Bringing to life the tragic history of the Jews and their Christianized descendants in Spain, Professor Netanyahu gives us a new intrepretation of the Spanish Inquisition and the origins of modern anti-Semitism.

The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain

History

NETANYAHU, B.

Europe

Random House]

One of the world's foremost scholars in the fields of Spanish and Jewish medieval history, B. Netanyahu revolutionized accepted belief concerning the causes of the Spanish Inquisition in his magisterial volume of 1995, The Origins of the Inquisition. Locating that origin not in the supposed persistence of Judaism among the New Christians but in a concession the kings were forced to make to powerfully anti-Jewish popular sentiment, he radically altered the whole landscape of Hispano-Jewish studies. Toward the Inquisition is another major contribution to this historiographic revolution. Made up of seven of Netanyahu's essays, published over the last two decades and collected here for the first time, it further illuminates Jewish and Marrano history from the mid-fourteenth century to the end of the fifteenth century. The essays throw light on such long-obscured phenomena as the rise of the Nazi-like theory of race which harassed the conversos for three full centuries, or the abandonment of Judaism by most conversos decades before the Inquisition was established.

Toward the Inquisition: Essays on Jewish and Converso History in Late Medieval Spain

World

NCROL

Don Isaac Abravanel: Statesman and Philosopher

Don Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508) was a major historical figure during the waning of the Middle Ages. Statesman, diplomat, courtier, and financier, he was, at the same time, a scholar of encyclopedic learning, a philosopher, an exegete, a prolific author, a mystic, and an apocalyptist. In Abravanel, B. Netanyahu suggests, two long lines of tradition met and concluded: that of medieval Jewish statesmen and that of medieval Jewish philosophers. In what is both a biography and an exploration of Abravanel's thought and influence, Netanyahu describes how Abravanel illuminated the grave crisis and profound transformation experienced by the Jewish people after the Spanish expulsion. 
First published in 1953, Don Isaac Abravanel has been out of print for several years. This new edition includes revisions in the text, notes, and bibliography.

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Cornell University Press

The Marranos of Spain: From the Late 14th to the Early 16th Century, According to Contemporary Hebrew Sources, Third Edition

B. Netanyahu, one of the world's foremost medievalists, has made a lifelong project of studying the historical evolution of Marranism and seeking to ascertain the genesis of the Spanish Inquisition. In this seminal work, which opened an ongoing debate on the nature of conversion and belief in late medieval Spain, Netanyahu analyzes evidence on the Marranos contained in the Hebrew sources. 
For this new edition, the author has updated the book and added an Afterword in which he considers some of the scholarly reactions to the work since the publication of the first edition in 1966.
"This book's revolutionary thesis dispels the romanticized heroic image of the Marrano found in Jewish literary and historical annals," says Isaac Barzilay, Professor Emeritus at Columbia University. "Netanyahu's conception of the Marranos is of a people whose majority hardly resisted assimilation to Spanish culture and Christianity. Consequently, he unhesitatingly rejects the Inquisition's claim that it was established for the sole purpose of preserving the integrity of Christianity against the undermining effects of Marranism."

The Spanish Inquisition remains a fearful symbol of state terror. Its principal target was the conversos, descendants of Spanish Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity some three generations earlier. Since thousands of them confessed to charges of practicing Judaism in secret, historians have long understood the Inquisition as an attempt to suppress the Jews of Spain. In this magisterial reexamination of the origins of the Inquisition, Netanyahu argues for a different view: that the conversos were in fact almost all genuine Christians who were persecuted for political ends. The Inquisition's attacks not only on the conversos' religious beliefs but also on their "impure blood" gave birth to an anti-Semitism based on race that would have terrible consequences for centuries to come. This book has become essential reading and an indispensable reference book for both the interested layman and the scholar of history and religion.

The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain

New York Review Books

Los marranos españoles desde fines del siglo XIV a principios del XVI, según las fuentes hebreas de la época

Castilla y León. Consejería de

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Books by NETANYAHU, B.

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The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain

Toward the Inquisition: Essays on Jewish and Converso History in Late Medieval Spain

Don Isaac Abravanel: Statesman and Philosopher

The Marranos of Spain: From the Late 14th to the Early 16th Century, According to Contemporary Hebrew Sources, Third Edition

The Marranos of Spain: From the Late 14th to the Early 16th Century, According to Contemporary Hebrew Sources, Third Edition

The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain

Los marranos españoles desde fines del siglo XIV a principios del XVI, según las fuentes hebreas de la época