Why Benjamin Netanyahu Gave The Pope A Book About The Spanish Inquisition
Today Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met Pope Francis at the Vatican. According to the DPA news agency, Netanyahu brought with him a slightly unusual gift: A book about the Spanish inquisition.
The leader of the world's only Jewish state giving the leader of the Catholic Church a book that largely revolves about Spanish Catholics questioning, torturing, and punishing Jewish converts to Catholicism is certainly noteworthy. The Spanish inquisition is widely held up as one of the worst excesses of the Roman Catholic Church, and thousands of people were expelled from Spain or burned at the stake. Worse still, the inquisition of Catholic converts (and the use of torture to discover heretics) was first legally sanctioned by Pope Innocent IV.
So, Netanyahu's gift may seem passive aggressive (or maybe just aggressive), and perhaps it is. But it is important to think of the context of the book, which is written by Netanyahu's father Ben-Zion Netanyahu, a well-regarded historian who worked at both Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Cornell University.
The elder Netanyahu's impact on his politician son is well-known within Israeli circles. In 1998, David Remnick of the New Yorker wrote that while Ben-Zion Netanyahu's opinions frequently differed from his son, the pessimism of his right wing worldview influenced his son's hawkish policies. “His dilemma is always to what degree he can, or should, remain true to the ideals, the stubbornness, of his father," Remnick observed.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/netanyahu-gave-pope-book-about-spanish-inquisition-2013-12
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