against a false way of believing things that is genuinely harmful. And that's that's the lesson I take away from this. And that's you know, why I intrigue it. And I really wish, you know, I wish there were better sources on it, is what is all I can say. That's the only like, like when I told you I wanted to do this episode and I'm like, okay, I'm probably fine.

That was the biggest disappointment I had is, you know, there's functionally no sources that you can read on this that aren't like, you know, oh, the, the Jews were unfairly maligned and prosecuted. You know, I, it really is a shame,

but you can find all sorts. There's even like a, like a play in which Christopher Lee stars in about the disputation of Barcelona. But nothing about this one. So I don't know. I guess that tells you, I guess that tells you, even something as minute as that,

you know, if, if I find, if I'm doing research and I find that all of the, all of the sources on it are written by this one particular group of people, I'm going to start raising eyebrows. Yeah, 100%.

You know, it's like, I don't know how much you're, you know, we're going to go over what happened through medieval Spain, but really one of the best books and really one of the only books that talks about, you know, Jewish policy when it comes to Western Europe is by Bernard Bachrock. And it's actually, it's actually titled early medieval Jewish policy in Western Europe.

And people may think, oh, well, You know, why did they, you know, they're forcing them away from their religion. Well, Bachrach reveals that people will say, well, Judaism isn't a evangelizing. No, no, just, you know, if you do a little, if you do a little research, and American Krogan did a good job in his series talking about how Jews would take Christians as slaves in Spain and forced them to be circumcised and forced them to become Jewish. And yeah, so putting it out there, having a basically a debate in which people hear arguments and decide, oh, okay, so what I've been told my whole life is wrong, my Messiah has already come, and his name is Jesus Christ, so I'm going to accept him now. you know, that's a lot better than what happened to the way a lot of the Spanish were treated when, you know, the Moors controlled most of Spain and basically let the Jews run wild to the point where they had to start making laws saying that they couldn't do certain things like take slaves and force conversions, things like that.

no absolutely and i think what it demonstrates is really how brittle the jewish community is and how much of a what is it how much it much of it is built on like you know you know obfuscation and and and and rabbis keeping certain texts or certain interpretations kind of locked away it's like it's like what protestants say the catholic church does is what the or did rather in the past is what you know jews actually did you know it's actually how they they kept all their people in line. And also being, when you're born into an out group and you're told your whole life that you're a part of this out group, you know, it's pretty easy to keep that going.

When everyone around you has told you that that's an out group, yeah, like I said, it's pretty easy to keep that, pretty easy to keep that going. Yeah, I mean, as we go on in the series, I don't want to, I don't, you know, this was the one episode I wanted to dedicate to it. American Krogan has done a much better job, much more in-depth talking about the sort of, what is it, talking about the specific, how should I say, the specific excesses committed by this group of people. Yeah, against the Spanish and against, you know, and how the Visigoths basically had to rise up, start the Reconquista. Exactly. But I hope that as we go on in this series, if we, if we, if we, if we, if we, do get that series really do fully started. I hope that we actually focus on the fruits of that and more so,

you know, the Spanish as a people and the character that they had and what they were able to do with that experience once they enter the world stage. Sure. Yeah, because once they get past this period and once we start getting into the golden age, this really isn't a, yeah, there are some controversies, but, you know, this group doesn't really play a big part, not as big a part as what we're talking about now or basically from 700 from 711 to 1492 so yeah yeah yeah once we get past 1492 you know we're going to be talking about accomplishments and and not you know things things have been put in the rear view mirror let's put it that way absolutely I look forward to that yep what do you what do you have to plug and uh I'll end this only thing I plug at this point is the old glory club

the Old Glory Club like the Old Glory Club, do all that stuff that we do. We have a lot of, a lot of chapters that are getting spun up now. I'm sure you plug it on just about every show that you're on too. Yeah, did it today. I did like a five minute sermon today

on the Old Glory Club when someone's like, oh, what do you have to plug? Okay, here we go. Yeah, but you know, no, it really is, it really is a, you know, I have a lot of hope for it. Um, really, I, I, I do have a lot of hope for it. And, um, yeah, that's, that's really the only thing I have to show. You can follow me on Twitter if you want, I guess, you know, but like, shoot, all of you

listening to Pete's show, you've probably heard me 15 times already, you know, you, but so, so yeah, but don't worry about me. Go to, go to, follow the old glory club, do that sort of stuff. All right, Paul. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Pete.