 the Spanish Inquisition. It's then and now, including now, here on History is here to help with History Professor Peter Haffenberg. Welcome to the show, Peter. Aloha. You know, the thing about the Inquisition is, and you have to tell me if I'm right about this, is that it's not that it came from Ferdinand and Isabella. It was a political thing as it would be today. What they found was that for 100 years before 1492, there were people out there in the streets, the unwashed masses, who had it out for the Jews, and they would attack Jewish homes and businesses. They would kill people, kind of a Spanish pogrom thing, and Ferdinand and Isabella said, hmm, you know, we better pay attention to this because we can improve our power position if we, you know, bond up with them somehow and support them. Now, that's a wild guess, but I wonder how much of that could be true. Well, I certainly think some of it is true. It's not a complete story, but maybe we can try to fill it in. For our audience or viewers, we should probably provide some dates. So the Inquisition is official starting in the later 1470s. So notice that it prefigures the Reformation. So it tells us that Protestants per se were not targets. Jews were targets. Muslims as quote unquote a great heresy. And then folks who study the period know that around every corner was some kind of heretic or dissenter. So the idea of attacking Protestants comes later. And then officially the Inquisition ends in the early 19th century in the 1830s. And many of us who don't really know much about Spanish history forget that there were significant liberal reforms in Spain in the 19th century. So when Franco comes to power, Franco is a shot to the system. So introducing that, let me get back to your question. Certainly intolerance and violence, murder, burning of religious centers happened well before the 1470s. It happened throughout Europe. I mean, it's certainly in England or Britain as well. I think what folks are struggling with and even in today's examples of genocide or hatred, there's always a balance, right, between what elites and the governments would like to do and are able to do and whether or not there's either public support or public indifference. So your comment about people attacking Jews and Muslims and heretics is absolutely true. But it's also true that at this point in the 15th century, we're just creating Spain. No such thing as Spain. So you could also look at the Inquisition as part of state or nation building. In that case, it's not really dissimilar from a lot of other places. So I would say the answer is yes and. Well, that does really give me confirmation in the sense that here's a king and queen of their nation building in Spain. They're part of a process where you want to galvanize people to support you, where you want to acquire new territories, you want to have the loyalty of new groups. You're consolidating the country. That's the nature of nation building. And so they probably had a lot of things on their plate. But one thing is, hey, why don't we get people to come around and support us and we'll do things that are part of this Inquisition and they will like us for that. They will think we're on their team. And that's one way we can have them become loyal. Two quick things. One is that you're right about the historical narrative. What we want to remind ourselves so is that historical narrative is primarily focused at this period against Muslims. Remember that Spain had been a caliphate. Spain, Muslim Islamic Spain had running water before any other place. My mononies, the great Jewish philosopher. So the part of this is what it's called in Spain, the Reconquista. We always talk about conquistadors in the New World. They're inspired in good part by the Reconquista. So you're right about the cultural consolidation and the nation building. But we're also talking about 400 years of internal warfare, particularly against Muslims and then against Jews. The Muslims were slaves. Spain had slavery in those days. And the Muslims were at the very bottom of the heap. And they had come from North Africa as slaves. They ruled and governed Spain. Spain was an Islamic caliphate. Starting in the later 11th century, it's really difficult to call them Catholics because they're no Protestants yet. But the official church, the Church of Rome and its practitioners in what will become Spain started rebelling against the Islamic governors. And so what you have is really a three and a half century Reconquest. As we know in the end of 1492, not only Muslims are defeated, but Jews are expelled. So it's a long term cultural process. The only other point I would make, and I think probably your viewers would well understand this, is you're right about trying to get support. But these are also exercises of fear and terror. So the target is also what the group you call the great unwashed. It's not just to gain their support. It is to socialize them and to basically instill a kind of fear. So it's not just I get to pick on somebody else. It's also that I better pick on somebody else or I might be attacked or get some kind of suppression from the state. So it's really both, right? It's public support. But the flip side of that is fear if I don't give public support. So that puts a whole new dimension on the notion of scapegoating. Scapegoating out of fear. Scapegoating was essential in those days and maybe that carries forward. You're not a scapegoat just to put the other guy down. You're a scapegoat because you have to be. Am I getting this right? I think, yeah, there's a lot of wonderful literature and scholarship on this, but I think that's a good point to consider. And in a way, I don't want to draw a strict analogy. I don't want to get us off target, but there's a lot of discussion right about the American South, where for a variety of reasons relatively poor whites both feared African Americans, but I put themselves above African Americans as well. And that worked for government control and work for social control. So I don't want to get off track, but you could for folks interested in American history, you can see a kind of scapegoating done by people who are certainly not high up in the social hierarchy. And so that serves their interests and also the interests of the government or the elite. I don't think we should forget the power of fear and certainly listeners who observe, you know, either the show at the Holocaust or the fear now in Ukraine. I mean, fear is a very powerful historical force. I don't think anybody would disagree with that. The worry of something happening to you can be as powerful as something actually happening to you. And so in Applebaum wrote her article about the about the success of the Soviet communists after World War II in Eastern Europe. One of the essential elements of their success and the reason that people didn't turn against them was fear. And that's certainly the most important factor. Yeah. Right. I mean, she emphasizes that and I would not disagree with her. I just think that when we look at that example, there were a lot of other factors as well. I mean, some of those areas had suffered under the Nazis and so Soviets were relative liberators and some folks in those regions had been communists or Stalinists for decades. But that doesn't discount fear. It just means that the molecule was a little more complicated, but fear is definitely there. And I think even if we fast forward to today, we look particularly social media, how easy it is for fear as a contagion to spread. So we got to go back in time. Perhaps folks will be familiar with the printing press. That certainly contributed to the ability of the inquisition to instill fear. But even beforehand, there was a considerable power of word of mouth, a considerable power of pageantry, you know, having public trials, for example. So all of that, right, that the technologies of fear are different, but we're still talking about the fear and the general climate that something would happen to you. And therefore, maybe you better get on board and do that to somebody else. Yeah. So that's really great. It's great to know this because it sounds to me like this is a common denominator you can find in pretty much every large scale or every scapegoating, you know, experience, cultural experience, at least in Europe and elsewhere. So, but my big question for you, Peter, is we know that the inquisition was not one year with Ferdinand and Isabella. We know that it was going on for hundreds of years. And my question, you know, and it seemed to me that by the time you got to Ferdinand and Isabella, it was pretty rough, namely, you know, convert or die, convert or, you know, be required to leave, lose everything, lose your home, all your lands, whatever you had. And that was probably, you know, I don't know if it was the worst of it, but it was pretty bad. Now, the question I want to put to you is what was the dynamic on that? It started, if it started at zero and it wound up at, you know, the full tilt, auto da fei, you know, murderous inquisition in the late 15th century. How did it change? Was it always thus? Or did it start out in little pieces and get worse? And why? Well, as most cases, things start out locally. So we're talking sometimes, even with the inquisition, the ideological religious reasons we think of, because at the same time there are witchcraft, crazes and trials, are combined or covered for more local or personal reasons. The inquisition left us an incomplete but still very helpful historical record. And when you start looking at it, you realize from the get go, there were the heretics, so to speak. But there were also people who pissed off local elites, or there were people who wanted to grab other people's land or property. And we see that very commonly in all kinds of kangaroo ports in history. We see that, as I mentioned, very commonly in witchcraft trials. So one might say, for your question, is it began primarily as a local enterprise, quite often with the local priest or the local landlord or aristocrat. What Ferdinand and Isabella and subsequent monarchs did was centralize it to a great degree, try to make it more uniform of the power of the state behind it. And I think if we look at incidents, I don't want us to get to upset stomachs or headache, but if we look at similar types of incidents, they often do begin much more locally, more decentralized. And we as historians then try to figure out what were the impulses to centralize it and make it an official policy. So in the case of Ferdinand and Isabella, the argument usually goes that, as every kid knows from the song, they married. And as they married, they did what many monarchs did in Europe at the time. They fused families and regions. So again, we can start talking about a Spanish crown. So some historians say that part of the Spanish crown was to consolidate and centralize. Secondly, we can see, as I mentioned before, that the reconquista is successful, quote on quote, right? Muslims have been defeated. The Jews have been expelled. So this is a way now to preserve that cultural uniform. And again, the Spanish were not unique. You can find examples of this throughout Europe. But other scholars would say it's a matter of, I now have a realm. What is going to make people Spanish? Right? They used to be loyal to these two families. They're loyal to their various provincial landlords. What makes them Spanish? And we think today of elections and national anthems, et cetera. But part of this was that what was determined to be Spanish culture, which was a mishmash, right? Sure. But it reminds me of the Aryan culture in Germany in the 20th century. We want pure Spaniards. And the common denominator between the Jews and the Muslims is they were not pure Spanish. So we have to purify. Exactly. And Netanyahu, the former Prime Minister's father, wrote a very controversial, enormous tome, very much in keeping with you suggested, because he looked at the Inquisition as a preamble to the Holocaust. I think we want to recognize, again, the pseudo use of science in the Holocaust, the pseudo use of Darwinism, but the same idea that there is some kind of cultural purity. And if you can't get a political purity, which usually was embodied by public oaths of loyalty to the crown, that was a very common form of political purity. There's no economic purity because you're dealing with the birth of capitalism. So ideas about property and money and trade are all in flex. So scholars suggest that at this time period, and I don't want to use the word in tube and all the way, but culture matters. So you start beginning to have the consolidation of national languages with the printing press. You have what we just talked about, the consolidation of religion, not just as a political instrument, but ensuring the loyalty and uniformity. The only thing I would add is while we talk about culture, I don't think we want to put culture as a separate realm, because like today we have culture wars. They're really about society, right? Who should be a member of society? What should be our relations? So I don't want us to get off on what seems to be an isolated question of religion or race, etc. It all embodies what kind of society you want. Well, that's the purification thing, isn't it? Right, right. In the 15th century. Or a society that is pure in my vision of the way it should be. Right, but that purity could be a whole variety of things. It doesn't have to be religion or race. I mean, purity could also be the rule of law. For example, it's kind of a civic purity, where I'm not asking your race or your religion or your orientation. I'm asking you to participate on the same terms, equal terms, politically. And that's a kind of purity as well. But you're absolutely right. I mean, most of history is about some type of, well, I guess we call it identity now. That really wasn't a phrase that would be used beforehand, but something that I have, you don't have, but what I have, I am born with. So even if you convert to Catholicism, right? There's still a suspicion that you're not really pure. We need you to be devoted to whatever is the common denominator that brings our social experience together. So, I mean, every government, I'm just throwing this at you, every government is a result of people agreeing to be bound by, call it the rule of law, call it culture, whatever it is. We have a common denominator. We share. We have a groupie thing, where we share these views and everyone who shares these views is agreeing to the deal, whatever the deal is in this jurisdiction, this country. If you don't share those views, can't be with us. If you don't share those views, we have to expel you because we are looking for purity and uniformity and agreement on these views. Am I close? I think you're very close. And just a few years after we're our discussion began in the 15th century, at least in the West, there'll be an expression of what you just said in terms of a contract. So a social contract, meaning though, whoever violates the contract, the contract is null and void. So that's taking your philosophical point, which could, of course, be through coercion. We could use coercion to promote. But here, and I think certainly in the West, where the West has gone, the notion of a social contract still binds people. You can see with our problems in the country today, our social contract is free for the United States. The Spanish were just creating their notion of some kind of contractual or coercive relation. Because as I mentioned, there's no Spain. So you couldn't call somebody Spanish, it would make no sense. Now, starting in the later 15th century, and there are plenty of people who still don't want to be called Spanish. We look at the bosses, for example. They don't want to have any part in Spain. So it's still an ongoing, like so many cases, Scotland and Britain, parts of France, the blue states or red states. I remember starting in Carmen, the opera, which was a study of a 19th century French study of 18th century Spanish culture. One of the elements when you study the opera you find is that they looked down on the Spaniards. They looked down on the Spanish culture, thought it was inferior. Those people would never actually be as sophisticated and awkwardly developed as the French culture. That's the way the guys who wrote the opera looked at it. But I think it reflects the French view of the Spaniards at the time. And I think in appreciating what you're saying, I think we have to look at Spain as just developing the social compact, just developing this notion of consolidating under the monarchy, and then figuring out how to exclude the people who somehow threaten you. But what is remarkable, is I would guess from the period where the Inquisition arguably began in the local communities and so forth, it was not, am I right? It was not that violent. By the time it got to Ferdinand and Isabella, it had been mechanized. It had industrialized, if you will, made uniform and really creative, that torturing and killing people wholesale. In other words, as it got more part of the state mechanism, it got worse in terms of dealing with the humanity involved. Am I right? I would say right with just a slight question, Mark, because we don't know a lot about local events. We would like to know more, but we're dealing particularly in Spain at that time period, 13th, 14th century, very low literacy, very low reporting. So we have oral history. The response would be, I think you are right with the addition that, as I like to tell my students, you can do a lot of damage with farm tools. So in other words, you can do a lot of damage locally without the Mel Brooks type torture mechanisms that he made fun of in history of the world. So I think you're right about the consolidation of technology. What you might say is it becomes more of a stage in a theater. And that's part of fear, theater. The only point I would make is I would not limit the amount of violence and hatred and damage that can be done locally. It just may not be done in such a seemingly sophisticated manner. And we see this after World War II, where people take into their own hands whatever essentially war crime trials. I mean, they drag French collaborators out, right? They shave their heads, throw them into pits. It's violent. I don't think we could disagree, but it's more localized violence with the tools you have at your hand. For example, witches in Britain were hanged locally, whereas probably in London they would have been tortured and then hanged. But the end result is the same, right? But you wonder why people needed to do the torture if they were going to kill them anyway. There's a good answer for that. And I think, well, I said there's several answers, but let me give you my answer as a historian. During this time period, particularly in Europe, I can't really talk about Hinduism or Buddhism and other non-Western religions. But in Europe, the understanding was that the body is a vessel for the soul. So if you torture and abuse the body of an individual, that soul would either go to hell or purgatory, would not go to heaven. That doesn't discount, right? Sadomasochism, right? It doesn't discount the need for theater, but there is a religious and philosophical reason to deface the body. So for example, Protestants just a few years later, the reformational start in 1517, just 30 years later, Protestants will very often attack Catholic buildings and burn down churches, because for Protestants, Catholicism was an institutional legacy. For Catholics, they tortured Protestant bodies to prevent those souls from going to heaven. So torture, I mean, I know this sounds kind of absurd and certainly in the 21st century, you wouldn't want to advocate this, but torture made intellectual sense in that world. It's one of the things the Enlightenment argued against, torture. Beclaria, the Italian legal theorists argued against it. I mean, you could say U.S. Constitution, right? Allegedly is against cruel and unusual punishment, right? And the most specific example in the 18th century of that was torture. So you could say we have to get back into the minds of the time period, put aside our very reasonable and hopeful shared morality and ethics, and ask why was torture practiced? And I think we've suggested it was helpful for the state as far as theater and fear, and it made perfect sense. If you had a heretic, you did not want that heretic soul going to heaven. Now, in Catholicism, though, there was an alternative movement. We might see it born in liberation theology in the 20th century, that you cannot torture somebody, because if you want them to convert, for example, you cannot torture them into conversion. It has to be an exercise in free will. So it's like the whole criminal thing. You can't torture somebody who is suspected of a crime and wind up with a valid confession. Right. And in this case, the advocates of that view generally said it was okay to torture Jews and Muslims and Protestants, because they had already made up their mind. But as the transition goes to the new world, and the inquisition deals with Native Americans and the potential for Native Americans to be converted, there's a very powerful argument you should not torture Native Americans. It's not their choice not to be Christian. They never had the choice. They should exercise free will. So the inquisition says, you know, okay, but we have Jews and Protestants and Muslims, plus the blokes and property we want and torture certainly was part of it. I think, again, most historians would say that the inquisition suffered in good part from bad public relations. In other words, there is a legend that came out of the new world called la leyenda negra, which is known as a black legend, which is the Spanish were worse than anybody else. And so the French and the Dutch and the Portuguese and the British and the Scots could all feel, oh, okay, we're doing some bad things, but the Spanish are always worse. And I think the Spanish inquisition and even Franco, while not in any way whitewashing them, have also to a certain degree made those the apex of the movements, and nobody would deny how horrible they are. But the mirror needs to reflect that, you know, the British and the Portuguese and the Dutch all had their compliments or analogies. I mean, certainly the new world, you didn't want to be colonized by any European of any religious strain. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So brutal. And you mentioned before that at least part of that was sadomasochism, and I don't believe sadomasochism is an important part of it. It defines humanity in so many, it justifies and explains so many events that have taken place through history, no? I think we should have another show about that with somebody who's a little bit or informed about psychology and psychiatry. I think you're right at some point with some practitioners, it becomes an obsession, it becomes an appetite. That's clearly so with some. I don't think it provides enough of a overall historical view. The easy conclusion might be that each society has decided that some group and individuals are not human, however human is defined. And then they're allowed to do extra human things to those people. But that only opens up the question, right? How does each society, what group is covered? And after all, there are ways to be sadomasochistic, which are mental and psychological. Like my assigning an excessive matter reading to my students. I don't want to physically torture them, but certainly so. Again, you open up a really interesting question, maybe another show about the psychiatric and psychological elements in what we call intolerance and certainly acting on that intolerance. I met a law professor out of Columbia a few years ago who had the distinction of teaching a course called torture. One last question I wanted to ask you, and I didn't want you to leave this hanging. You said that it started well before 1492, but it didn't actually end until the first few decades of the 19th century. 1834 is the official date. And yeah, that just blows my mind. It means it was going on for 500 years. And what was the dynamic there? How did it wind up stopping? Was it some edict? Was it a change in the views of people? Was it only in Spain that it ended in 1834? Was it elsewhere? Why do you say 1834? Okay, so very quickly, it ebbed and flowed. So like all movements in history that are several hundred years old, it's not the same every day. So it's like a virus? It's a virus and it could be under control. It could be limited, etc. And I think most historians, again, that's an overused phrase, I apologize. The scholarship says that the images we have of the Inquisition are generally late 15th, 16th, early 17th century. And then subsequently, with a stronger Spanish state, an interest in the Spanish state in its colonies and fighting the Ottomans, not internal Muslims or Jews, what we think of the Inquisition either is expressed in different ways by formal royal edicts, but certainly doesn't have the intensity by any means at all. 1834 makes sense because as I suggested at the start, Spain was undergoing liberal reforms late 18th century and throughout the 19th century. Spain remains a battleground. Those of us who know about Franco, it's still a battleground. And to a great degree, the liberals never truly won in Spain. But having said that, they made significant reforms. One would say if you're interested in reading about it, you could say that the end of the Inquisition is an example of the enlightenment influencing Spain. Many of these ideas are brought from the French. Some are brought with Napoleon. And so the inclusion really is that Spain becomes more liberal in the 18th and early 19th centuries. It continues being liberal. And by 1898, as we all know, it loses most of its empire. But by 1898, it was a very different Spain than 120 years before. Now, having said that, having said that, it's hard to look at Franco's Spain as not really another chapter in the Inquisition's culture wars. Franco embraced the Catholic Church, the clergy embraced him, common Roman Catholic peasants embraced the regime, and they attacked all the people you had mentioned who would be viruses. Socialists, communists, Republicans, gay writers like Lorca. That was another cultural purge which called upon in many ways what was considered the Spanish Golden Age. And the Inquisition was associated in that mythology with the Spanish Golden Age. So that's why I thought then and now as our title because Franco only died in 1975. That's not that long ago. And you see as Spain tries to deal with Franco's regime and the memories of Franco's regime, they're dealing with a lot of the ghosts from the Inquisition. Let's leave it there, Peter. Thank you very much. Revelation area. And I would like to spend some time with you on one offshoot of this discussion. And that is colonialism and how this kind of cultural violence played a role in gaining colonies and in losing them. Absolutely. So much. So much. We have miles to go. Yes. Thank you, Dr. Peter Hopper. My pleasure. Historian at UH Manohar. Take care. Be healthy. Thank you very much.