Tomas de Torquemada, the Inquisitor

16th September 1498 was the day on which died one of the most evil men to have ever lived. However, like many such people he was utterly convinced that he was on the side of justice and was doing “God’s will”. It is amazing how religious zeal can persuade some people to act in the most unspeakably cruel and villainous ways.

The man in question was Tomas de Torquemada, a Dominican monk who, in 1483, had been entrusted by Pope Sixtus IV to lead the “Holy Inquisition” in Spain. The aim of this institution was to root out heresy from Spain, which Torquemada understood to mean discovering and punishing “Marranos”, Jews who had ostensibly converted to Christianity but who still practised Judaism in secret.

Torquemada took his work extremely seriously, gathering a network of spies and arming himself with “enforcers” in the shape of 50 armed knights and 200 foot soldiers. There was nothing he would not do to extract a confession, followed by punishment. It is true that not every victim was burned at the stake – this was the fate of possibly as few as 2,000 discovered Jews – but at least 25,000 others received less severe punishments after they had been tortured into confession.

It seems unlikely that Torquemada’s career was unknown to the Nazis of a later age, because there are distinct parallels between their persecutions of Jews. Torquemada confiscated Jewish property, flogged Jews in public and forced them to wear yellow shirts with crosses sewn on them – a chilling precursor of the yellow stars that the Nazis forced German Jews to wear.

He issued guidelines to enable Christians to identify the secret Jews among them. One was to take note of people who wore clean clothes on Saturdays rather than Sundays.

Torquemada even had his own “final solution”. In his efforts to create a “pure-blooded” Spain he concluded that all the Jews must be expelled. He went to the King and Queen and made this demand, but they were also approached by some wealthy Jews who offered them 30,000 ducats if they refused to do what Torquemada wanted.

This was an unfortunate sum to have offered, because it played right into Torquemada’s hands. He challenged the monarchs by pointing out that Jesus had been betrayed by Judas for 30 pieces of silver and now they were about to do the same for 30,000. The jibe worked, and 160,000 Jews were forced to leave Spain within three months. Any left behind would have been executed.

It beggars belief what some people are prepared to do in the name of religion, which is one reason why the current writer would be perfectly happy if the world gave up religion altogether, although I appreciate that this is not likely to happen any time soon! The problem arises when people convince themselves that their religion is the only true one and that everyone else’s must therefore be wrong. It is a short step, in the minds of many, from this position to the belief that the wrongs of others must be corrected in order that they can be “saved”. The lengths to which they go in order to convert others to their point of view are clearly very varied, but it is when “no, I won’t change my religion” is not taken as the end of the matter that the real trouble can start.

As a footnote to the story of Torquemada, there is another parallel to the excesses of the Nazis. One of the worst Jew-baiters, Reinhard Heydrich, was known to have had a Jewish grandmother. The same was true of Tomas de Torquemada.

© John Welford

Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French victim of anti-Semitism

13th January 1898 was the day on which the Dreyfus affair erupted in France. One of France’s most respected writers, Emile Zola, published a letter on the front page of the daily newspaper “L’Aurore” with the headline “J’Accuse”. The accusation was that the leaders of the French army had falsely condemned an innocent man, and acquitted a guilty one, merely because the former was Jewish.

The miscarriage of justice had arisen in 1894 when the Army’s General Staff became aware that they had a traitor in their midst who was offering confidential military documents to the German embassy. Suspicion fell on Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was the only Jewish officer on the General Staff. The evidence against him was sketchy, amounting only to a supposed resemblance between his handwriting and that on a memo found by a French agent who was working as a cleaner at the German embassy.

However, this was enough to send Dreyfus to prison at the notorious Devil’s Island in French Guiana, having previously been stripped of his military rank and had his sword broken in a public act of humiliation.

In 1896, new evidence was found that pointed the finger of blame at another General Staff officer, Major Ferdinand Esterhazy, whose career had been far less distinguished than that of Dreyfus and who had been inveigled into spying for Germany due to his having squandered his money by gambling.

However, the authorities refused to consider the new evidence, preferring to allow Dreyfus to continue to rot on Devil’s Island.

Eventually, the lawyers supporting Dreyfus did manage to force the army to put Esterhazy on trial, and this took place, behind closed doors, on the 10th and 11th of January 1898. Esterhazy, a well-known anti-Semite, was acquitted, and this was what prompted Emile Zola to break the story to the wider public.

The reaction of the authorities was to continue with the cover-up and to accuse Zola of committing a libel, of which he was found guilty. Dreyfus was, however, given a second trial but this also found him guilty, although his sentence was reduced from life imprisonment to ten years.

The affair split French opinion down the middle, between the “Dreyfusards” and “anti-Dreyfusards”, with accusations flying in all directions, often fuelled by naked anti-Semitism on the part of the “antis”.

It was not until 1906 that Esterhazy eventually admitted his guilt and Dreyfus was pardoned, having lived for twelve years under the cloud of having betrayed his country. Once pardoned, he was restored to the army and promoted to major. He was also awarded the Legion d’Honneur as some form of recompense. He served throughout World War I as a lieutenant-colonel and died at the age of 75 in 1935.

The tragedy of the affair was the humiliation it caused for France in the eyes of the world, as it became abundantly clear that anti-Jewish sentiment was behind the whole affair. Had Dreyfus not been Jewish, the affair would never have occurred in the first place. 

© John Welford