The War Against the Jews, Act I : Monumental work on the Inquisition raises a controversial thesis : THE ORIGINS OF THE INQUISITION: In Fifteenth-Century Spain, <i> By Benzion Netanyahu (Random House: $50; 1384 pp.)</i>

Fearing for their safety during the 1391 massacre that claimed tens of thousands of Jewish lives, two Spanish Jews decided to close shop early one Friday afternoon and hastened to the nearest church in the hope of finding a priest willing to baptize them on the spot. The choice, as they saw it, couldn’t have been simpler: either convert to Catholicism or fall prey to what historian Cecil Roth called an anti-Jewish “orgy of carnage.” Having spotted a church that looked promising enough, the two men rushed in and explained the reason for their visit to the sacristan , who told them that the priest was hearing confession but would be with them shortly.

The men decided to wait--five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Half an hour passed. Then an hour. Two hours. At some point one of the Jews, growing ever more restless, looked out the windows and indicated to his companion that it was growing dark outside. “You’re right,” agreed the other. “We had better leave now or we’ll miss Sabbath service.”

The story, handed down over generations of Sephardim, is familiar to many, and comes, as these stories invariably do, in many versions. The point here is not that Sephardim--Jews from Spain--have a history of religious apostasy but that they were able to swap religions with astonishing spiritual agility. Baptized or not, these Jews had Sabbath services to attend!

By converting to Catholicism, conversos--converted Jews--were not only able to escape the bloodthirsty lynch mobs massacring Jews throughout the cities of Spain, but as history proved soon enough, were immensely rewarded for forswearing Judaism. No longer shunned or forced to earn their living by money-lending or medicine alone, conversos were able to enter all the professions to which access, until then, had been difficult. In the space of a few decades after their conversion, they managed to penetrate so deeply into Spanish life that they were for all intents and purposes totally assimilated into dominant Christian society.

It is not clear why their rise was so meteoric or why, with religious restrictions lifted, success seemed almost ensured. Probably, as the immediate descendants of individuals who had served the Crown for three centuries beforehand, they already possessed the business acumen and vast networks of contacts through whom to exploit new opportunities. Moreover, to quote Prof. Benzion Netanyahu in his most recent work, “The Origins of the Inquisition,” they had the requisite “industry, learning, ingenuity, frugality, driving force and, perhaps, above all, the talents” to achieve unlimited prosperity. Conversos also thrived in crafts, scholarship and literature.

Indeed, converso presence so permeated the cultural life of 15th-, 16th- and 17th-Century Spain, that it seems any Spaniard worthy of distinction either had or was believed to have Jewish blood. Cervantes, Spain’s most famous author; Gongora, its most accomplished poet; Tomas de Torquemada, the man whose name is synonymous with Inquisitorial Spain; down to Generalissimo Francisco Franco, this century’s Spanish dictator, are always suspected of having converso origins.

No doubt the history of the conversos’ sudden affluence may have been exaggerated. But those who watched them accumulate vast fortunes and snatch a disproportionate number of public jobs saw a diabolical Jewish plot aimed at undermining the very foundations of the Christian nation. Their resentment was intense, and envy easily fanned an undying hatred of Jews that was rooted in Spain long before the time of the Moorish occupation.

Ultimately, their indignation surged to such heights that in the city of Toledo, historically a center of Moorish, Spanish and Jewish cultures, new Christians suddenly found themselves as ruthlessly persecuted in 1449 as their Jewish grandparents had been three generations earlier in 1391. After all, their enemies claimed, compulsory conversion does not a Christian make. These were not true Christians, they said, but the same old Jews, practicing the same old ugly job of assessing, collecting and farming taxes for the king, except that now, instead of being discriminated against and held in check by religious laws, they were free to do as they pleased, which Jews did--or so their enemies claimed--with greater perfidy and impunity. Yesterday’s Jew was today’s converso-- same name, same business, new stationery.

It was time to curb these excesses. And who but a marauding mob to straighten matters? Murder, riot, looting and chaos followed in 1449 Toledo. The townsfolk seethed with bitterness, not only against conversos, but against the king and his prime minister for high taxes and for employing and favoring conversos in both royal and public offices. The pogrom had all the makings of an insurrection, and King John II himself had to stay clear of the fray for fear of seeing the situation escalate into a mini-civil war.

When the king finally entered Toledo in the wake of the 1449 pogrom, he found himself in a strange position: Either persecute all those who had committed outrageous crimes against the new Christians, or issue a blanket pardon and hope their hostility against conversos might die down. A blanket pardon, however, turned out to be insufficient: The citizens of Toledo weren’t about to back down after their atrocities. Not only wouldn’t they take back those conversos who had fled the city during the carnage or allow those who had stayed access to public offices, but they wanted to see “the converso problem solved.” The king, who feared disobedience and sedition more than converso resentment, gave in. Unbeknown to his loyal conversos, it seems, plans were being drawn to institute an inquisition in Castile.

The Spanish Inquisition was eventually established in 1478--87 years after the forced conversion of Jews. Fourteen years later, in 1492, the year Columbus set sail, Spain’s remaining Jews were summarily ordered to leave the country. In fact, they were faced with a choice: Either convert (again!) or face expulsion. Earlier that same year, Spain had finally taken Granada from the Muslims, thus ending the seven-century Muslim occupation of Spain. The Reconquista --the reconquest of Spanish territories from outside hands--was finally over. It was time now to reconquer and purge the nation internally.

The wicked irony here is that while Spanish Jews were bemoaning their catastrophic eradication from Spain, their ex-brethren the conversos, who were not expelled, were already being burned at the stake as renegade Christians. This time, it seemed, refusing to convert could save your life.

Since Judaising--the continued practice of Judaism following one’s conversion to Christianity--was a capital offense, conversos needed to lead double lives, learning to survive undetected from the prowling eyes of neighbors, servants and the Inquisition. Thus begins a chapter in the history of Sephardic Jewry that is nothing short of morbidly fascinating. Sabbath candles were lit, not in the main room, but preferably in a cellar, concealed from everyone’s view, sometimes even in a large pitcher. To observe a Jewish fast without arousing the suspicion of servants or Christian neighbors, one would have to stage a loud family brawl at around the habitual mealtime, whereupon, after furious shouting, everyone would either disperse from the common dining area in great haste or claim to have lost their appetite. Yom Kippur was observed a day later so as to deceive the tireless vigilance of Christians eager to catch conversos off guard. The same applied to Passover, which was celebrated two days after the appointed day. An aversion to pork gave away one’s true religious leanings--which is why conversos had to curb their distaste for ham and bacon, especially before strangers and servants.

Circumcision presented a peculiar problem. It was, of course, prohibited. Still, those who were circumcised either reported they were born circumcised, or that they had lost their foreskin during a childhood prank or as a result of an accident. The scholar Albert A. Sicroff once related an incident in which three “experts” were sent to examine the male member of a man suspected of being circumcised. When, after their examination, they were asked whether the suspect was indeed circumcised, their answer was astonishingly vague. They had seen something strange, but weren’t really sure, and perhaps the man wasn’t circumcised after all. The reason for the ambiguity is simple. No one wanted to show he knew what a circumcised penis looked like.

This incident has all the making of an apocryphal tale, but it gives an urgent picture of the degree to which the suspicion of crypto-Judaism cast a cloud of paranoia so intense and so pervasive that it ultimately rivaled the terror of Tiberius and Stalin. Everyone was suspected of being of converso stock, and every converso was suspected of being a Jew.

Historians who have written on the subject assume that converso culture was essentially duplicitous: Christian outside, Jewish inside. But here comes Netanyahu’s contribution: The whole perception of a Jewish-Christian double-life subculture may be entirely false.

Netanyahu, a world-renowned Israeli historian, has produced a monumental study. The father of Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of Israel’s Likud arty, and of Jonathan Netanyahu, hero of the Israeli raid on Entebbe (to whom the book is dedicated), the elder Netanyahu is conscious of the controversial nature of his thesis. He has been advocating it for over two decades. Here is a meticulous, thoughtful and rigorously logical historian who sifts through his evidence with the cunning of a detective keenly aware that his suspect is cunning enough to have fooled almost every other scholar in the field. He speculates when he must, is honest enough to question his own speculations, and like every good, original thinker is always seeing things from a different perspective. No one can look at what he’s seen and pretend not to have seen anything.

Like all accomplished historians, the first thing Netanyahu looks at, in fact, is the evidence itself. What, he asks, do we know of the conversos? And where do we know it from?

We’ve known, for example, that conversos practiced all sorts of arcane pseudo-Jewish rituals and we know that they resorted to an infinite number of schemes to avoid detection. But we know this from the records of the Inquisition. And herein lies the problem. The “evidence” gathered by the Inquisition is evidence expressly manufactured to confirm the image of conversos as closet Jews. (Imagine trusting Nazi court records to understand a similar phenomenon.)

That conversos were almost always found guilty should surprise no one. The instruments of torture were so persuasive that when Lucero, the over-zealous inquisitor, expanded his persecution to include staunch Old Christians, they, too, “confessed” to being secret Judaisers.

What Netanyahu wants to suggest, instead, is that conversos were not crypto-Jews but had become real Christians and, with the passing of years, had grown totally estranged from the religion of their forefathers. We may be disinclined to accept this theory, but it is by no means implausible. Forced conversions do work. And a good part of Netanyahu’s book is an attempt to prove the point.

This, however, is also where the readers’ own detective work begins. Should we believe Hebrew language sources when they tell us that the Jews of Spain did not look favorably on conversos? And how should we read converso writings advocating that crypto-Jews be severely punished? Should we believe them? Or are these coded texts? In fact, is anything written by the conversos on this matter ever uncoded?

Whether one is reluctant to accept Netanyahu’s thesis, the fact remains that, after reading this book, one can no longer automatically assume that conversos were secret Judaisers.

Still, by stopping his book at the close of the 15th Century, Netanyahu does not attend to questions raised by later events. Did converso culture change as a result of the Inquisition? And if the conversos were so thoroughly Christianized, how does one explain the fact that many of them, as soon as they were out of Spain, immediately reverted to Judaism?

“The Inquisition,” Netanyahu writes, “revolutionized the thinking of some [conversos] and led them to re-examine their relationship to Christianity, now that they were suffering torture and infamy at the hands of their fellow Christians. They decided to embrace their ancestral faith.”

What does this really mean? Does one convert back to Judaism after having become a Christian simply because Christians are cruel? Or was one’s original conversion to Christianity “shaky” to begin with? There are no answers.

Netanyahu, however, is interested in the issue of converso religion for another reason. The Spanish Inquisition was instituted essentially to extirpate, not just Judaism as a religion, but conversos as a population. In this it treated Jews as a race, not just as members of the Jewish religion. And in this it provides the modern age with the first instance of anti-Semitism. The religious “angle” was a pretext. That the Inquisition accused conversos of Judaising when conversos had already given up Judaism merely confirms that it was operating with another, unstated agenda: wealth.

Anti-Jewish sentiment had always existed in Spain and lay at the root of many a pogrom. The monarchs who found Jews loyal, the cities that found their money-lending useful and the aristocracy who borrowed from them the better to resist the king were always shifty in their treatment of Jews--as were Jews in their effort to hedge their losses in what were sometimes prosperous but fundamentally inclement circumstances. Each--the king, the cities, the nobles, the clergy--played their “Jewish card” against each other. Netanyahu’s history of the Jews of Spain is, in fact, a brilliant reconstruction of how each group played that card. One can use Jewish influence and wealth to attain certain gains, but the converse is equally true: One can cut one’s losses by sacrificing one’s Jews. This is what happened to the Jews in 1449-1451. It was easier to hate Jews than hate the king whose taxes they collected; likewise, it was easier for the king to punish “his” new Christians rather than punish the citizens who had massacred them.

When King John II felt his authority challenged by the burghers, he decided to pardon them for what they had done to the conversos and to promise them an inquisition. The cities eventually did get what they wanted: Converso success was stunted, Christians stepped into the places vacated by conversos, and--of course--Christian debts were summarily expunged. In the process, the new monarchs Henry IV and later Ferdinand and Isabella got what they wanted as well: uniform allegiance from kingdoms that were finally united. They also got something else: the wealth of every Jew they expelled and of every converso summoned into the Office of the Inquisition. Not a bad deal after all.

It is said that after Bayesid II, the sultan of Turkey, allowed Spanish Jews to settle in his lands and noticed how skilled, industrious and resourceful they were, he could not help remarking, “You call Ferdinand a wise king, who had made his country poor and enriched ours?” The king of Spain would probably have scorned such words. After all, Spain would receive gold and silver ingots from the New World by the galleon and was to amass the largest treasury of precious metals in Western Europe. What he didn’t realize was that soon no one would be left to manage, exploit or capitalize on all of that newly acquired wealth. He didn’t realize that what makes a country wealthy is not its gold, or the assets it steals from its citizens, but its people, not those who have the gold, or know where to find it, but those who know what to do with it.

One may have known how Netanyahu’s tale would end, just as one always knows who the villains are in this Spanish tragedy. Still, Netanyahu writes with verve, implacable reasoning and a sometimes emphatic style that make this scholarly--and long--work a source of great learning, wisdom and pleasure.