William Thomas Walsh on the Influence of Jews on the Protestant Revolution and Its Spread

William Thomas Walsh on the Influence of Jews on the Protestant Revolution and Its Spread

In Spain to which Philip had returned, the instinct of a society to preserve itself had been sharpened by a keen awareness of the pattern of crucifixion running through the whole living epic of Christianity, especially in a country than had groaned and struggled under the violence of so many heretical movements. To the descendants of Iberian crusaders Protestantism was not the new and forward- looking institution that many of its new advocated in the north imagined. To Spaniard it was rather the recurrence of something as old as the Church.

The Spanish mystic felt about heresy as the Jews had always felt about idolatry. Against the iterated calvary of human endeavor he saw the eternal Christ as the heart, the foundation (as He said, the cornerstone) of the Catholic Church, the human member of the which might always be a fallible as the little group constituting the primitive Church – the materialistic and plausibly dishonest as Judas, as angry as James, as sluggish as Thomas, as uninteresting as Andrew, as ambitious as the youthful John, as rash and self-confident and mendacious, as penitent and long-suffering as Peter – this Church would welcome sinners worse than Mary Magdalen and publicans more despised than Levi before he was Saint Mathew; it would even stretch out its net to include rich Simon the Pharisee, if possible, and would pluck hard-handed centurions from under the eagles of Caesar redivivus a thousand times.

Nevertheless, in its vast and complex ramifications, as it grew to take in the whole world, there would always be a central and unchanging unity of doctrine, always the Holy Spirit, always Christ, daily renewed in the Eucharist. Also, in literal fulfillment of the prophecies of Christ, the hatred that had mocked, slandered and baited Him, misrepresented His teachings and actions, sought repeatedly to kill Him, and finally, by trickery, induced the power of Caesar to crucify Him – this too would always remain. There would always be a Caiaphas, the spiritually blind Abet Din, misleading the synagogue, always some crafty Anna, the Nasi or political Prince directing and corrupting the Sanhedrin. To these the Judases would flee when the Church rejected them, and these the Caesars of every age would use and despise. Even as good Jews would help furnish the sinews of the Church in many ages, so men remarkably like those scribes and pharisees whom Christ had called the children of the devil would perpetuate the hatred that had once crucified Incarnate Love.

No philosophy of history that leaves out of account this gigantic aspect of reality can be considered realistic. It is for this reason that the best hints for a philosophy of history may be found in the encyclicals of various Popes.

The intense hatred that Jesus foretold would follow all who sincerely believed in Him was manifested in the earliest days of the Church. When Saint Paul went to Rome to preach “One Lord, one faith, one baptism” he encountered such opposition from his own race that he somewhat bitterly wrote of “the Jews, who both killed the Lord Jesus, and the prophets, and have persecuted us and please not God, and are adversaries to all men; prohibiting us to speak to the Gentiles, that they may be saved.” It must be noted however, that later on he sent a letter to the Christians at Rome sternly warning them against the wickedness of Jew-baiting. The Acts of the Apostles abundantly testify that most of the first Christian converts were Jews. Jews of good-will formed the sinews of the Church. Everywhere another type of Jew, perhaps in a small minority, refused even to listen to the arguments he condemned, and prevented well-meaning Jews, as well as Gentiles from hearing the Gospel.

The author of the Apocalypse, too, adverts more than once to the same astonishing concentration of hate that followed the children of Christ as they scattered through the Roman world: “I know thy tribulation, and thy poverty, but thou art rich; and thou art blasphemed by them that say they are Jews and are not, but are of the synagogue of Satan.” And “Behold I will bring a synagogue of Satan, who say they are Jews and are not but do lie. Behold, I will make them to come and adore  before thy feet. And they shall know that I have loved thee.” The first major persecution of Christians in the Gentile world, that of Nero, was probably set in motion at the instance of the Jews surrounding his wife Poppaea.

There were Judases in every age to attempt to pervert the Church from within. Not a few of the later scandals of Christendom were the result of their work. Simon Magus, perhaps a precursor of Gnosticism, was only the first to attempt to purchase the gifts of the Holy Ghost. Arius, the Catholic Jew, would yet made an insidious attack on the divinity of Christ that would divide the Christian world for centuries. Valentinus, called the chief of the Gnostics by Saint Irenaeus, was a Jew of Alexandria.

As the colossal struggle continued century after century, the chief means employed by the Annas and the Caiaphas of each age to keep the mass of the Jewish people in ignorance of the true nature of Christianity, and to fan their misunderstanding of it to hatred, was the Talmud. This melange of wisdom, tradition and superstition contained the most scurrilous and vindictive blasphemies against Christ. Wherever its true character became known, it was condemned by Christian authorities; as in France under Saint Louis, and in Rome under Pope Paul IV, who had thousands of copies burned. Yes it survived, to carry into the modern world the spirit of the Pharisees who rejected Christ, with those rabbinical interpretations which made it, as Lazare noted, “the creator of the Jewish nation and the mold of the Jewish soul.” The most vituperative parts were omitted in translation. In dangerous times they were handed down orally by the rabbis.

The historical importance of this book may be judged from the opinion of the Jewish historian Graetz, whose inaccuracies, omissions and wrong judgments have poisoned the whole Jewish world, but whose interpretations of that world cannot be ignored. He goes so far to say, “We can boldly assert that the war for and against the Talmud aroused German consciousness and created a public opinion without which the Reformation, like many other efforts, would have died in the hour of birth, or perhaps would never have been born at all.

In the Middle Ages it was customary for Jews to deny that the Talmud contained anti-Christian libels. Pretense in the modern world is no longer necessary. The Talmud is recognized as a sort of link between the early Gnostic onslaught on the Catholic Church, and the even more serious modern assault behind the mask of Freemasonry. Celsus the Gnostic may or may not have been a Jew. “Yet there are connections between Celsus and Judaism that must be emphasized,” says a Jewish authority; “for example, he asserts that Jesus was the illegitimate son of a certain Panthera, and again that he had been a servant in Egypt, not when a child as according to the New Testament, but when he was grown, and that he learned there the secret arts. These statements are frequently identical with those of the Talmud. Celsus might have heard this from the Jews.” From this it is not difficult to guess the source of the modern legend of freemasons seeking to disparage Christ the Redeemer in subtle fashion by claiming him as one of their “initiates.”

Another Jewish book that had a powerful effect not only on Jews but on the history of the world was the Kabbala. Originally that part of the Mosaic Law which was handed down by tradition, it had become by the thirteenth century, a collection of occult and esoteric doctrines borrowed from Buddhism, Gnosticism, the neo-Platonists and all manner of eastern pseudo-mystics. Out of the dark labyrinth of its imagery came many heresies and revolutions; rosicrucianism, theosophy, and all modern freemasonry. As Rabbi Benamozegh wrote, “It is quite certain that Masonic theology is at root nothing else than Theosophy, and that it corresponds to the theology of the Kabbala.” [Droleskey note: You don't think that Ivanka Trump Kushner's and Jared Kushner's practice of Kabbala matters? Think again.]

For a thousand years after she had emerged from the Catacombs – say roughly from the time of Constantine in the fourth century to the middle of the fourteenth – the Catholic Church successfully defended herself from such attacks both within and without. At times the very existence of the State and of society was threatened. In such crises, the Church not only permitted the use of force to avert worse evils, but even cooperated with it.

The Crusades were the defense of Christian homes, Christian women and children, Christian civilization, against an Islam deliberately bent upon exterminating them. A crusade ended the anti-social insanity of the Cathari who opposed marriage but taught suicide in that part of southern France known as Juea Secunda. The Inquisition followed them to Spain, and later saved the Christian Spanish State from the secret treachery of the pretended Catholics who were in league with the Moors in the war of liberation. As the ancient Jews had fought and slain idolaters, and had stoned spiritualists and similar dark heretics to death, so the Catholic Church, heir of the Jewish revelation, protected her children from destruction of body and soul while they were building the happiest and most balanced culture and civilization that have ever existed in this world.

The turning point in this vast drama (so far as our vantage point in time allows us to see) was the Black Death in 1346. It seemed to men as if Satan himself had burst the chains that had bound him for a thousand years. More than half the priests in the world died. Christendom was still staggering under this blow when other blows fee, one after another: the papal exile at Avignon, the Great Western Schism, the return of paganism under the guise of the Renaissance – all these onslaughts in the City of God itself while the Turks struck from without, gaining and laying waste on Christian country after another. Corruption and disorder were inevitable under these circumstances. Confusion became so widespread that only a divine institution could have survived it.

At the very moment when Columbus was claiming the new western world for Christianity and announcing the beginning of the Last Age of which he thought God had made him the harbinger, the stage was set for the most serious and widespread disaster the Church had yet had to face. It was something more important than the mere preaching of an exasperated monk against the abuse of indulgences; it was deeper than even the discontent of saintly men like More and Ignatius Loyola.

In the Protestant Revolt there was something more than the mere breaking away of the northern communities from the jurisdiction of Rome; much more that the nationalism to which Professor Carlton Hayes ascribes perhaps too much importance. There was a spirit of Protestantism in its first phase that sought something more than freedom; it sought nothing less (and this was more evident in Calvinism than in Lutheranism) than the utter destruction of the Catholic Church. Here was a hatred that began manifesting itself by the burning of churches and convents, the violation of nuns, the torture and execution of priests, the defiling of the Cross and the unspeakable desecration of the Blessed Sacrament.

It was an old and international hatred. It was the hatred of the church-burning Donatist, the hatred of Islam, the hatred that had opposed Saint Paul in Rome and Saint James in Jerusalem, the hatred of Annas and the scribes and pharisees crying, “Come down from the Cross, and we will believe!” There was nothing new about it except the form it took; but the preparation and organization were better, and the time was ripe.

Nor was this Protestant phase of the revolt a peculiarly northern or German product, though it has been convenient to make it appear so. It might have happened in southern Europe. In fact, it almost did happen in France, especially in southern France, before it happened in Germany. Lefevre, under the patronage of Marguerite of Angouleme and other of the anti-Catholic House of Navarre, taught justification by grace before Luther did, and profoundly influenced Beza, Farel, Rousel, and other leaders who passed quickly through a Lutheran phase to the more radical organization of Calvinism. The roots of the revolution went deeper that the German affair. It was not local, but international.

If we may believe Graetz and other Jewish historians, the Jews played a much more important part in all this than Christians, for some mysterious reason, have generally admitted. Incalculable was the number of this virile and gifted race who had settled in all countries of Europe during the so-called Dark Ages and the Middle Ages; incalculable the number who were assimilated as sincere Catholics, or who, as pretended Catholics, formed the nucleus for any international revolt. They were everywhere, in communication with one another and with the Jews of the Synagogue. There were so many of the latter in England and France that one Jewish writer of the sixteenth century, often cited by modern Jews, attributed to this fact, “the inclination of the English and the French” to Protestantism. Dispersion, secrecy and organization gave them a power out of all proportion to their numbers, a power so remarkable that Napoleon Bonaparte suspected that the political structure of the Jewish State had survived under cover for eighteen centuries. Was there any historical foundation for such a theory?

There may or may not be significance in the fact that the title of Nasi (Prince or King of the Jews) which belonged at the time of the Crucifixion to Annas, father-in-law of the High Priest, or Ab et Din, Caiaphas, was assumed by one of the bitterest, most intelligent and more persistent enemies of King Phillip II – Joseph Miques or Menes, the Jewish international banker of the Spice Trust of Portugal and Antwerp, who had in his debt William of Orange and many other noblemen of the Low Countries. About the time when Philip was returning to Spain, this millionaire was establishing himself in Turkey, throwing off the last pretense of Christianity and assuming the antique and princely title of Nasi.

He was not the first rich Jew after the dispersion to be so designated. Every now and then, like a bell-wether among the stray sheep of Israel, there appeared some grave and powerful man who took this title. There was, for example, the learned Jew of Babylon, Machir, who settled at Narbonne in the time of Charlemagne. If it is only a legend, as the Jewish Encyclopedia affirms that he was appointed head of the Jewish community by the Emperor at the request of the Calif Haroun al-Rashid, there is no doubt, according to the same authority, “that he soon acquired great influence over his coreligionists. It is not certain, however, whether he himself bore the title of Nasi (Prince or King of the Jews) as his descendants did, who continued to direct the affairs of the Jewish community.” There was, for instance, a Nasi Levi who presided over a meeting of delegated from all the Jewish communities in southern France in 1215, as Annas had presided over the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem.

Even then, among the Jewish communities of southern France, the anti-Christian Revolution was being silently prepared. Prosperity and wealth had reward the industry and intelligence of the exiles in Montpelier, Nimes, Tarbes, Carcassone – a score of places in that part of France where later the Huguenots would flourish – until they almost rivaled the medieval empery of their brethren in Spain. Slave-traders, purveyors of silks and other luxuries, usurers – they excelled generally in the commerce of intangibles, in the handling of money per se. Culture and power followed upon wealth. It was their great-tragedy that, having failed to understand Who Christ was, they could not get rid of the messianic consciousness for which they had been chosen and consecrated. Finding closed to them the only spiritual door to salvation, they were constantly driven to seek redemption in the here and now, in the resources of matter, in gold and power, in anything, anywhere but Christ. When all their kingdom had turned to dust in their patience hands, and the inevitable scourge of persecution came to scatter them again and again, they still followed leaders who kept them blind, and remained missionaries of what Saint John called “the spirit that dissolves Christ.”

In the thirteenth century, when the Catholic Church rejoiced in the full burgeoning of that rich and generous civilization she had reanimated and purified, the Jews were creating at Troyes a remarkable school of exegesis in which were being forged most of the arguments to be used by Protestant preachers against the Church and to be turned by the “higher critics” of later times aginst the heart of Christ Himself. The center and master of the group was a very rich Jew named Isaac Chatelain, better known now as Isaac of Troyes; a man learned in the Talmud, author of elegiac poems, endowed with many of the great Jewish virtues, such as deep and passionate loyalty to family and to race, but cursed with the intransigence of ancestors who perhaps had cried in a black hour, “His blood be upon us and our children.” He and his family incurred the wrath of the Christian populace, for the usual reasons. On Good Friday April twenty-fourth, 1288, the mode seized them, spurned their offers of gold and burned them.

The shocking holocaust avenged a long period of exploitation and of undermining of the foundation of Church and State. The heroism of some of the victims makes one regret the more that they were not in Italy, where the Pope or the hierarchy would undoubtedly have protected them. The wife of Isaac through herself into the flames. Her two sons and her son-in-law followed. Her two daughters also were burned, as was the wife of her son Alakadmenath, with Simeon the Scribe of Chatillon, Isaac Cohen, Baruch Tob Elem d-Avirey, and some others.

Rabbie Salamon, the son of this hapless Isaac, became famous inter the name of Raschi as founder of the Talmudic school of Champagne and the chief rival of Maimonides. Through Raschi the ideas of Isaac were transmitted to Protestantism. They were adopted early  in the fourteenth century by a Franciscan monk of Jewish descent, Nicholas of Lyra. The arguments of this Nicholas of Lyra powerfully influenced Luther, Calvin and Zwingli. “Raschi and the Toraphists made Nicholas of Lyra,”  wrote the nineteenth-century Christian apostate Renan, whose writings were financed and published by Jews, and who borrowed many of his brilliant sophistries from the arsenal of Narbonne, "and Nicholas of Lyra made Luther.” this has been said more wittily in the familiar epigram.

Si Lyra non lyrasset, Lutherus no saltasset.

Another Jew who did valiant spade work for Luther's sowing was Elias Levita, founder of the modern Hebrew grammar and teacher of many Christians. “He, with Jacob Loans and Obadiah Sforno,” observes a Jewish historian, “must be allowed a large share in producing the Protestant Reformation.” Sforno was the teacher of Reuchlin and many others. The so-called Reformation, adds Abrahams, “drew its life blood from a rational Hebraism.” Luther naturally employed Jews in preparing his German Bible. Jews were the most successful agents in the printing and distribution of Protestant Bibles and tracts in all parts of Europe.

Not only the ideas of Luther, but the very occasion for their dissemination, was furnished by the fertile activity of Jewish minds. The Battle of the Books, preliminary skirmish in the way of ideas about to commence at Wittenberg, could never have occurred if the Talmud and the Kabbala had not first done their deadly work. There sat on the throne of Saint Peter at that time a Pope, Leo X, for whom very little is to be said from the Catholic point of view, except that, like all the Popes, he was orthodox in his pronouncements on matters of faith and morals. He was also a patron of literature, music and art; the employer of Raphael.

His chief concern, however, was not the welfare, much less the needed reform, of the Church, but his own amusement and gratification. There is evidence in Leo's conduct to lend color to the assertion that on being elected, he remarked jovially, “Let us enjoy the Papacy, since God has given it to us.”

In the most critical and decisive age of the Church, this descendant of Florentine usurers, this son of Lorenzo de' Medici, kind and generous intellectual, Cardinal at thirteen, Pope at thirty-seven, was too busy with his pictures, his hunting and his plays to give sufficient attention to the ruin of the world. The Jews have always been well pleased with him. Like all the Medici, he surrounded himself with them and showered them with favor and protection, even to the extent of allowing the printing and dissemination of the Talmud, of whose true nature he was perhaps in ignorance. This genial collector, to whom Luther was only a joke, went to his death (too suddenly for the last sacraments) with little more than a suspicion of his own share in the business, not only by the abuses permitted in connection with indulgences, but by his long negligence and vacillation in the matter of the Jewish books.

Johann Reuchlin, a friend of Erasmus, started the famous Battle. Saturated, like young Pico della Miranola, with the imagery and fanatical theosophy of the Kabbala, which he imagined he understood, he urged all Christians to study this and other Jewish books, for a better understanding of their own religion. A Dominican of Cologne, Jakob Hochstraten, replied to him publicly in 1519, protesting against the notion that the pseudo-judaism of the Jewish mind in revolt against its own Messias could possible cast anything but a baleful light on Christianity. As the controversy continued, there entered into the lists against Reuchlin another Dominican monk, Johan Pfefferkorn. This man was a Jewish convert to the Faith. Graetz calls him, with more vigor that truth, “an ignorant, thoroughly vile creature, the scum of the Jewish people.” Reuchlin, who defended the Jewish books, was of course, “a pure, upright character,” with admirable love of truth and a soft heart.” The fact was the Pfefferkorn was a good sincere man, a none too brilliant student, who carried the zeal of the convert to the verge of fanaticism; his vileness apparently consisting of his being a true Jew in the sense in which the Apostles understood the term. He recognized the divinity of Christ and the untruthful obscenity of the Talmud. Urging the people of his race to turn from the man-made books of the rabbis to the living Christ in the Catholic Church, he defended the Jews, against the worst charges made against them, including the ritual murder accusation. This did not save him from the lasting enmity of the Annases of his day. As for Reuchlin, Graetz might have added that he had not only a soft heard but a rather soft head.

Pfefferkorn accused his, in a pamphlet called Handspiegel, of having been paid by the Jews to disseminate their propaganda. Reuchlin replied with a violent denial in his Augenspiegel and after further vituperation, pro and con, appealed to the Pope. By means of a flattering letter, he gained the favor of the influential Jew, Bonet de Lattes, physician to Pope Leo X. The physician naturally had no objection to interceding with the Holy Father in such a cause. The upshot was the pleasure-loving Pope handed over this mere squabble of monks, as he considered it, to the Bishop of Spires, a youth of twenty-seven, who in turn passed it on to Canon Truchsess, a disciple of Reuchlin; who gave the decision to his friend, completely exonerating the Augespiegel.

The more discerning friends of the Catholic Church were highly alarmed. The Inquisition, better aware from long experience of what was going on among the Jews, appealed from the verdic to the Pope. Leo summoned both disputants to Rome in 1514. delay followed delay, until Reuchlin, by a false statement, got the case transferred to another judge at Spires, who again exonerated him. Another appeal was filed. The Pope continued to delay, however, as various rich patrons of Reuchlin, and such liberal but not very profound Catholics as Erasmus, brought pressure to bear upon him; as did also the Emperor Maximilian I. It was not until the Lutheran bombshell exploded in 1517, on the hard-fought field of the Battle of the Books, that the real significance of Reuchlin's proposals became generally evident. Even then the easy-going Pope made no decision.

At last, in 1520 the finding at Spires were reversed. The Pope forbade the Augenspiegel as a scandalous and offensive book, unlawfully favorable to the Jews, and condemned Reuchlin to pay the costs of litigation. By that time it was too late to stop the avalanche. The young humanists were now united behind Reuchlin. One of them, Hutten, attacked even the Holy See. These men became the nucleus of Luther's party. The real anti-Christian Revolution (for such time would reveal it to be in essence) appeared full-panoplied on the stage of Christendom.

I have not been able to find any evidence to Dr. Margolis's assertion that Luther was drawn into the controversy on the side of Reuchlin, or of Lewis Browne's, echoing that of Hyamson, that Luther was “a disciple of Reuchlin.” If Reuchlin had never existed, Luther might well have challenged the preachings of Eck. What is certain is that the bull-necked Augustinian, who despaired of human nature because he could not at once achieve perfection in his cell, found the soil well ploughed for him for such men as Franz von Sickingen and other pupils of Reuchlin; without which he might have made no more disturbance than Huss or Wycliff had. What is equally certain, but strangely kept well in the background of most historical research, is that the Protestant Revolt, far from being an “advance” or a “progressive step,” was a long retrogression toward the moribund Judaism of the Pharisees of the time of Christ. Its multitudinous offspring of more than 200 sects would lead in the course of time to a return of the dismal skepticism of the Sadducees. Caiaphas was a Pharisee, Annas a Sadducee. It was old Annas, the Nasi, who would have the last word.

If there is exaggeration in that astonishing but almost unnoticed statement of Cabrera, himself of a Spanish Marrano family, that “most of the heresiarchs and heretics of this present century have been of those people.” it is beyond question, as a Jewish historian says, that the first leaders of the Protestant sects were called semi-Judaei, or half-Jews, in all parts of Europe.and that men of Jewish descent were as conspicuous among them as they had been among the Gnostics and would later be amog the Communists.

The origin of Calvin (whose real name was Chaurvin) is obscure, as is that of his chief aide and successor, Theodore Beza. But Farel, Rousel and others of the stormiest preachers who carried their propaganda through Europe were of Jewish descent. Michael Servetus may have been, and was certainly influenced by Jews. At Antwerp in 1566 the chief minister of the Calvinist synod, which was the center of the most telling Protestant intrigue and propaganda in the Netherlands, was a Spanish Jew.

Modern research by Jewish historians has made it clear that in the sixteenth century large numbers of the English Protestants (and doubtless the most active in propaganda and organization) were Jews who had put on the convenient mask of Calvinism at Antwerp. For example, “from an early period,” says Dr. Lucien Wolf, “the Marranos in Antwerp had taken an active part in the Reformation movement, and had given up their mask of Catholicism for a not less hollow pretense of Calvinism. The change will readily be understood. The simulation of Calvinism brought them new friends, who, like them, were enemies of Rome, Spain and the Inquisition. It helped them in their fight against the Holy Office, and for that reason was very welcome to them. Moreover, it was a form of Christianity which came nearer to their own simple Judaism. The result was that they became zealous and valuable allies of the Calvinists.”

There was something more in most Calvinists teaching than the desire for religious freedom and the reform of abuses. It was more like the ancient hatred which had followed the Catholic Church from her cradle, seeking not her reform but her utter destruction. Calvin himself was as ruthless in this regard as Mohammed. One of his letters to English Protestants declares that those who refuse to give up the Roman Catholic faith must be put to the sword. Calvinism quickly became an international movement, with a world capital at Geneva and with Calvin as a Pope ruling over a city with a regimentation uncomfortably suggestive of some totalitarian state of the future.

The most active intelligence, liaison officers and propagandists of this international army were the Jews. Only four years after Luther's first outburst, Cardinal Aleander, papal nuncio, reported that Jews were printing and circulating the German monk's books in Flanders. From the Netherlands they sent Bibles even to Spain, concealed in double-bottomed wine-casks. In Ferrara, a great Jewish financial center, they printed heretical bibles for distribution in Italy and elsewhere. No less a person than Carranza, now languishing in the prisons of the Inquisition in Spain, said that this was the reason why the church had to discourage the reading of the Bible in the vernaculars, save in approved versions. Even Jewish physicians and men of business were spies and propaganda agents. In the very year after Philip returned to Spain to stamp out Protestantism there, the Jewish Doctor Rodrigo Lopez, who was to find so unhappy an end in England, was passing over from Antwerp to London as a good Protestant.

A new spirit was abroad in the world, surely. It was not the regenerated Christian thing that Luther imagined it to be. It was the reappearance, in the most formidable array, of something older and far more terrible. The Cambridge Modern History tells us its effect was “to transfer the allegiance of the human spirit from clerical to civil authority,” or to put it more bluntly, to deliver Christ once more into the hands of Caesar. The Jewish historian Graetz expresses it otherwise: “the interest of the marketplace had driven the interests of the church into the background.” Is this not a way of saying that after the great betrayal the money changers were flocking back into the Temple from which they had been ousted by the medieval Church when she was most free and vigorous.

That was the thing, the old and evil thing, the insidious and destructive thing, that Philip was resolved to destroy, if possible, before it ruined the world. It would be far-fetched to say that he saw all its potentialities in 1559. He could hardly have seen what Pope Pius IX saw in 1849, when he declared that all the evils of the modern world (including Communism and its attendant miseries) had their origin in the tragic sixteenth-century assault on the Catholic Faith in the name of Protestantism.

Did Philip imagine, then, that the Jews were to blame for all the ills of humanity? Not even his bitterest enemies could fairly accuse him of that. A Jew-baiter in the vulgar sense he certainly was not. When an attempt was made to introduce into Spain an organization know as the Order of the White Sword aimed against Jews as Jews, he put his foot down against it.  He knew and employed too many excellent men of Jewish ancestry to be taken in by any stupid and vicious theory of “Nordic” or “Aryan” superiority. It must have been apparent to a man of his shrewd common sense (in most matters) that even those Jews who persisted in the iniquity of attempting to destroy the Church could have accomplished very little without collaboration from within, from unworthy Christians. It always takes a Judas to complete the work of Annas and Caiaphas. (William Thomas Walsh, Philip II, published originally in 1937 by Sheed and Ward and republished by TAN Books and Publishers, 1987, pp. 239-252.)