Jonathan Kirsch: 5 Things You Didn't Know: The Inquisition
[Jonathan Kirsch is the author of The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God, published by Harper One and available on book shelves everywhere as of September 9, 2008.]
Nowadays, we tend to make a parody of the Inquisition, as in the set-up line of a famous Monty Python sketch: "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" But the Inquisition is no joke. An unbroken thread links the friar-inquisitors of the Holy Inquisition to more recent torturers and executioners, including those of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, but the thread does not stop at Auschwitz or the Gulag. Various tools and techniques in the inquisitorial toolbox that were first invented in the Middle Ages were put to use at the Salem witch trials in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the Hollywood blacklists of the McCarthy era, and even the interrogation cells at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Above all, as familiar as it may seem, much of what we think we know about the Inquisition is wrong.
1- The Spanish Inquisition was not the Inquisition
Many of us think of the Spanish Inquisition as the Inquisition, but it was only a branch operation. The Inquisition was deployed as early as 1233, when the friar-inquisitors set up operations in Southern France, and it remained in existence across Europe and elsewhere around the world (including the New World) for the next 600 years. The Inquisition was especially active in Germany and France in the Middle Ages, and in Italy during the Counter-Reformation, but it reached such far-flung colonies as Goa, Mexico and Peru. Indeed, the Inquisition was already nearly 250 years old when the Spanish Inquisition was chartered by the Pope in 1478.
2- The Inquisition did not target Jews
Mel Brooks embraced a common misconception about the Inquisition when he showed its victims as pious Jews put to torture on outsized slot-machine wheels in History of the World: Part I. In fact, practicing Jews fell outside the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, whose mission was to detect and punish Christians who strayed from the approved beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church. The very first victims of the Inquisition, for example, were the dissident Christians known as the Cathars, who called themselves “Good Christians” and regarded themselves to be more authentic Christians than the friars who tortured and burned them.
Only when a Jew (or a Muslim) formally converted to Christianity did he or she come under the scrutiny of the Inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition, for example, sought and punished Jews and Muslims who had converted to Christianity on the assumption that most or all of them were still secretly practicing their old faiths. A Jewish convert who changed her underwear on Saturdays, for example, or a Muslim convert who ordered a plate of couscous in a public tavern were both regarded as suitable for burning at the stake as heretics....
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Nowadays, we tend to make a parody of the Inquisition, as in the set-up line of a famous Monty Python sketch: "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" But the Inquisition is no joke. An unbroken thread links the friar-inquisitors of the Holy Inquisition to more recent torturers and executioners, including those of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, but the thread does not stop at Auschwitz or the Gulag. Various tools and techniques in the inquisitorial toolbox that were first invented in the Middle Ages were put to use at the Salem witch trials in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the Hollywood blacklists of the McCarthy era, and even the interrogation cells at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Above all, as familiar as it may seem, much of what we think we know about the Inquisition is wrong.
1- The Spanish Inquisition was not the Inquisition
Many of us think of the Spanish Inquisition as the Inquisition, but it was only a branch operation. The Inquisition was deployed as early as 1233, when the friar-inquisitors set up operations in Southern France, and it remained in existence across Europe and elsewhere around the world (including the New World) for the next 600 years. The Inquisition was especially active in Germany and France in the Middle Ages, and in Italy during the Counter-Reformation, but it reached such far-flung colonies as Goa, Mexico and Peru. Indeed, the Inquisition was already nearly 250 years old when the Spanish Inquisition was chartered by the Pope in 1478.
2- The Inquisition did not target Jews
Mel Brooks embraced a common misconception about the Inquisition when he showed its victims as pious Jews put to torture on outsized slot-machine wheels in History of the World: Part I. In fact, practicing Jews fell outside the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, whose mission was to detect and punish Christians who strayed from the approved beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church. The very first victims of the Inquisition, for example, were the dissident Christians known as the Cathars, who called themselves “Good Christians” and regarded themselves to be more authentic Christians than the friars who tortured and burned them.
Only when a Jew (or a Muslim) formally converted to Christianity did he or she come under the scrutiny of the Inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition, for example, sought and punished Jews and Muslims who had converted to Christianity on the assumption that most or all of them were still secretly practicing their old faiths. A Jewish convert who changed her underwear on Saturdays, for example, or a Muslim convert who ordered a plate of couscous in a public tavern were both regarded as suitable for burning at the stake as heretics....