Dear sirs,
I have read your “Open Letter to Spain” (July 28, 2025) with regard to the outrageous incident which occurred on a Vueling flight in Spain this summer. Only two were needed to perpetrate and spread anti-Semitism: a murky pilot and a buffoon minister. The past of Mr. Chirivella should have set off alarm bells well before he got his permit. As for Mr. Puente, I refer to what a journalist had previously said: “It is truly amazing he can move on two legs.”
The Spanish government, a minority socialist-communist coalition, shares the dismantling of Western civilization with Islamic terrorism. Mr. Sánchez, the prime minister, aside from his friendship with the Venezuelan narco-regime and authoritarian China, is embarrassingly ignored in the international arena (even within the E.U.). He does not represent the majority of Spaniards when he expresses his sympathy for Hamas and his rancorous animosity toward Israel.
The massacres you mentioned (and others) happened and cannot be forgotten. But I disagree with the term “holy war” you gave them. In 1391, we find in Seville a fanatic, this time a priest called Ferrán Martínez, who had been given sermons and diatribes against the iniquity of the Jews and the need to save their souls through forced baptism. All this against the King of Castile’s express orders and against the Archbishop of Seville who had suspended Martínez from preaching. The writings of Pedro López de Ayala, chronicler and Chancellor of Castile, indicate that “all this [the massacre] was greed for stealing, rather than devotion.” The people of Seville were more concerned about saving their pockets than about saving the souls of the Jews. Indeed, the common people were impoverished, hungry, and decimated by the plague and the ravages of the recent civil war in the Kingdom of Castile. They feared no authority, and a small group of radical populists (in today’s terms) only had to light the flame.
Once the new king Enrique IV came of age, he ordered to imprison Ferrán Martínez and imposed a fine on the Seville City Council of such an amount that it took 10 years to pay it off. Too late, for, by then, few Jews had saved their lives from the massacre. The Judería was burned, wealth stolen, and the synagogues converted into churches.
It is always the same pattern. Any imaginable excuse has been enough to spark the pogroms along the length of history, no matter where. The pattern has an ultimate common denominator as a cause: envy. Envy for your intellect, for your hardworking attitude, for your business and managerial skills, for the wealth of few among you, for your contributions to culture and science. Too many qualities and disproportionate achievements to put up with. For more than a thousand years, more Jews lived in Spain than in all the countries of medieval Europe combined and, when enjoying amicable relations within the social environment, sincere conversions often occurred. In fact, the sheer number of Jewish converts as well as their prominence (King Ferdinand had a converso grandmother and the Chief Rabbi of Burgos had himself and his whole family baptized in the same year, 1391, to become eventually Bishop of Burgos) impeded assimilation and led to antagonisms and accusations between “old” and “new” Christians while causing immense bitterness in the Jewish community (Maimonides, expelled from al-Andalus by the Almohads in 1146, had proposed that conversos be stoned as idolaters). The magnitude of the phenomenon was well expressed by Mr. David Hatchwell, president of the Jewish community in Madrid: “No one in Spain can say they don’t have some kind of Jewish ancestry.”
It was under this situation that the Inquisition was established in 1478. The inquisitors were able to stifle much of the mob action and disorder, but they could not forge a lasting peace, with the tragic result being the edict of 1492 ordering that Spain’s remaining Jews either convert or leave.
Revisionist historians and scholars such as Carlo Ginzburg, Henry Kamen, E. William Monter, John Tedeschi, and Norman Roth base their dissenting views upon having gained full access to the complete archives of the Inquisition of both Aragón and Castile. They have read the careful records made of each of the 44,674 cases heard between 1540 and 1700. At the time they were written, these records were secret, so there was no reason for the clerks to have misrepresented the actual proceedings. All told, during the entire period of 1480 and 1700, only about 10 deaths per year were meted out by the Inquisition all across Spain.
The data for the Inquisition of Aragón (1540–1640), when broken down by offense, show that only 942, or 3.6%, of all the cases tried involved charges of being a marrano (false converso). Some of these marranos were exonerated, and only 16 of the 942 defendants (1.7%) were executed.
Around the same time, the English monarch Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547), in addition to killing two of his wives, executed 20–25,000 of his subjects by boiling, burning, hanging, beheading, pressing, and drawing and quartering them. The Jews had been expelled from England in 1290 (later in France in 1306 and again in 1394) and they did not end up like the Catholics, Lutherans, and Lollards.
I join my prayers to those of the Sephardic Jews for their brothers and sisters imprisoned and murdered by the Spanish Inquisition. I know they remember as if it had just happened. The 8 de Tamuz de 5757, I attended the wedding of a friend who can trace his origins back to twelfth-century Tudela. The rite was the takkanot, the Castilian wedding rite. He explained to me that the ketubah ended with min’chag Kastilah. Not long ago, during a trip organized by the Sefarad-Israel Center, an old lady from Bulgaria sang lullabies in Ladino she remembered from her mother to Ms. Esperanza Aguirre, President of the Autonomous Community of Madrid. Unsurprisingly, Ms. Aguirre and the others who listened could not help but cry.
I take this opportunity to congratulate you on this excellent magazine.
Sincerely,
Antonio Rico
Madrid
Sefarad
