The Inquisitions

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully
when they do it from religious conviction.
– Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

 

“Making every allowance required of an historian and permitted to a Christian, we must rank the Inquisition, along with the wars and persecutions of our time, as among the darkest blots on the record of mankind, revealing a ferocity unknown in any beast.”1

Illustration Jean-François Martin for The New Yorker

The Inquisitions were, in many ways, a continuation of the crusades. Instead of fighting Infidels these wars were against Christians who were described as heretics. They began when the crusade against the Cathars was winding down as an attempt to finish the process of eliminating them.2 The subsequent Inquisitions attacked heretics and converted Jews and Muslims, and eventually other marginalized groups such as lepers, witches (women), prostitutes, and homosexuals. Their goal was to police the boundaries of acceptable belief and behavior within the Christian world and within the psyche of each person.

Heresy derives from a Greek word meaning choice. It was defined in the early days of the Romanized church as a crime against the empire3 –as any way of worshipping, behaving, or even thinking that was prohibited by religious decree. Heresy was the crime of disobedience to the church as the church tried to constantly define and enforce “rigid standards of theological uniformity”.4 

From Chronology of the Carmelite Order

The Fourth Lateran Council, inspired by the Papal Bull Ad abolendam, met in November 1215. The assembled Christian leaders from throughout Europe renewed the definition of faith and launched a long period of persecution which fundamentally shifted the meaning of heresy. The longest canon (section) of the decree denounced “every heresy that raises itself against the holy, orthodox and Catholic faith’ and laid out detailed measures for wiping them out including excommunication, punishment by secular authorities, and confiscation of property. Secular officials were ordered to exterminate heresy in their territories and anyone who sheltered, defended, or aided a heretic would themselves be considered one. Christians who engaged in military action against heretics were given the same privileges and indulgences as crusaders.5 The Holy Office of Inquisition into Heretical Depravity6 established a vast papal directed bureaucracy to root out heresy and maintain the one true faith.

The result of the enforcement of this decree, particularly its demand that religious and secular authorities seek out and destroy heretics, led to the development of what historian Ian Moore has labeled “a persecuting society” in which, within a century or two it was no longer individuals, but entire groups of people who were considered heretical by their very existence. As Moore says,

Persecution became habitual. That is to say not simply that individuals were subject to violence, but that deliberate and socially sanctioned violence began to be directed, through established governmental, judicial and social institutions, against groups of people defined by general characteristics such as race, religion or way of life; and that membership of such groups in itself came to be regarded as justifying these attacks. The victims of persecution were not only heretics, but lepers, Jews, sodomites, and various other groups whose number was added to from time to time in later centuries. ((Moore, Ian, p 5. italics in original.))

Moore adds the following summation of the developments in that period.

For all imaginative purposes heretics, Jews and lepers were interchangeable. They had the same qualities, from the same source, and they presented the same threat: through them the Devil was at work to subvert the Christian order and bring the world to chaos.” ((Moore, p. 65))

The period of the Inquisitions, like the period of the Crusades, lasted approximately 600 years (1184 to 1834, although local inquisitors continued to be active decades after its formal end). During this period, Christian values were forced, slowly and steadily, into the everyday fabric of people’s lives in ways previously unheard of. Christianity created a supposedly superior community based on faith, a common worldview, and an ethical way of life (and authority structure) which was opposed to, and even condemning of, traditional relationships based on community, geography, blood and family. The result across Europe was a new social ethos in which the primary dividing line was between Christians and non-Christians. All marginalized groups were subject to demonization and the monitoring was done not just by the church or even by secular authorities, but by each individual Christian as part of their religious obligation. Their bond to the church as the representative of god was supposed to be greater than their bond to family and community members and if they did not believe this and act on it by turning in heretics, they were suspect themselves.

One’s behavior was seen as a window into one’s moral worth and was judged accordingly. Under finer and finer scrutiny for moral lapses—when nearly anything could count as a sin—ordinary people had to judge themselves, and even increasingly, their neighbors. The Inquisition was not just a systematic and far reaching institution for guarding Christendom from pagans, witches, Jews, Moors, conversos, homosexuals and heretics. It was also a process which, over time, forced people to internalize those fears of being sinful and learn to monitor their behavior. The results of this internalization process became manifest in the level of surveillance people manifested towards their neighbors in the witch hunts, which were largely popular denunciations and trials. It also became manifest in the harshness with which employers disciplined their workers in the newly emerging capitalist factories and in the increasingly puritanical and obedience-focused discipline of parents towards their children. The impact of the inquisitions on western civilization and our daily lives is often overlooked or minimized or even turned into a caricature. But its deep and lasting impact cannot be eliminated if it is ignored or misunderstood.

Like the Crusades7 the Inquisitions were a complex and complicated series of periods of terror—and their impact was no less great. There were two periods of Inquisitions directly controlled by the Pope, another lengthy (over 300 years) period of religiously sanctioned Inquisition controlled by the Spanish royalty which affected Catholics around the world. There were further periods of inquisition throughout Europe in most Protestant countries and in their colonies.

Papal Lead Bull of Pope Lucius III

In 1184, Papal Bull ad aboldendam was issued By Pope Lucius III against several European heretical groups: the Cathars, the Waldensians, the Patarines and the Humiliati.

THE DECREE OF POPE LUCIUS III AGAINST HERETICS

To abolish the malignity of diverse heresies which are lately sprung up in most parts of the world, it is but fitting that the power committed to the church should be awakened, that by the concurring assistance of the Imperial strength, both the insolence and mal-pertness of the heretics in their false designs may be crushed, and the truth of Catholic simplicity shining forth in the holy church, may demonstrate her pure and free from the execrableness of their false doctrines….

More particularly, we declare all Catharists, Paterines, and those who call themselves “the Poor of Lyons;” the Passignes, Josephists, Arnoldists, to lie under a perpetual anathema….

And we likewise declare all entertainers and defenders of the said heretics, and those that have showed any favor or given countenance to them, thereby strengthening them in their heresy, whether they be called comforted, believers, or perfect, or with whatsoever superstitious name they disguise themselves, to be liable to the same sentence….8

Many of the ideas in the aforementioned bull were further codified by the largest Church Council in history (over 1200 bishops and abbots) – the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) previously referred to. The council in Rome declared that unrepentant heretics should be excommunicated, and turned over to secular authorities for punishment. Punishment was unspecified, but further Papal decrees sanctioned the use of torture, banishment, death by burning, and confiscation of property, even that of heirs of those accused.9

In the Middle Ages there was little separation of religious and secular law. Heresy was considered an attack on public morality as well as a breach of public security. During Medieval times, Catholic bishops installed emperors and kings; those same emperors and kings provided protection for the church and its ministers. To rebel against the church (either in matters of theology or matters of organizational hierarchy) was to question the legitimacy of the whole social, political, economic, and, of course, religious structure of medieval society. The church hunted down and prosecuted heretics, and the state punished them, often by burning at the stake. Both religious and secular authorities relied heavily on mass support. Neighbors were pressured to monitor each other, husbands were required to testify against wives, as were children against parents.10

Although orchestrated from above, the Inquisition became a popular phenomenon with very widespread participation. Huge crowds of thousands would turn out for hangings, burnings, beheadings, and various forms of torture, much as crowds of white Christians turned out for lynchings in the U.S. in later centuries. Many times, mobs would apprehend people accused of heresy and murder them on the spot, sometimes destroying entire communities of Jews or others considered heretics.

The medieval Inquisition officially began in 1231 with a decree by Pope Gregory IX during the long and vicious Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars in which southern France was devastated by a coalition of powerful lords from the north. Although the Inquisition was officially launched to root out Cathars remaining after the Albigensian Crusade, there was plenty of precedent in earlier periods for the torture and killing of heretics by the Church. Now, for the first time, with the declaration of the crusade against the Cathars, the Pope was officially encouraging the killing of Christians by other Christians.11 The church added pagans, witches, midwives, homosexuals, conversos and infidels as targets of persecution, but always because it claimed they were Christians who held heretical beliefs and were aiding the devil in his work. The inquisitions never persecuted people because of what they actually did except as their behavior was understood to demonstrate anti-Christian underlying beliefs. The sole focus of the persecution was supposedly Christian people’s beliefs that were allegedly inspired by the devil and a danger to the Christen community. Inquisition historian Henry Charles Lea has written that “Even doubt was heresy. The believer must have fixed and unwavering faith, and it was the inquisitor’s business to ascertain this condition of his (sic) mind.”12

Christendom believed in a cosmic struggle between good and evil. Heretics were on the wrong side. Pope Innocent III called them “traitors to God” and Pope Innocent IV labeled them “thieves and murderers of souls”. The Bishop of Verden wrote “When the existence of the Church is threatened, she is released from the commandments of morality. [T]he use of every means is sanctified, even cunning, treachery, violence, simony, prison, death.13 As with the crusade’s murder of infidels, the death of heretics was supposedly met with divine approval. A witness to the burning of 183 Cathars wrote that it was “a holocaust, very great and pleasing to God.”14

1881 Illustration from Wikiwand

The Council of Toulouse, in 1229, mandated that every parish in Christendom should have a team consisting of the parish priest and two laymen to supervise the inquisition locally. Four years later completely independent inquisition courts were set up and soon after these courts were granted the extraordinary power to supersede any secular and civil authority.

During this early period of the inquisitions a network of secret police and secret courts were set up, an international network of (male) inquisitors, interrogators, notaries, scriveners, bookkeepers, security guards, spies and informers was created. For the inquisitors themselves, “wise and mature men capable of asserting their authority” were preferred and according to historian Jonathan Kirsch, “University graduates and especially men with doctorates in law and theology were especially attractive candidates.”15

Every little detail of the proceedings was documented, copied, distributed, and filed creating a bureaucracy and incredible database. New instruments of torture were developed, refined, and perfected. Although the inquisitions never operated at the level their leaders hoped for, the advances in methods of torture, criminalization, information control, and general terror generated by massive public spectacles of murder developed quickly and steadily through the next six hundred years.

Even prior to 1215 homosexuals had begun to be attacked. Until the eleventh century homosexuality was not distinguished from other forms of sexual behavior and was not stigmatized by the church. The Third Lateran Council of 1179 was the first major religious legislation to censor homosexuality and to demand excommunication for those who practiced it. By the 1250s onward, in vast regions of Southern Europe, laws prescribing death, usually preceded by torture, dismemberment or castration were put in place by local secular and religious bodies.

By end of the 15th century, the original Papal Inquisition had pretty much run its course since most rival Christian sects had been exterminated. However, the Inquisition was revived in the mid-16th century to persecute a new perceived enemy, Protestants.

In the interim period, in 1478, Pope Sixtus IV issued a bull (an official declaration by the Pope representing God’s voice on the earth) authorizing King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to appoint an inquisitorial board. The purpose of the Spanish Inquisition was to root out false Christians in Spain – especially Jews and Muslims who had converted to Christianity,16 but were claimed to be still secretly practicing their faith. The Spanish Inquisition operated for 354 years. Tomas Torquemada served as Grand Inquisitor during the 15th century and it is estimated over 100,000 people were sentenced as heretics under his jurisdiction. ((Hroch, Miroslav and Anna Skybova. Eccesia Militans: The Inquisition. Dorset Press, 1988, p. 47. ))

Mural depicting the movement of Torah scrolls following the expulsion from Spain. From Wilshire Boulevard Temple, Los Angeles.

There was a long history in Spain of persecution of Jews before the Spanish Inquisition. During 1391, for example, over 50,000 Jews were murdered by mobs. To save themselves from further violence, tens of thousands of Jews converted to Christianity. But once the Inquisition was formally established with both religious and secular authority, persecution increased dramatically. Within a few years, in 1492, the year Christians completed their crusade to conquer the Iberian Peninsula, the Jews in Spain were given the option of becoming baptized Christians, or leaving Spain. It is estimated about 40,000 Jews “accepted” conversion, and another 40,000 left Spain.17

In 1502, Muslims were also given an ultimatum to either convert or emigrate. The majority converted, but, as with the Jews, there were some who converted only superficially, continuing to dress and speak as they had before and to secretly practice Islam. Traditional dress was banned in 1508 and more restrictive legislation was introduced in 1526 and 1527. In 1568, Philip II of Spain issued an edict for Moriscos (Muslims) to give up their children to be educated by Christian priests. This led to a three-year rebellion by Muslims which was defeated. In the most massive ethnic cleansing until the twentieth century, all 300,000-400,000 Spaniards of Muslim descent were expelled from Spain to North Africa in 1609.18 Machiavelli subsequently described King Ferdinand’s expulsion of the Moors as “a policy of pious cruelty”.19

Throughout the 16th century and thereafter the Spanish Inquisition was employed in certain Spanish and Portuguese colonies such as Peru, Goa, Sicily, Manila, Colombia, Mexico, and Argentina. Many missionary expeditions included an inquisitor among their ranks. The Spanish Inquisition continued in the Americas until Mexican Independence in 1821. (It was not abolished in Europe until 1834).

Spain developed what was to become the hallmark of western Christian national states—strong national religious unity based on the exclusion of difference and imperial quests (voyages of discovery and imperial wars) after internal unity was deemed sufficient.

It was in Spain during the 14th and 15th centuries, because of Christian concern about the sincerity and legitimacy of Jewish and Muslim conversos, that a theory of racial or biological purity developed to clearly define who was a legitimate Christian. For example, Marcos Garcia preached in 1449 that

All converts who belong to the Jewish race or those who have descended from it—that is, who were born as Jews, or are sons, grandsons, great-grandsons, or great-great-grandsons of Jews who were baptized…including those [converts] who descended newly and recently from that most evil and damned stock, are presumed, according to the testimonies of the Scriptures, to be infidels, and suspect of the faith. From which follows that the vice of infidelity is not presumed to be purged until the fourth generation.20

Image from Egyptian Streets

The racialization of Jews and Muslims soon became legalized under the concept of limpieza de sangre (blood purity).21 Jews and Muslims were conceived to be separate races from Christians. Even if they converted to Christianity the church held the taint of their Jewishness or Muslimness took generations to become diluted and to disappear. In practice, a person with any Jewish or Muslim blood was considered to be tainted—a literal one-drop rule. Based on this belief, the policy of the Spanish crown eventually became the complete elimination of all Jews and Muslims from Spanish society, and even of Christians who had a drop of Jewish or Moorish blood in their veins. This is the beginning of modern forms of biological or (pseudo) scientific racism. By this period, conversion and intermarriage was out of the question and the church taught that Jews and Muslims were a perpetual threat to Christian blood.

This theory of blood impurity and therefore racial inferiority was subsequently used extensively to justify the inferior treatment, murder and enslavement of Africans, Indigenous peoples in the western hemisphere and other peoples, even though, or despite the fact, that they converted to Christianity.22 In other words, there was no way for many groups of people to be treated as fully human by Christians, whether or not they converted. They were seen as better off dead because then, at least, their souls would be freed from their contaminated lives. All people were considered children of god but only white Christians were god’s chosen ones. Everyone else was literally believed to be a misled child and agent of the devil.23

The Spanish Inquisition’s concern for blood purity was the beginning of “state racism”. It fixed the relationship between religion and race by making race a substitute for religious purity and virtue. Spanish historian Robdrigo de Zayas writes that this concern was “not an isolated phenomenon but an essential part of the grand European state between 1481 and 1820.”24

The extreme rhetoric of Pope Innocent II was typical of the Inquisition and was reflected in the sermons, essays, drama, poetry, songs, and liturgy of the times. He preached that heretics were “…a scourge, a pestilence, filth, an ulcer infecting society, a savage beast, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a fox that destroys the Lord’s vine.”25 A traveling Christian with the same invective in his sermons and who was subsequently granted sainthood by the church was St. John of Capistrano who drew crowds as large as 100,000. Often, thousands of Jews would be attacked by mobs after his sermons.26

St. John of Capistrano. Stained glass window in the Franciscan Monastery in Washington, DC

During these centuries, the inquisition was widespread and literally tens of millions of Christians were subjected to and participated in the systematic vilification and attack on Jews, Moors, heretics, pagans, infidels, and individuals considered a threat to the social order. They were taught there were only two kinds of people in the world white, male Christians and Others and those Others, even if they seemed to be practicing Christianity, were irrevocably, and irreconcilably inferior, dangerous, infectious, and evil. It was a Christian’s duty to obey church authorities and God’s design and seek them out and destroy them. Any hesitation was seen as a possible indication of disloyalty to God and consort with the devil.

In fact, there was a separate crime under the Inquisition, fautorship, which was aiding or abetting a heretic. Supporting heretics, having social interaction with heretics, including family members, and refusing to report heretics were capital crimes—the penalties just as harsh as those for heretics themselves, including torture and death.

The Portuguese Inquisition was established in Portugal in 1536 by the King. While not as extensive as the Spanish Inquisition, its impact was felt throughout the Portuguese empire, and even included an office in the Indian city of Goa which operated in the rest of the Portuguese empire in Asia. This office, established in 1560, was aimed primarily at wayward new converts from Hinduism.

After the establishment of the Protestant Reformation, various Protestant denominations pursued their own forms of inquisition to retaliate against Catholics and to cleanse their communities of pagans, unbelievers, and anyone accused of dissent. Both Catholics and Protestants eventually extended these inquisitions to their countries’ colonies in the Western Hemisphere.

Secular rulers in Western European countries such as England, France, Germany also burned heretics but without a formal inquisitional structure. Although there was never a formal inquisition set up in England, Protestant sovereigns in that country ordered capital punishment for Catholics. And in Calvin’s Geneva, Catholicism, adultery, blasphemy, idolatry and witchcraft were all punishable by death. (Calvin himself presided over the execution of 58 people).

Both Catholics and Protestants, i.e. all Christian institutions at the time understood the Bible to require the use of penal sanctions and violence to root out false religion from Christian society. Protestants use the same Biblical texts that Catholics relied on to justify the inquisition. Luther and Calvin both endorsed the right of the state to protect society by purging false religion. Calvin, laying the blame for human degradation on Eve for her sin, “…she corrupted both herself and all her senses, and depravity was suffused through all parts of her soul as well as her body.”27 In another sermon he proclaimed,

Therefore, in accordance with this rule, in the name and by the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, I excommunicate all idolaters, blasphemers, despisers of God, heretics, and all who form private sects to break the unity of the Church, all perjurers, all who rebel against parents or their superiors, all who are seditious, mutinous, quarrelsome or brutal, all adulterers, fornicators, thieves, ravishers, misers, drunkards, gluttons, and all who lead a scandalous and dissolute life.28

Calvin not only banished from Geneva those who did not share his views, he permitted, and in some cases ordered others to be executed for “heresy.”

In England and Ireland, Reformers engaged in their own ruthless inquisitions and executions. Conservative estimates indicate thousands of English and Irish Catholics were put to death—many by being hanged, drawn, and quartered—for practicing the Catholic faith and refusing to become Protestant. An even greater number were forced to flee to the Continent for their safety.

Rock of Cashel. Photo by John Sullivan

Elizabeth I burned heretics, as did her successor James I, as did virtually every Protestant government in Europe until the middle of the seventeenth century. What gave the Catholic Inquisition greater impact was that it was well organized and at least, in theory, universal throughout the Church, whereas Protestant persecution of heresy tended to be periodic and dependent on local conditions. Both were devastating.

All together, the terror and violence of the inquisition was a daily part of European life. The sentencing, punishment, and murder of heretics, including witches was “one of the great spectacles of public life over several centuries of European history.”29 The message was clear, constant, and relentless—there is no escape from agreement with Christianity because the slightest doubt or disbelief will be rooted out and met with total, life-destroying violence.

The Inquisitions were never only about punishing sinners. As the 1578 edition of the Directorium Inquisitorum spelled out the purpose of inquisitorial penalties: …

“… for punishment does not take place primarily and per se for the correction and good of the person punished, but for the public good in order that others may become terrified and weaned away from the evils they would commit.” In addition to the obvious horror of seeing one’s family members, friends or neighbors hung and/or burned alive, people in the towns and villages were reminded of the power of their god and the church when, after a public hanging the body would be dragged throughout the town and the words shouted out, “Who behaves thus shall perish thus.”30

It was indeed a chilling reminder of what happened to those who disbelieved, disobeyed, or misbehaved.

The trauma from the centuries of religiously sanctioned persecution, exile, torture and murder of millions of Jews, Muslims, heretics, witches, homosexuals, people who were non-binary, and people who experienced physical, mental, or emotional disabilities still reverberates within each of us today. It lives on in our support for a “persecuting society” based on surveillance, judgment, individualism, punishment-based family, educational, and criminal legal systems in which everyone is encouraged to discipline, report on and turn in those who disobey to state bureaucracies and other authorities. Parents are still disciplining their children, men their female partners, teachers their students “for their own good”–to save their souls from a worse fate. The police, sheriffs, and immigration officials are still monitoring and punishing the same groups marginalized by dominant Christianity for hundreds of years. When will we reject an inquisitional society and move towards one based on healing, justice, inclusion and collective care?

  1. Durant, Will. The Age of Faith, p. 784. []
  2. The invading “true” Christians “engaged in scorched-earth warfare, setting fire to houses and standing crops, poisoning the wells and cutting down the orchards…Men taken in battle were mutilated, blinded, dragged at the heels of horses, and used for target practice.” ((Kirsch, Jonathan. The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God Harper One, 2008 p. 50. []
  3. Peters, Edward. Inquisition. New York: Free Press, 1988. p. 29 []
  4. Steele, Michael R. Christianity, the Other, and the Holocaust. Greenwood, 2003. p. 41. []
  5. Moore, Ian. The Formation of a Persecuting Society. Blackwell, 1987. p. 7. And The Twelfth Ecumenical Council: Lateran IV 1215. Fordham University. []
  6. That office still exists in the Catholic church and is named The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. []
  7. For more on the Crusades see the article “The Crusades Are Still Being Fought” by the author at (web link). []
  8. Quoted by Jones, William. The History of the Christian Church: From the Birth of Christ to the XVIII, Century: Including the Very Interesting Account of the Waldenses and Albigenses. Free will Baptist Printing Establishment, 1837. p. 236. []
  9. Pope Innocent IV’s papal bull Ad Extirpanda of 1252, explicitly authorized (and defined the appropriate circumstances for) the use of torture by the Inquisition for eliciting confessions from heretics. Bishop, Jordan (2006). “Aquinas on Torture”. New Blackfriars. 87 (1009): 229–237. []
  10. Steele, Michael R. Christianity, The Other and the Holocaust. Praeger, 2003. p. 45 []
  11. Armstrong, Karen. Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World. New York: Anchor Books, 2001. p. 393. []
  12. Lea, Henry Charles. The Inquisition of the Middle Ages. New York: Citadel Press, 1961, 60, 97. quoted in Kirsch p. 10. []
  13. Quoted in Kirsch, Johnathan.The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God. Harpers Collins, 2008, p 13. []
  14. Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual, p. 67. []
  15. Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual, p. 65. []
  16. Kirsch The Grand Inquisitioner’s Manual p. 174. []
  17. Kamen, Henry. The Spanish Inquisiton: A Historical Revision. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. pp 23, 25. Quoted in Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitioner’s Manual, p. 181. []
  18. Majid, Anouar, We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades Against Muslims and Other Minorities. University of Minnesota, 2009. p. 31, 40. []
  19. Quoted in Majid p. 43. Ferdinand was the self-described “first prince of Christendom”. []
  20. Netanyahu, Benzion. The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain. New York: Random House, 1995, p 505-6 quoted in Steele, Christianity, The Other, p. 46 []
  21. The Strictures of the Purity of Blood was adopted in Spain in 1449 and prefigured various laws defining blackness under slavery and reconstruction operating in the U.S. until the late 1960s, and also the Law for Protection of German Blood and Honor adopted in 1935. ((See: Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual p. 15. and Majid, We Are All, p. 34. []
  22. They often accepted conversion, only then to be enslaved, worked to death, or killed. []
  23. Jews were and still are widely believed to have horns on their heads. []
  24. Rodrigo de Zayas in Les Morisques and le Racisme d’etat quoted in Majid p. 52. The Catholic Church only officially distanced itself from these policies during Vatican II in 1965. []
  25. Nickereson, Hoffman. The Inquisitioin: A Political and Military Study of Its Establishment. 1932; reprint, Port Washington, NY:  Kennikat Press, 1968. quoted in Steele, Christianity, the Other and the Holocaust, p. 49. []
  26. Poliakov, Leon. The History of Anti-Semitism. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Schocken Books, 1974. p. 146. Quoted in Steele, Christianity, the Other and the Holocaust, p. 50 []
  27. Brock, Rita Nakashima and Rebecca Ann Parker. Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire. Beacon Press. Boston, 2008. p. 333. []
  28. Brock, p. 333-334. []
  29. Kirsch, The Inquisitioner’s Manual, p. 84. []
  30. Kirsch, The Inquisitioner’s Manual, p. 87. []