The Long Lie

The late Benzion Netanyahu (father of the current prime minister) wrote a history of the origins of the Spanish Inquisition that spans over a thousand pages. His thesis was controversial: medieval Spanish Jew hatred was driven less by theology than by envy.

The conventional story portrays the Inquisition as a religious crusade against insincere converts. Jews converted to Christianity supposedly continued to practiced Judaism secretly. They were persecuted as subversives.

Netanyahu challenged that narrative. He argued that most of the conversos became sincere Christians, deeply integrated into Christian society. Their persecution was a reaction not to hidden ritual but to visible success.

Converted Jews — often highly educated, trained in textual analysis, commerce, and administration — rose rapidly in royal courts, finance, and government. They became indispensable to the state. Under Ferdinand and Isabella, the equivalent of the state department was headed by a converso. That sort of thing bred resentment.

The envy extended even into the Church itself. Coming from a religious culture that emphasized study, interpretation, and mastery of sacred texts, converted Jews often excelled in theology and ecclesiastical administration. They rose in the hierarchy. Old Christian elites resented their advancement. A Church that might have benefited from intellectual renewal instead hardened around suspicion.

As resentment grew conversos were charged with disloyalty, deception and dual allegiance. Conversion was interpreted as infiltration. Competence became conspiracy. Over time, hostility that began as social jealousy hardened into theology. Religion supplied the vocabulary of resentment. Envy supplied the fuel.

This pattern recurs throughout European history. Jews frequently occupied intermediary roles — financiers, tax collectors, advisers — because of their skills and because other professions were closed to them. Their proximity to power made them resented. When political winds shifted against the Jews’ elite protectors, as it did in Spain during the rise of the urban bourgeoisie, the protectors threw the Jews off the back of the sleigh hoping to distract the wolves.

Today the setting has changed. Israel is not a dispersed minority but a sovereign state. Yet it is a small state that has achieved disproportionate success — technologically innovative, militarily capable, deeply integrated into Western economies, closely allied with the United States. It is visible. It is influential. It is successful.

Inevitably Jew haters represent Israel’s competence as sinister influence. Alliance becomes “control”; military capability becomes “bloodlust”; diplomatic leverage becomes “manipulation.”

We hear that Israel “controls” American politics. That it exerts hidden power. That its very existence distorts international order. These claims echo older structures of suspicion: proximity to power recast as corruption of power.

Netanyahu’s history does not reduce antisemitism to envy alone. But it does remind us that when visible success meets resentment the lies follow quickly to justify persecution.

Antisemitism is spread by factual but false accusations, all the more dangerous because Jewish—now Israeli--success makes the lies more plausible. The more blessings Israel bestows on the world, the more good she does for America, the bigger the lies grow, the faster and wider they spread and the more blood is spilled.

“[For] he was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of lies.”