Everything Has Gone to Shit, Part 678,549

So, I was doing a bit of research for a book proposal I am working on, having to do with the idea of “superstition.” I don’t mean things like belief in witches, magic or anything like that. What I was looking for was something on the history of it as a concept, particularly how people used it since the Reformation.

Lo and behold, I came across one of those “Very Short Introduction” books, put out by Oxford Press. As the series name indicates, these are short intros to big topics like “Religion,” “History,” “Philosophy” and other broad topics, this one on “Superstition.” Problem solved.

I have sometimes found these books useful, as they give a broad overview but are not a heavy read. And, because I was an early modern British historian by training, I have for many years implicitly trusted anything with the names “Oxford” or “Cambridge” on them. For someone who studied British history, they became synonymous with quality, excellence. You could always count on a book or series that you could rely on to scholarly, sober, serious, well researched. I suppose it seems silly, but you get this sort of veneration for all things Oxbridge sort of by osmosis when you study my field, along with heavy doses of industrial strength British empiricism.

Well. The author of the book, someone named Stuart Vyse, has a chapter on “the Secularization of Superstition,” in which he drops this beaut:

Jews, who had already suffered many centuries of discrimination and—in the case of the Crusades—genocidal extermination, were often thought to be secretly continuing to practise their forbidden religion. Inquisitors also targeted Christian heretics, including a variety of Protestant groups, and those who violated moral laws, such as bigamy and sodomy. The Spanish Inquisition had an estimated death toll of 350,000.

There are so many things wrong with this I don’t know where to begin. First of all, though Jews did face discrimination and persecution in medieval Europe, never at any time did any Christian ruler or group, including Crusader armies, ever attempt to wipe out every Jew in Europe, which is the plain meaning of this passage. Mobs in German territories attacked Jews during the First Crusade, with often horrific results. These sadly became more frequent following the Crusades. But pogroms are not genocide, and no ruler in medieval Europe ever proposed to murder every single Jew in Christendom, a la Hitler, as one Jewish historian has pointed out.*

But the number of deaths attributed to the Spanish Inquisition is even more absurd. First of all, no inquisitorial court ever executed anyone. They determined whether or not the accused was a heretic, and if they determined he was, then he would be handed over to the civil authorities to be executed. The real number of those handed over to be executed in Spain is somewhere between 2000 and 5000 people over a 350-year period. Vyse also claims that the Spanish Inquisition regularly tortured people, which is not true; Thomas Madden has estimated that inquisitors used torture in only about 2% of cases, a far lower percentage than used in civic law courts (torture was commonly used in civil courts across Europe).#

The fact that someone can write such nonsense (in a book on “superstition” no less), when numerous scholarly books have been written on this subject—by the likes of Edward Peters, Thomas Madden, Henry Kamen, Helen Rawlings, Francisco Bethencourt and many others (not all of them “revisionist,” by the way)—is astonishing. It is even more astonishing that no editor or anyone else thought to check any of this.

Or it used to be. In an era when news media routinely make up horror stories about the Catholic Church hiding “mass graves” in Canada or Ireland, you’d like to think scholarly publications would be more circumspect, especially those as venerable as Oxford. You could always find casual prejudice and contempt for the Catholic Church in academic publications; that is nothing new. At least in the past, they tried to limit it to enormities the Church actually perpetrated. Besides, you would like to think people presumably dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge would care about whether such knowledge is true or not.

But no, accuracy and fairness go out the window when you are dealing with outgroups, no matter who the in-group is. That is just human nature, and it is my fault for believing that academics were “not like other men” and would somehow escape this fact. (That’s thing about illusions: like the man said, you shouldn’t have any.) Still, it is hard to accept that those who once did a better job than others of resisting this lugubrious aspect of human nature are no longer capable or willing to do so. I will probably always retain a soft spot for anything with Oxford or Cambridge on the spine, but the trust it once engendered is gone for good. The universal march toward brainless tribalism proceeds apace, and nothing is going to stop it. Which means you can kiss basic competence, that you once took for granted in so many aspects of life, good-bye.

Such is life in a declining empire, ladies and gentleman.

*Steven L. Katz, cited in Rodney Stark, Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History, p. 27. Stark is a Protestant historian, fwiw.

#Cited in Stark, Bearing False Witness, p. 122.