The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain

"This is another very long book. You mentioned the Conversos. They are the epicentre of the thing, the reason why the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions are founded. This is the best history that we have about the origins of the Inquisition in 15th century Spain. It’s a very detailed book, quite an academic book, and it’s built on an enormous amount of research. It takes a very modern approach to looking at this, arguing effectively, that an idea of race began in Spain in the 15th century, with the presence in society of people who were descended from Jews, but were Christians, and so had an ambiguous status. This racialised idea of Jewish converts, it argues, drove a hatred of them and led to the founding of Inquisition. It’s a very modern history. But it also tells a narrative story. If you want a readable book written in the last 20 years that explains why the Inquisition was founded, this would be the one I would choose. There had been a Jewish community in Spain for a long time. The key thing that happened—and Netenyahu goes into this in the book—is that in 1391, there was a series of riots against the Jews in many cities in Spain. There are lots of reasons for this. Economic and social pressures caused by the Black Death may have been quite a large factor. But anyhow, this is what happened at the end of the 14th century, and after that a lot of Jews did convert to Christianity. But they did so under duress, because of what had happened. So that was one of the problems. They were given 20-odd years to make their conversions good, so there were no real investigations made into how effective these conversions have been initially. But then the narrative started to change in the 1410s, and 1420s. This is the kind of thing that which Netanyahu looks at. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In his first book, which he wrote in the 1970s, he looked at those original conversions of the 1390s. And he looked at Hebrew sources from North Africa to see how effective they had been and he argued that actually, they had been quite effective, they had been converted, but they weren’t accepted as converts as such. So it’s a book which is based on the author’s knowledge of all of the relevant languages."