Lionel de Rothschild – “The first Jesuits were Jews.”

 

Source: Redefining God

A Crypto-Jewish conspiracy that started, appropriately, in a crypt beneath the church of Saint Denis in 1534 reached its culmination in 2013…

…Let’s have a look at what happened.

Several months ago, I came across this rather intriguing narrative…

…From the Israel Elect of Zion website

Upon reading it, my inner guidance gave me a thumbs up. But since it was on a website run by religious weirdos, I decided it would be best if I verified its major points for myself. So over the course of the next few days, I’ll show you what I found. Then we’ll arrive at a rational, commonsense conclusion based on the available evidence.

Before we begin, it is necessary to know who the Marranos (also referred to as the “conversos”) were…

“Marrano, in Spanish history, a Jew who converted to the Christian faith to escape persecution but who continued to practice Judaism secretly. It was a term of abuse and also applies to any descendants of Marranos. The origin of the word marrano is uncertain.

In the late 14th century, Spanish Jewry was threatened with extinction at the hands of mobs of fanatical Christians. Thousands of Jews accepted death, but tens of thousands found safety by ostensibly converting to Christianity. The number of converts is moderately estimated at more than 100,000. By the mid-15th century the persons who had been baptized but continued to practice Judaism in secret—Marranos—formed a compact society. The Marranos began to grow rich and to rise to high positions in the state, the royal court, and the church hierarchy. They intermarried with the noblest families of the land. The hatred directed against them by the old Christians, ostensibly because they were suspected of being untrue to their converted faith, was in fact directed indiscriminately against all conversos, or Jewish converts.” – From The Encyclopaedia Brittanica

So the Jews, after already having been massacred and spread to the wind by the political Roman Empire (see The Origin of Jewish Antipathy to the Roman Empire, the Jewish-Roman wars), were yet again under assault by monarchs crowned by the surviving religious element of the Roman Empire, the Roman Catholic Church…

“Alonso de Hojeda, a Dominican friar from Seville, convinced Queen Isabella of the existence of Crypto-Judaism among Andalusian conversos during her stay in Seville between 1477 and 1478. A report, produced by Pedro González de Mendoza, Archbishop of Seville, and by the Segovian Dominican Tomás de Torquemada, corroborated this assertion. In 1480 a plot to overthrow the government of Seville under armed insurrection lead by Don Diego de Susona, a wealthy merchant converso was discovered and suppressed.

Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella requested a papal bull establishing an inquisition in Spain in 1478 in response to the conversos returning to the practice of Judaism.” – From Wikipedia

This Spanish Inquisition lasted from 1478 to 1834, and it was during this period that Ignatius of Loyola conceived the Jesuit Order in a crypt beneath a church. So the first obvious question is…

Was Ignatius really a Crypto-Jew / Marrano / converso?

Given the inherent bias of all historical narratives, to which narrative should we look to find the answer to this question? I decided that the surest way to confirm Ignatius’ converso background was to look for admissions of it from the Jesuits themselves. And lookie what I found…

…from Fordham.UniversityPressScholarship.com. If you look to the “S.J.” in the names of the authors, it refers to the Society of Jesus; both the listed authors are Jesuits (I’ll cover other points from this book description later).

Here is an informative section from a review of the book…

…From ejournals.bc.edu (a PDF link)

And it’s worth noting that the book was published by Fordham University, a Jesuit institution…

…From Wikipedia

So as you can see, the Jesuits do not dispute that Ignatius came from a converso family, although they do gloss over the obvious implication that Ignatius himself was a Crypto-Jew. They also attempt to spin away the pervasive Crypto-Jewish nature of their Order (while simultaneously heaping praise upon the Jews). Again, I’ll get back to that later.

It is here where we must take our first common sense break. The Jesuits would retort that the Marranos (Crypto-Jews) are somehow a subset of the conversos (“real” Jewish converts to Christianity), so the terms shouldn’t be conflated. As the Establishment’s Encyclopaedia Brittanica said in one of the previous quotations…

“The hatred directed against them [the Marranos] by the old Christians, ostensibly because they were suspected of being untrue to their converted faith, was in fact directed indiscriminately against all conversos, or Jewish converts.”

Let’s bring a little common sense into the mix…

Under threat of torture and death by the followers of Jesus (who were the descendants of the Romans who slaughtered and scattered the Jewish people in Judea), how many conversos sincerely converted to Christianity and suddenly held a love for Jesus in their hearts?

The answer to this question is “few to none.” You can call the Jews many things, but “pushovers” isn’t one of them. When their opportunity to convert or die arrived, the strident Jews were tortured and killed, the practical Jews fled, and the stubborn, strong Jews stood their ground and said, “Yeah. Sure. We’re Christians now.” But as that last group, the conversos, professed Christ with their tongues, their hearts professed something else: their Jewish identity and a desire for revenge.

That being said, “converso” DOES equal “Marrano / Crypto-Jew,” because virtually no Jews would ever embrace a bastardized / Romanized version of their religion forced upon them by the enemies of their people. Almost all conversions were done for practical purposes, not out of a real realignment of faith.

So it is here where you face your first moment of decision. You need to pick the truer narrative…

A. The Jesuit version – Ignatius did have a Jewish family background, but his family was among the “good” conversos. When they were told to “convert or die” during one of the many pogroms that occurred before and during the Inquisition, his family realized the err of their Jewish ways and repented of them. They cast aside their Jewish identity and embraced a true love of their savior, Jesus Christ. It was with this pure-hearted love of Christ that Ignatius begat the Jesuit Order.

B. This blog’s version – When Ignatius’ family faced their “convert or die” or “convert for acceptance and gain” moment, they told the Christians what they wanted to hear. But secretly, they maintained their Jewish identities and practices like virtually all Jews did. So when Ignatius put together the Jesuit Order, he had on his mind what all Jews had on their minds: seeking shelter from the persecutors and seeking change to put an end to the persecution.

Which narrative do you find more realistic? If your answer is “the Jesuit version,” stop reading this entry now and go find something else to read. The rest will be of no benefit to you. But if your answer is “this blog’s version,” let’s keep going.

Now that we’ve established that the Jesuit Order was started by a Crypto-Jew, and given that at least one of the other co-founders, Diego (James) Laynez, was also a Crypto-Jew (who went on to lead the Order after Ignatius)…

Did any other Crypto-Jews / Marranos / conversos join the Jesuit Order?

To answer this question, let’s look to this Jesuit-affiliated “scholar”…

…who is an Associate Director of the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at a Jesuit university…

…From Wikipedia

In an interview with The Boston Globe, Professor Maryks provided the answer to this Q & A…

The answer to our question, then, is “yes.” The Jesuit Order was founded by at least two Crypto-Jews (not just one like the Professor suggests), and they flung open the doors for more to follow them in. As the Professor said in the understatement of the year, “The Society of Jesus was substantially influenced by Christians of Jewish ancestry.”

So did this new order of Crypto-Jews escape the attention of other members of the Catholic hierarchy? No, they did not.

Let’s have a quick look at page 86 from Professor Maryks’ book A Companion to Ignatius of Loyola…

…From Google Books

From this passage, we see that the “Old Christians” (traditional non-converso Christians) within the Church “suspected Loyola of Crypto-Judaism” so much that at least one investigation was mounted against him. Maryks also mentions “Ignatius’ alleged Basque pride in his blood purity.” I’ll get back to that a little later. And by the way, the “Alumbrados” of “Jewish origins” with whom Ignatius had “numerous contacts” translates to “Illuminated.” Now isn’t that a little foreshadowing of things to come.

Now let’s have a look at page 41 of another of Professor Maryks’ books, The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews…

…From Google Books

This passage offers three important points…

1) It speaks of the Jewish infiltration of civil and ecclesiastical institutions that gave rise to a protective backlash against the conversos. From the perspective of the Old Christians, they saw an insidious takeover of their society taking place, and it had to be stopped (we Americans know exactly how that feels). They were right of course. But from the perspective of the “New Christians” (the conversos), they perceived the Old Christians as engaging in persecution against them, and they too were right. Looking at it rationally, the Old Christians had no reason to complain; they forced the Jews into their religion, so they fully deserved what was coming to them. They brought “the Crypto-Jewish virus” in by their own hand.

2) It confirms that conversos did see the clerical ranks of the Church as a haven from persecution, although Maryks fails to mention the other obvious motivation the conversos had in becoming clergy: ending the persecution of their people by changing or even taking over the Church once they were on the inside.

3) It points out that Crypto-Jews penetrated other orders of the Church. It is standard Jewish operating procedure to infiltrate all factions within an institution for the purpose of monitoring their activities and taking control if possible. They didn’t need to take over the Jesuit Order, though. It was theirs from the very beginning. It was their hand within the Church.

It is here where we’ll take another common sense break and put ourselves in the shoes of the Crypto-Jews of the early Jesuit Order. Upon doing so, we find that we’re facing a worsening environment in which our Order is suspected of being a synagogue of Jews, and blood purity laws are popping up to stop conversos from taking positions in civil society and the clergy. What do we do?

Do we give up, go home, and cry in our Manischewitz? Or do we make adjustments to allay suspicion and get around the blood purity laws? Being Jews, the choice is obvious: we adjust and move on – we never give up.

After thinking about it, these are the specific things we’d do to keep going….

1) We would double-down on leading the charge against converso influence in the both the Order and the wider Church, like our co-founder Francis Xavier did in encouraging the Inquisition of Goa…

…By leading the effort against ourselves, we can control where the investigations go, and we can shield our core operatives while staging controlled sacrifices (such as in a faraway place like Goa, India) to make it look like we’re making progress.

2) We would double-down on our efforts to pose as the most rabidly loyal order in the whole Church. This would place us above any suspicion of being subversives. If we want to sneak around as Jews and change the Church, we must stop acting like Jew-lovers and start acting like the complete opposite. People will find it incomprehensible that we are Jewish influencers if we outwardly act like we are against Jewish influence.

Stepping back out of our Jewish shoes, we find this is exactly what the Jesuits did. Here is another excerpt from Professor Maryks’ Boston Globe interview…

“The archbishop of Toledo issued a purity-of-blood law in 1547. So the foundation of the Jesuits coincided with the increase of purity-of-blood laws. In 1593, the society issued a law which said that no candidate of Jewish ancestry could enter the society, and those conversos already in the society who had not finished their vows had to leave. This was much harsher than the first because it did not limit the genealogical inquiry. In 1608, an inquiry was set at five generations.”

So the Jesuits not only made their own blood purity law, they made one that was “much harsher” than that of the archbishop of Toledo. This helped put them above suspicion. But take note that they did not kick out the conversos who had already finished their vows, which left conversos in the Order to do the background checks. By having their own people doing the background checks, they could falsify clean certificates for the conversos they wanted, and reject conversos who weren’t “connected.”

As for any background checks that weren’t conducted by insiders, getting around them was a simple matter: they just bribed the inspectors and/or presented falsified documents. As Wikipedia’s entry on limpieza de sangre (blood purity) states…

“The religious and military orders, guilds and other organizations incorporated in their by-laws clauses demanding proof of cleanliness of blood. Upwardly mobile New Christian families had to either contend with their plight, or bribe and falsify documents attesting generations of good Christian ancestry.”

In the time of these blood purity laws, falsified documents and bribes were commonplace. And within the context of the Jesuit Order, this gave rise to the “closet-converso” – a deep-cover Crypto-Jew who had a “clean Christian background.” Even Professor Maryks recognizes the existence of such persons…

…From page 84 of A Companion to Ignatius of Loyola on Google Books

So in the year 1593, the Society of Jesus went from being a synagogue of conversos to being a synagogue of closet-conversos, and it is here where you face another moment of decision. You must choose the truer narrative…

A. The Jesuit version – The Society of Jesus enacted a very strict purity of blood law in 1593, and it was faithfully observed. This resulted in the end of the Order’s liberal period, and the converso presence within the Society waned. The Order then went on to centuries of strict adherence to Catholic doctrine and faithful service to the Church.

B. This blog’s version – The Society of Jesus responded to its increasingly hostile environment by putting on a show of casting out conversos and blocking them from entry. But in reality, they had ways of dodging blood purity laws, and they kept bringing in Jews under deep cover. With the financial assistance of the “Court Jew” money-men outside the Church, the Order then spent centuries spreading its tentacles both within the Church and around the world, eventually taking over the Church entirely.

Which narrative do you find more realistic?

Before you answer this question, you might want to have a look at this inconspicuous sentence from the Jesuits’ Wikipedia entry…

“The Society participated in the Counter-Reformation and, later, in the implementation of the Second Vatican Council.”

By the late 1950’s, the Crypto-Jews had amassed enough power within the Church to be able to remake it in their image, making it more worldly and cosmopolitan. And they officially began the process on 11 October 1962 by convening the Second Vatican Council.

Have a look at what this Huffington Post article…

…written on the 50th anniversary of the Council, says about it [with my comments added in brackets]…

>>> With Vatican II, the Catholic Church sent out the message that it was part of the modern world, said Thomas Ryan, director of the Loyola Institute for Ministry. “Not against, not above, not apart, but in the modern world,” he said. “The church sought to engage, not condemn.” [Note who is saying this about the Church’s new worldliness: one of the directors of a Jesuit institution] <<<

The article also talks about the most notable change of all…

>>> Perhaps the biggest of these changes came in the church’s approach to Judaism. Before Vatican II, Jews were stigmatized as the people who killed Jesus Christ. That changed with the council, when the Catholic Church acknowledged its Jewish roots and Jews’ covenant with God, Ryan said.

“It had the effect that the sun has when it comes up and interrupts the night,” said Rabbi Edward Cohn of New Orleans’ Temple Sinai, whose best friend as a child had to get permission from the archbishop to attend Cohn’s bar mitzvah. “It was no less dramatic than that. It provided an entirely new day. It changed everything.” [So in this passage we have the Jesuit-affiliated Ryan and a Jewish rabbi telling us how great Vatican II was; telling, no?] <<<

And can you guess who led the effort in the Council to change the Church’s stance on Jews?

It was this Jesuit Cardinal, Augustin Bea (seated, next to his rabbi co-conspirator, Abraham Joshua Heschel)…

…Here is what Wikipedia says about Bea and his role in Vatican II…

>>> Augustin Bea, S.J. (28 May 1881 – 16 November 1968), was a German Jesuit priest and scholar at the Pontifical Gregorian University specialising in biblical studies and biblical archeology. He also served as the personal confessor of Pope Pius XII.

In 1959, Pope John XXIII made him a cardinal of the Catholic Church. He served as the first president of the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity from 1960 until his death. Bea was a leading biblical scholar and ecumenist, who greatly influenced Christian-Jewish relations during the Second Vatican Council in Nostra aetate…

Bea was highly influential at the Vatican II Council in the 1960s as a decisive force in the drafting of Nostra aetate, which repudiated anti-Semitism. In 1963, he held secret talks with Abraham Joshua Heschel, promoting Catholic-Jewish dialogue. John Borelli, a Vatican II historian, has observed that, “It took the will of John XXIII and the perseverance of Cardinal Bea to impose the declaration on the Council”. <<<

And for more information about Bea’s co-conspirator, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, have a look at what this article from America magazine (which is published by the Jesuits)…

…says about him…

>>> The two key figures that inspired the preparation of “Nostra Aetate” were Cardinal Augustin Bea, the Jesuit who was head of the Secretariat for Christian Unity, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, theological consultant of the American Jewish Committee. Between them a sincere friendship began, which helped to work out the declaration, though not without difficulties. From the very beginning, Rabbi Heschel worked hard to remove from the teaching of the Catholic Church any anti-Semitic words and any reference to a mission of the church for the conversion of the Jews. In May 1962 he presented a memorandum in which he asked the council fathers to eliminate once and for all any accusation of deicide on the part of the Jewish people, to acknowledge the integrity and the perpetuity of the election of Jews in the history of salvation and, lastly, to give up proselytizing Jews. The American Jewish Committee presented three memoranda; in the last of these his influence was essential. He wanted the council fathers to know that a Jew has a dignity as a Jew and not as a possible convert to Christianity. He repeated quite often: “If I were asked either to convert or to die in Auschwitz, I’d rather go to Auschwitz.” <<<

As for getting the Church “to give up proselytizing Jews,” that would have to wait until the Crypto-Jewish takeover of the Church was fully completed with the installation of the first Jesuit pope, Pope Francis…

…From National Public Radio

So it is now the official stance of the Roman Catholic Church that the death of chickens Jews sacrifice to expiate their sins…

…is fully equivalent to the death of Jesus Christ to expiate sins…

…(It’s no wonder the Catholic communion wafers taste like chicken)

I’m sure you can imagine how traditional Christians feel about this change in Vatican policy.

So with Jesuit activities during Vatican II and Pope Francis’ reign set before us, let’s return to the question…

Which narrative do you find more realistic?

A. The Jesuit narrative that the Order was never Crypto-Jewish, and that conversos stopped joining them in 1593, or

B. This blog’s narrative that the Jesuit Order was created as an instrument of Jewish infiltration and subversion of the Roman Catholic Church, and it has succeeded in taking over.

Now that we have a basic understanding of the past, it’s time to look at what the Jesuit Crypto-Jews are doing now.

If we check in on Thomas Michel, the Jesuit whose book told us about Ignatius’ converso background earlier in this entry, we see he has been involved in the Vatican effort to “unify the People of the Book” under “Chrislam” (a.k.a. the “One World Religion” or the “Spiritual UN”)…

…From Religion.UCSB.edu (a PDF link)

Chrislam is intended to be the companion religion to the BRICS-fronted, UN-centered New World Order, but both Chrislam and the NWO are merely intermediate steps to the globalists’ ultimate objective: doing away with democratic government and installing a Kabbalized god-king named “Jesus Christ” as world ruler. With this ultimate goal in mind, beware of narratives that spin the converso takeover of the Church as the action of “Satanic” forces…

The_Jesuit_Order_as_a_Synagogue_of_Jews_Jesuits_of_Jewish_Ancestry

 

 

Review: The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews

Part One
“Those from the circumcision subverted the entire house of the Society. As sons of this world who are shrewd in dealing with their own, and avid of new things, they easily excite disorders and destroy the unity of souls and their bond with the government.”
Lorenzo Maggio, Jesuit Curia in Rome, 1586.

One of the more interesting aspects of Jewish group behavior is the presence of subversive strategies employing crypsis, often facilitated by a combination of deception and self-deception. To date, the most forthright and convincing theoretical framework for understanding cryptic forms of Judaism is found in Kevin MacDonald’s groundbreaking Separation and Its Discontents: Toward and Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism. A substantial portion of the fourth chapter of the text (1998/2004: 121–132) is devoted to ‘Reactive Racism in the Period of the Iberian Inquisitions.’ Here MacDonald puts forth the view (147) that the blood purity struggles of the Spanish Inquisition during the 15th and 16th centuries should be seen as “an authoritarian, collectivist, and exclusionary movement that resulted from resource and reproductive competition with Jews, and particularly crypto-Jews posing as Christians.” The historical context lies predominantly in the forced conversion of Jews in Spain in 1391, after which these ‘New Christians’ or c onversos assumed (or indeed retained) a dominance in the areas of law, finance, diplomacy, public administration, and a wide range of economic activities. MacDonald argues (148) that despite superficial religious conversions, the New Christians “must be considered a historical Jewish group” that acted in such a way as to continue the advance of its ethnic interests. An integral aspect of this was that Wealthy New Christians purchased and endowed ecclesiastical benefices for their children, with the result that many prelates were of Jewish descent.

Indirectly, and almost certainly unintentionally, MacDonald’s arguments find much in the way of corroboration in The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews (2010) by Boston College’s Robert Aleksander Maryks. Examining the same geographical area during the same period, Maryks presents an account of the early years of the Society of Jesus, during which a fierce struggle took place for the soul, fate, and control of the Order; a struggle involving a highly influential crypto-Jewish bloc and a competing network of European Christians. In this unpolished but interesting book, Maryks illuminates this struggle with reference to previously undiscovered material, in the process shedding light on some of the most important recurring themes of reactive anti-Semitism: Jewish ethnocentrism, nepotism, the tendency to monopoly, and the strategic use of alliances with European elites. Perhaps most fascinating of all, Maryks makes significant reference to Jewish responses to European efforts to stifle their influence, some of which are remarkable in the close manner in which they parallel modern examples of Jewish apologetic propaganda. As such, The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews is highly recommended for anyone seeking to understand, via an easily-digested historical case study, the dynamics of the ethnic conflict between Jews and Europeans.

Maryks divides his text into four well-paced chapters. The first provides readers with ‘The Historical Context of Purity-of-Blood Discrimination (1391–1547),’ a detailed standalone introduction to the nature of the ‘New Christian’ problem in Iberia but which should be read in conjunction with MacDonald’s work on the same theme. The second chapter concerns ‘Early Jesuit Pro-Converso Policy (1540–72),’ which demonstrates the intensive manner in which crypto-Jews infiltrated key positions in the Society of Jesus, adapting its ideological positions in accordance with their interests, and eventually establishing a monopoly on top positions that extended to the Vatican. The third chapter, ‘Discrimination Against Jesuits of Jewish Lineage (1573–93),’ concerns the establishment of a movement acting against the crypto-Jewish strategy, with an analysis of the key figures and their rationale. The fourth chapter, ‘Jesuit Opposition to the Purity-of-Blood Discrimination (1576–1608),’ examines the efforts of crypto-Jewish Jesuits to fight back against the European counter-strategy, often involving the employment of tactics and stances that are now familiar to us as the hallmarks of a Jewish intellectual movement.

This sequence parallels the processes that led to the Inquisition—New Christians establishing themselves in top positions in Spanish politics, business, and culture, provoking a reaction by the Old Christians aimed at regaining power, followed by Jewish counter efforts against the Inquisition and the against the Spanish government generally, the latter typically played out on the international scene.

One of the key strengths of this fascinating book is that Maryks can rely on relatively recent genealogical discoveries to prove beyond doubt that many of the individuals once merely “accused” of being crypto-Jews were undeniably of Jewish lineage. Maryks can thus cut through a clouded period in which ancestry was vital and yet fogged with accusations, denials, and counter-accusations, with tremendous clarity. In the author’s words (xxix), “racial tensions played a pivotal role in early Jesuit history.”

Opening his book, Maryks recalls delivering a paper on converso influence in the Jesuits, and afterwards receiving an email from a man with origins in the Iberian peninsula. The email concerned the remarkably long survival of crypto-Jewish behaviors in the sender’s family:

From Friday evening through Saturday evening, his grandfather would hide the image of baby Jesus from a large framed picture of St. Anthony that he kept in his home. It was, in fact, a wind-up music box. On Fridays he would wind up the mechanism and push a button, so that Jesus would disappear out of St. Anthony’s arms, hidden in the upper frame of the picture. On Saturdays he would push the button, so that Jesus would come back out from hiding into St. Anthony’s arms. As eldest son in his family, my correspondent was told this story by his father, who also asked him to eat only kosher food. (xv)

The survival of such eccentric, and in this case apparently trivial, forms of crypto-Judaism into what one assumes to be the early twentieth century, might appear to be little more than a socio-historical curio. In actual fact, however, it is a small but memorable vestige of what was once a very powerful means of continuing the Jewish group evolutionary strategy in the Iberian peninsula after 1391 — an overwhelmingly hostile environment. In a political, religious, and social context devoid of the synagogue and many of the most visible aspects of Judaism, small reminders of group difference, even otherwise trivial ones like hiding images of Jesus or adhering to discreet dietary rules, became vital methods for retaining group cohesion.

For some time, these methods were largely successful in facilitating the continuance of Jewish life ‘under the noses’ of the Christian host society. During this successful period, conversos were able to expand nepotistic monopolies of influence in a wide range of civic and even (Christian) religious spheres. When it failed, however, the consequences could be catastrophic. Maryks points out (xxii) that from its founding in 1540 to 1593, the Society of Jesus had no discriminatory legislation against individuals of Jewish heritage, and that during this period converso Jesuits “held the highest administrative offices, and defined the Society’s institutional development and spirituality.” However, significant resistance to this crypto-Jewish monopoly had developed by the latter date, and from 1593 to 1608 a power struggle resulted in the defeat of the crypto-Jewish element and the introduction of laws prohibiting the admittance of members of ‘impure blood.’ From 1608 until 1946 this involved a review of the ancestry of any potential member of the Society of Jesus, up to the fifth generation.

The Jewish Origins of the Jesuits

On 15 August 1534, Ignatius of Loyola (born Íñigo López de Loyola), a Spaniard from the Basque city of Loyola, and six others, all students at the University of Paris, met in Montmartre outside Paris, in a crypt beneath the church of Saint Denis, to pronounce the religious vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Ignatius’ six companions were: Francis Xavier from Navarre (modern Spain), Alfonso Salmeron, Diego Laínez, Nicolás Bobadilla from Castile (modern Spain), Pierre Favre from Savoy, and Simão Rodrigues from Portugal. At this point they called themselves the Compañía de Jesús, and also Amigos en El Señor or “Friends in the Lord.” The Spanish “company” would be translated into Latin as societas, deriving from socius, a partner or comrade. This soon evolved into the “Society of Jesus” (SJ) by which they would later be more widely known. In 1537, the seven travelled to Italy to seek papal approval for their order. Pope Paul III gave them a commendation, and permitted them to be ordained priests. The official founding of the Society of Jesus occurred in 1540.

The presence and influence of conversos in the Society of Jesus was strong from the beginning. Of the seven founding members, Maryks provides categorical evidence that four were of Jewish ancestry — Salmeron, Laínez, Bobadilla, and Rodrigues. In addition, Loyola himself has long been noted for his strong philo-Semitism, and one recent PhD thesis[1] has even advanced a convincing argument that Loyola’s maternal grandparents, (his grandfather, Dr. Martín García de Licona, was a merchant and financial advisor at court), were full-blooded conversos — thus rendering the ‘Basque nobleman’ halachically Jewish. Jewish scholar of the Inquisition, Henry Kamen, who had earlier argued that the Inquisition was “a weapon of social welfare” used mainly to obliterate the conversos as a distinct class capable of offering social and economic competition to ‘Old Christians,’ once voiced his own personal view that Loyola was “a deep and sincere spiritual Semite.”[2]

Straightforward assessments of the reasons for Loyola’s philo-Semitism are, as Maryks admirably elucidates, complicated by the ubiquitous presence of converso propaganda. More specifically, Loyola’s reputation as an ardent admirer of the Jews rests predominantly on a series of anecdotes and remarks attributed to him — and many of these derive from biographies penned shortly after his death by converso Jesuits aiming to promote and defend their interests. For example, the only source for the argument that Loyola had an overwhelming desire to be of Jewish origin so that he could “become a relative of Christ and his Mother” is the first official biography of Loyola — penned by the converso Pedro de Ribadeneyra. Ribadeneyra is described by Maryks as “a closet-converso” who distorted many now-established facts about Loyola’s life, including a concealment of the fact that “the Inquisition in Alcalá had accused Loyola of being a crypto-Jew.” (43) An important aspect of Ribadeneyra’s biography was thus the promotion of the idea that being Jewish was desirable and admirable — Loyola’s philo-Semitism (real or imagined) was intended to be emulated. Meanwhile the sinister aspects of crypto-Judaism, and their suppression by the Inquisition, were excised from the story altogether.

Whether Loyola was in fact a crypto-Jew, or whether he indeed was a European but possessed a strong desire to be a Jew, remains unconfirmed at time of this writing. However, it is certain that Loyola surrounded himself with many converso colleagues and that he opposed any discrimination against converso candidates within the Society of Jesus. Maryks argues that, issues of crypsis and philo-Semitism aside, Loyola was probably “motivated by the financial support that he had sought from their [converso] network in Spain.”(xx) In this reading then, Loyola was fully aware of the elite position of the conversos within Spanish society and was prepared to accept their money to establish his organization in exchange for adopting a non-racial stance in its governance.

The question of course remains as to why the crypto-Jewish elite in Spain would back, both financially and in terms of manpower, a Christian religious order. The important thing to keep in mind is that religion and politics in Early Modern Europe were intimately entwined, and that, through spiritual confraternities and their relationships with local elites, even poverty-espousing religious orders like the Franciscans could exert a strong form of socio-political influence. This was often made even more sharply evident when religious orders engaged in missionary work in foreign lands, often taking pioneering roles in colonial regimes, and even assisting with their economic enterprises. William Caferro notes that in Renaissance Italy “the Florentine political elite was closely tied to the church. Government officials often held high church office and benefice, which aided their local political power.”[3] Involvement in religious orders was thus a necessary aspect and extension of political, social, and cultural influence.

Unsurprisingly then, it can be demonstrated that crypto-Jews straddled the interconnected networks of royal administration, the civic bureaucracy, and the Church. Citing just some examples, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh note in their history of the Inquisition:

In 1390 the rabbi of Burgos converted to Catholicism. He ended his life as Bishop of Burgos, Papal legate and tutor to a prince of the blood. [Burgos’s son would later become an important pro-converso activist and will be discussed below]. He was not alone. In some of the major cities, the administration was dominated by prominent converso families. At the very time the Spanish Inquisition was formed, King Ferdinand’s treasurer was converso in his background. In Aragón, the five highest administrative posts in the kingdom were occupied by conversos. In Castile, there were at least four converso bishops. Three of Queen Isabella’s secretaries were conversos, as was the official court chronicler.[4]

For the crypto-Jewish elite of early modern Spain, the founding of an influential religious order headed by a philo-Semite (if not a fellow crypto-Jew), staffed predominantly by a converso leadership, and constitutionally tolerant of converso applicants, would undoubtedly have been an attractive prospect. That a bargain of some form existed between Loyola and his crypto-Jewish sponsors is suggested, as noted above, by the nature of the early Jesuit constitution and by early correspondence concerning the admission of candidates of Jewish ancestry. The founding of the Jesuit order had coincided with the rise of a more general Spanish anti-converso atmosphere that reached its peak in 1547, “when the most authoritative expression of the purity-of- blood legislation, El Estatuto de limpieza [de sangre], was issued by the Inquisitor General of Spain and Archbishop of Toledo, Silíceo (xx).” Pope Paul IV and Silíceo’s former pupil, King Philip II, ratified the archbishop’s statutes in 1555 and 1556, respectively, but Ignatius of Loyola and his converso successor, Diego Laínez (1512–65) vigorously opposed the Inquisitor’s attempts to preclude conversos from joining the Jesuits. In fact, in a letter addressed to the Jesuit Francisco de Villanueva (1509–57), Loyola wrote that “in no way would the Jesuit Constitutions accept the policy of the archbishop (xxi).”

Seeking to quell rising tensions over the issue, in February 1554 Loyola sent his plenipotentiary emissary, Jerónimo Nadal (1507–80), to visit the Inquisitor. Nadal insisted that the Jesuit Constitutions did not discriminate between candidates of the Society on the basis of lineage, and even personally admitted a number of converso candidates during his visit to Iberia. In a heated debate with the Inquisitor over the admission of one of them, Nadal replied: “We [Jesuits] take pleasure in admitting those of Jewish ancestry.” In what would become a striking pattern, most of the pro-converso arguments were made by crypto-Jews claiming to be native Spaniards. Maryks notes that his historical investigations suggest that Nadal was “most probably a descendant of Majorcan Jews (77).”

Jewish attempts to alter Christian thinking about Jews, from within Christianity, were already well-established by the date of Nadal’s intercession with the Inquisitor. An excellent example is the classic work of Alonso de Santa María de Cartagena (1384–1456) — Defensorium unitatis christianae [In Defense of Christian Unity] (1449–50). Alonso de Cartagena had been baptized (at the age of five or six) by his father Shlomo ha-Levi, later renamed Pablo de Santa María (c. 1351–1435), who— as chief rabbi of Burgos—converted to Christianity just before the anti-Jewish riots of 1391 and later was elected bishop of Cartagena (1402) and Burgos (1415). The fact that the wife of this Bishop of Burgos remained an unconverted Jewess does not appear to have impeded the latter’s career in the Church is interesting to say the least.

Meanwhile his son, Cartagena, like many other conversos, studied civil and ecclesiastical law at Salamanca and went on to a highly influential career straddling royal, civic, and religious spheres. He served as apostolic nuncio and canon in Burgos. King Juan II appointed Cartagena as his official envoy to the Council of Basel (1434–9), where he contributed to the formulation of a decree on “the regenerative character of baptism without regard for lineage (4).” Like other examples of pro-converso propaganda, however, Cartagena’s arguments always went beyond mere appeals for ‘tolerance.’ According to Cartagena, “the faith appears to be more splendid in the Israelite flesh,” Jews naturally possess a “civic nobility,” and it was the duty of rough and uncouth native Spaniards to unite with the “tenderness of the Israelite meekness.” (14, 17)

Conversos thus emerge in the works of the earliest crypto-Jewish activists as more special than ordinary Christians, as naturally deserving of an elite status, and, far from being the worthy objects of hostility, were in fact uniquely blameless, ‘tender,’ and ‘meek.’ One is struck by the regular use of similar arguments in our contemporary environment, a similarity that only increases when one considers Cartagena’s attribution of anti-Jewish hostility solely to “the malice of the envious.” (20)

Against this backdrop of crypto-Jewish apologetics, Maryks demonstrates, whether he intends to or not, that the early Jesuits were largely a vehicle for converso power and influence (both political and ideological). Loyola continued to be “surrounded” by conversos throughout his leadership (55). Enrique Enríques, the son of Portuguese Jews, even authored the first Jesuit manual of moral theology, Theologiae moralis summa, in 1591. (65) Maryks describes Loyola as having an unlimited “trust” in candidates of Jewish heritage, citing his decision to “admit in 1551 Giovanni Battista Eliano (Romano), the grandson of the famous grammarian and poet Rabbi Elijah Levita (1468–1549) …. He entered the Society at the age of twenty-one, just three months after his baptism (66).”

In explaining Loyola’s lax requirements for converso applicants, and resultant acquiescence in flooding the Society with crypto-Jews, it is strange that Maryks should abandon his own prior suggestion that the founding of the Jesuits may have rested on a quid pro quo with the converso elite in favor of a less convincing theory based on a putative and ill-explained “trust” that Loyola possessed for Jews. Unfortunately this is a common theme throughout Jewish historiography, where the facts and conclusions presented in the same text are often on entirely different trajectories. In a similar vein, Maryks’s skeletal explanation that crypto-Jews flooded the Jesuits simply because Loyola had “numerous contacts with the converso spiritual and merchant network” before he founded the Society of Jesus, seems woefully inadequate and lacking in context.

Despite the best laid plans of Loyola and his colleagues, and just 32 years after its founding, the Society of Jesus would undergo a revolt from below against a rapidly expanding crypto-Jewish elite. The features of this revolt represent a fascinating case study in the reactive nature of anti-Semitism. Maryks narrative of how two competing ethnic groups struggled for the future of the Jesuit Order, outlined in his second and third chapters, is certainly the greatest strength of the text. It is to this European counter-strategy that we now turn our attention.

Part Two
“Being children of this world, pompous, cunning, fake, self-seeking, etc., it is certain that they fit religious life very badly and that it is impossible to maintain union with them. If those of this blood are made superiors, they employ almost all their government in external things: they promote genuine mortification and solid virtues very little, and seem to be merchants, seeking first seats and being called rabbis; they are hardly eager to seek perfection that is described in the parts 5 and 6 of the Constitutions; and readily admit others of the same blood who are very unworthy.”
Manuel Rodrigues, Jesuit curia in Rome.

The Racial Struggle for the Jesuit Order

Everard Mercurian (1514-1580)
Everard Mercurian (1514-1580)
The complaints of native Spanish members of the Society of Jesus, regarding the crypto-Jewish Jesuit elite, are remarkably uniform. Predominant among their concerns was the Jewish tendency towards monopoly, nepotism, arrogance, aggressive ambition, and an air of insincerity in the practice of Christianity. Of particular concern was the fact that the Spanish Jesuit Order was becoming an exclusive enclave of influential Jews that stretched out even into the heart of Rome.

The epigraph above, from Manuel Rodrigues, highlights all of these themes, some of which have been empirically demonstrated. For example, the body of research compiled by Maryks and other scholars, and discussed in Part 1, more than provides sufficient evidence in support of the accusation that crypto-Jews were “readily admitting others of the same blood.” Moreover, Benedetto Palmio, an Italian assistant to two native European Jesuit Superior Generals (Francisco de Borja and Everard Mercurian), complained of the “multitude and insolence of Spanish neophytes,” whom he described as a “pestilence (133).” Stressing that “where a New Christian was found, it was impossible to live in peace,” he added that “those who governed in Rome were almost all neophytes. … This sort of people and almost no other were being admitted in Spain (133).” King Phillip II of Spain had by the 1570s taken to describing the Jesuits as a “Synagogue of Hebrews.” (133)

The method of leadership employed by this crypto-Jewish elite was further described by Palmio as despotic. The crypto-Jewish elite in Rome was behaving “not as fathers but as masters (135).” Reflecting age-old Jewish ethnic networking, there were gross ethnic disparities in promotions to high office, with Palmio stressing that “the neophytes want to dominate everywhere and this is why the Society is agitated by the tempest of discords and acrimonies (138).” Conversos were “overly ambitious, insolent, Janus-faced, pretentious, despotic, astute, terrible, greedy for power, and infamous.” (142) Lorenzo Maggio, an Italian Jesuit curia in Rome, complained that “those from the circumcision subverted the entire house of the Society.” (117)

Regardless of the actual origins of the Jesuit Order, which were heavily Jewish and intertwined with the search for political influence from the beginning, many native European members seem to have perceived the Society of Jesus as an essentially good religious movement that had been founded on idealist and pious terms, but had been corrupted along the way by the infiltration of power-seeking crypto-Jews. It is of course essential to note that such perceptions were not unique to the Society of Jesus. Around the same time that agitation was building within the Jesuit Order, Bishop Diego de Simancas of Zamora urged his parishioners to combat the machinations of the conversos and their activities in “deceiving the pope and his ministers (31).” Simancas, like Rodrigues, Palmio, and Hoffaeus, concluded that conversos were prone to “ambition, conspiracy, and greed for power” as demonstrated by the fact they had “infiltrated the offices of importance in the Church of Toledo.” (34–5)

In order to combat crypto-Jewish nepotism and extensive ethnic networking, native European Jesuits developed very interesting counter-strategies that in many respects mirrored their Jewish counterparts. Again, the patterns seen here should be regarded as broadly supportive of Kevin MacDonald’s analysis of the reactive nature of anti-Semitism in Separation and Its Discontents, where one of the key chapters concerns National Socialism as a mirror image strategy. What non-Jewish Jesuits essentially did in the early stages of the revolt from below, was, like their crypto-Jewish opponents, to establish their own secretive networks based on racial exclusion, and the selection of their own preferred candidates based on ethnic preference.

The stage for this clash was set following the death of the third Superior General, Francisco de Borja, in 1572. Until this date, non-Jewish Jesuits had endured the philo-Semitic leadership of Loyola and the rampant ethnic nepotism of the converso Diego Laínez. Borja was himself described as a “protector of conversos” during periods of rising tension (115). After Borja’s death, it was readily apparent that the crypto-Jewish Jesuit elite had already contrived to select the converso Juan Alphonse de Polanco as his successor. (xxv) Polanco had already been appointed Society secretary by Loyola in 1547, before becoming senior administrator in the general curia in Rome. Incredibly influential, and “the most prominent figure in the Society of Jesus,” his selection should have been “open and shut.” However, as Maryks discusses, by this date “a close-knit anti-converso party [composed mainly of the Jesuit representatives from outside Spain] gained ground within the society.” (xxv)

In spite of the significant pro-converso presence at General Congregation 3 [General Congregations are “the supreme legislative body of the Society of Jesus consisting of major (‘provincial’) superiors and locally elected representatives”], the close-knit Italo-Portuguese lobby gained ground in the assembly and was crafty enough to successfully conspire against Polanco’s election and his pro-converso supporters. (120)

As well as forming a close-knit group based on ethnicity, the counter-strategy mirrored Jewish tactics by appealing for support from elites. The Portuguese delegation led by Leão Henriques “secretly carried to Rome a letter that Henriques’s penitent, Cardinal Infant Henry of Portugal (1512–80), had written to Pope Gregory XIII on 22 January 1573. In it, the Grand Inquisitor of Portugal and future king (1578–80) demanded that neither a converso nor a pro-converso candidate be elected superior general of the Society of Jesus, and he warned that if no measure against the converso evil is taken, the Society would risk destruction.” (121)

Pope Gregory XIII soon disclosed his support for a non-Spanish alternative to Polanco, who, in turn, indicated that he would step aside but refused to prohibit other “Spanish” candidates from being elected superior general. After the congregation opened, Gregory XIII inquired about the procedures of the congregation, about the number of Spaniards among the voters, and about the national background of the previous superiors general. Gregory “remarked that somebody should be chosen from a nation other than Spain, and, in spite of Polanco’s protest against limiting freedom of conscience of the electors, the pope specifically suggested the name of the Walloon Everard Mercurian, then dismissed the delegation with his blessing (122).” Consequently, while the converso Antonio Possevino was “addressing the congregation with an opening discourse, Cardinal Gallio of Como arrived and informed the congregation that he was representing the pope’s will to prevent the election of any Spanish candidate.” (122) The next day the assembly chose Everard Mercurian as the next superior general on the first ballot by a majority of 27 votes.

From the very first years of his office Mercurian proceeded, in his own words, to “cleanse the house.” He “removed from Rome (and possibly from Italy or even Europe) many converso Jesuits.” (123) Polanco, after almost three decades in office, “was moved away from Rome and sent to Sicily, a measure that seemed too harsh even to his major enemy, Benedetto Palmio.” (123)

However, in the aftermath of the removal of crypto-Jews from influence throughout the upper echelons of the Society of Jesus, a new movement emerged within the Spanish Jesuits called the memorialistas or memorialists. The group got its name from ‘memorial,’ which was a literary genre consisting of a written statement of facts presented in conjunction with a petition to a royal or religions authority. The memorialistas gained their name by sending “secret memorials to the Spanish Court and Inquisition, and the Holy See, asking for the reform of the Jesuit Institute, and, especially, for the autonomy of the Spanish Jesuit provinces.” (125–6) These memorials were highly divisive and destructive, seeking essentially to fracture the Society and to allow the conversos to recoup their power base in Spain.

This movement was little more than a damage-limitation exercise by the crypto-Jewish elite. Ousted from Rome, and suspected by the Portuguese, the goal was to consolidate their power in Spain and prevent further anti-converso measures from encroaching on their long-held power positions. As Maryks points out, “it must be admitted that many of its members, if not the majority, were of converso background.” (125) The memorialist movement was certainly widely perceived by contemporaries as a Jewish revenge movement, and Maryks clearly agrees with this perception. One of their key leaders was the converso Dionisio Vázquez, and Maryks remarks that “one could argue that Vázquez’s active role in the memorialistas movement was a sort of revenge for the discriminatory policy of Mercurian.” (126).” The anti-converso Benedetto Palmio “never doubted that conversos were behind the vindictive memoralistas movement.” (128)

As the struggle began to intensify, in 1581 another Italian anti-converso, Claudio Acquaviva, was elected as Mercurian’s successor. Acquaviva appointed a number of leading anti-converso Jesuits (including Manuel Rodrigues, Lorenzo Maggio, and the Rhinelander Paul Hoffaeus) to key positions in Rome, tasked with extending the anti-converso measures employed by Mercurian beyond the Roman power structure and into the wider Jesuit network. Maryks writes that the decade-long activities of Hoffaeus, Maggio, and Rodrigues, “effectively led to gradual restrictions in the admission into the Society of candidates of Jewish ancestry.” (146)

It is particularly interesting that much of this activity was carried out in a cryptic and secretive manner in which the ethnic aspect of the struggle was always kept just out of view — again mirroring the nature of the converso strategies to gain and extend influence. For example, in 1590 Acquaviva sent “secret instructions” to Spanish provincials operated by native Spanish, or ‘Old Christian,’ Jesuits in which he made clear the necessity of secrecy:

In regards to the offices of government, we should be careful not to give them to these people [conversos] in certain key places.… In what regards the admission of this people in order not to give occasion of bitterness to many in the Society, we have judged to be inappropriate to prohibit universally the admission of those who somehow have this defect. It is necessary to use more selectivity and diligence in the admission.… At any rate, [genealogical investigations] should be done quietly and when somebody has to be excluded, it would be convenient to give some other apparent causes and reasons for his dismissal, so that it could not be understood or affirmed with certainty that a person is barred from admission because of his lineage (147 ).

Faced with bitter responses from within the Spanish Jesuit Order, a few years later Acquaviva’s stance had hardened further, prompting him to issue a decree that those

who are descendants from parents who are recent Christians, routinely and habitually inflicted a great deal of hindrance and harm on the Society (as has become clear from our daily experience)…The entire congregation then decided to decree, as is affirmed by this present decree, that in no case may anyone of this sort, that is to say, one of Hebrew or Saracen stock, be admitted to the Society in the future. And if by error any such person is admitted, he should be dismissed as soon as the impediment is revealed, at whatever time before profession this occurs, after first notifying the superior general and awaiting his reply. (149)

Maryks states that at this point “the lineage-hunting season began,” and the removal of all persons of Jewish ancestry from the Society of Jesus commenced in earnest.

Early Modern Jewish Apologetics

Defeated and marginalized, the crypto-Jewish elite turned to issuing a long series of memorials that in many respects resemble prototypes of modern Jewish apologetics/propaganda of the kind issued by the ADL. For example, in a previous essay I noted the importance of the modern tactic of rhetorically displacing ‘foreignness’ away from Jews and onto the hostile movement itself:

Jews have regularly relied upon a fall-back tactic of presenting the troublesome movement as a foreign import…An excellent example of this, of course, would be Hillary Clinton’s ludicrous claim that the Alt Right has somehow been spawned by Putin’s Russia. Since most of her speech originated with the SPLC, we may assume that this particular accusation may be traced to a Hebraic hand. Another bizarre theory of the Alt Right’s foreign origins originating with the SPLC: Mark Potok has weighed in with the strange contention that the Alt Right “began as an anti-Muslim movement in Europe and has been spreading in this country since about 2008.”

And the list goes on. UK-based Jewish journalist Jonathan Freedland, who has a long history of activism against Whites, has penned an article titled “Donald Trump’s achilles heel is that he is truly un-American.” Freedland argues that America’s founding principle is “the belief that national identity did not reside in blood or soil, but in loyalty to the nation’s constitution and its bill of rights”—a clear indication that he has little acquaintance with American history. He continues that, “these moves by Trump are not just reactionary or bigoted or dangerous. They contradict the ideals that all Americans are meant to regard as sacred. Perhaps this is the way to attack Trump: as truly un-American. He says he wants to make America great again. The truth is, he would stop America being America.”

Further Jewish participants in the effort to portray Trump as un-American include but are not limited to: the editorial board of the Washington Post led by the Jewish Martin Baron; the Jewish journalist Franklin Foer; and Jewish talk show host Jerry Springer. Jewish businessman Josh Tetrick also purchased a number of expensive full-page ad spaces in the New York Times aimed at pushing the ‘Trump as un-American’ meme…In all cases, both Trumpism and the Alt Right are portrayed by Jews as a foreign incursion into American political life. As with other tactics, these have a long lineage. Kevin MacDonald writes that “Jewish organizations in Germany in the period 1870–1914 argued that anti-Semitism was a threat to all of Germany because it was fundamentally ‘un-German.’’”[5] In nineteenth-century Germany, anti-Semitism was often described by Jews as a French import. Conversely, Paula Hyman writes that, faced with a rise in anti-Jewish feeling in nineteenth-century France, Jews spread the message that anti-Semitism was “un-French” and a “German import.”[6] Thorsten Wagner reports that it was a common refrain among Jews in Denmark that anti-Semitism there was “a German import — without autochthonous roots and traditions.”[7]

There are countless more examples from countless other countries. The tactic therefore relies on convincing the population that Jews are not the foreign threat but rather that it is the growing volkisch movement that is the foreign entity threatening the nation. Although it’s an absurdly perverse claim, and hard to imagine as being successful, Jews are able to spread the message because of their superior media and political power (as seen with Tetrick’s efforts). This power has ensured that portrayals of nationalist movements as ‘foreign’ have been tactically effective in the past.

Crypto-Jewish Jesuit responses to the European counter-strategy are strikingly similar to these modern instances in that they also heavily relied on attempts to displace the sense of foreign threat away from themselves and onto the movement hostile to their interests. For example, the most ferocious and prolific written responses to the ousting of the conversos were penned by the converso and high-ranking Italian diplomat Antonio Possevino, who had been removed from office by Mercurian and sent to remote Sweden. Isolated and powerless in the cold north, Possevino declared that it was figures like Benedetto Palmio who were truly ‘un-Christian’ and in fact little more than “pagans (164–5).” Remarkably, and with much chutzpah, Possevino attributed all of the disruption within the Society of Jesus to the “overweening ambition of the Portuguese Jesuits (171–2).” Possevino blatantly lied in his propaganda about the nature of the memorialistas, suggesting the movement was part of a “Portuguese conspiracy” to undermine Jesuit unity (171–2). Maryks comments bluntly on Possevino’s text that the majority of memorialists were in fact “undeniably conversos.” (172) Finally, Possevino’s apologetics also contain another aspect that prefigures modern propaganda — the idea that Jews are a natural and moral elite, typically combined with contempt for the rural masses. Possevino blamed “envious and talentless men from poor, rural backgrounds” (168) for the agitation against the conversos, while asserting that “in terms of their virtue and dedication, [conversos] represent an elite within the Society.” (172)

Conclusion

The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews is an important contribution to the study of religion and ethnic conflict in early modern Spain. Although not suited for beginners to any of the themes under discussion, the book is concise, and its four chapters are filled with new information sure to fascinate the reader with some prior knowledge of the Jesuits, Spanish history, or the Jewish Question in Europe.

My only real criticisms rest on matters of style and structure. Maryks’ writing style is often mechanical, and one sometimes feels that, while the material lends itself to a dramatic narrative, that potential is lost amid bland observations and repetitive recourse to lamenting the “bias” and “discrimination” of the “Old Christians.” Certainly this is a book in which the facts, rather than the author’s analysis, lead the way. As regards structure, the text has an irritating habit of repetition, particularly in terms of persistently re-introducing characters we would already be familiar with. I found this especially disappointing because of a normally high quality of editing from Brill.

These minor irritations aside, The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews was a page-turner. Perhaps best of all, it’s now been made available to download for free as part of Brill’s open source initiative. Enjoy.

References

[1] See Kevin Ingram, Secret lives, public lies: The conversos and socio-religious non-conformism in the Spanish Golden Age. Ph.D. Thesis (San Diego: University of California, 2006), pp. 87–8.

[2] Quoted in Maryks, The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews, p.xx.

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[3] W. Caferro, Contesting the Renaissance (Oxford:Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p.158.

[4] M. Baigent & R. Leigh, The Inquisition (London: Viking Press, 1999), pp.75-6.

[5] K. MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward and Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (1st Books, 2004), 232.

[6] A. Lindemann & R. Levy (eds.), Antisemitism: A History (Oxford University Press, 2010), 136.

[7] T. Wagner,’Belated Heroism: The Danish Lutheran Church and the Jews, 1918-1945,’ in K. Spicer (ed), Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2007), 7.

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