7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
The crimes of the Catholic Church revealed, January 2, 2003
This review is from: End of Days (Hardcover)
I picked up this book when looking for something on Muslim/Christian relations in 15th century Spain.
Here is a summary of the book's theme: The Catholic church, in general, and the Spanish Catholic church, in particular, have been attempting to eradicate the Jews for the last 1400 years (at least). In the year 712, Muslims brought multi-culturalism to Spain. The resulting golden-age of tolerance was ended by Catholic bigotry, lies and murders. The book retells Spanish history in terms of crimes against the Spanish Jewish people (people who practiced the Jewish faith and those whose Spanish ancestors were Jewish but practiced Catholic Christianity themselves). Particular attention is given to the anti-Jewish riots of 1391 and inquisition, but these events are linked to more contemporary Catholic crimes.
I found the details of Spanish history interesting. This period is particularly ugly to our modern sensibility and English speaking historians seem to avoid it. For example, Queen Isabella looks like a good candidate for modern feminist biography. She created one of the first modern states and financed the first European adventures in the Western Hemisphere. Despite this, the Amazon website has only 1 post-1950 biography on her. I suspect her role in establishing the Spanish inquisition seems decidedly un-feminist.
I don't recommend this book. The author naively accepts various first person accounts from the era when they support her case. At one point, she retells the miraculous story of Jewish children having visions of Christian crosses entirely without a modern skepticism. It simply happened. Less sentimental was her naive acceptance of the racist premise that being a 'converso' (Spanish Catholics with a Jewish ancestor) had some sort of biological reality. Somehow, the persecution of these Christians was a crime against the Jewish race because the biological reality of race was more important than the details of faith.
The conventional wisdom on the Spanish Inquisition, (see B. Netanyahu's "The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain") takes the view that the Spanish sovereigns let the 'coversos' be attacked in order to distract the outraged city masses and their leaders from turning against the royal establishment itself. In other words, it was a media campaign to control the 'masses' via propaganda. For example, King Ferdinand himself was a 'converso', but he continually used the inquisition to suppress opposition to his innovations in tax policy.
The 'revisionist' view (see The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision by H.Kamen) suggests the modern understanding of the inquisition is Marxist propaganda of the 20th century. If you can take this perspective for a moment, the fact Paris ignores the 13th century expulsion of Jews from Muslim Spain suggests Paris fits Kamen's critique. For Paris, the only villain is the Catholic Church.
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14 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not a history but an apology and a prediction., November 8, 1999
This review is from: End of Days (Hardcover)
Ms. Paris is not a historian. She admits that primary sources are scarce. She has produced an "explanation" of how the Jews of Germany could have been taken in 500 years after the events decribed and how the "fear of the Other" continues today.
This is a hard read as she skips back and forth and from place to place. She details the pogroms but not the accomplishments of the Jewish community. She virtually ignores the events in the rest of Europe and cannot tell us why Spain was different from France or Italy.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
good journalism, so-so analysis, July 26, 2006
This review is from: End of Days (Hardcover)
As the editorial reviews point out, this book describes the rise and fall of religious tolerance in Spain and the birth of the Spanish Inquisition. Paris gives a fascinating blow-by-blow account of how the Spanish clergy first pressured Jews into converting to Christianity, then used torture and false promises of clemency to punish "conversos" (former Jews who had converted) for allegedly relapsing into Judaism, and finally blamed Jews for the conversos' heresy. Spanish monarchs were only too happy to support these policies, because the crown confiscated the property of anyone punished by the Inquisition.
Paris stumbles when she attempts to explain popular support for the Inquisition. Why did Spain shift from becoming the most tolerant country in Europe to the least tolerant? Paris blames natural disasters, social instability and economic hardship. But after I read this book, it was not clear to me whether (or why) these problems were so much worse in 14th and 15th-century Spain than in other countries or other times. And the last chapter of the book would have been deleted by a more thoughtful editor; it drags in every conceivable social problem in order to argue that the U.S. or Canada could turn into 15th-century Spain.
As other reviewers point out, this book is not a masterpiece of sociological analysis. But I still thought it was vivid and informative enough to be worth the time I spent on it.
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