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Apparently, there are many other major religious persecutions that are not well-known today.
These include the Nguyen Lords persecutions and ethnic cleansing of Chams people that used to live and control more than half of modern Vietnam, for more than a thousand years [1],[2].
Interestingly, both of the Catholic Church of Spain and Nguyens Lords of Vietnam regimes employed Pig or Pork Policy as a control measures to forcefully integrate the remaining Muslims community that were not migrated away but chosen to stay behind [3],[4].
[1] Nguyá»…n lords:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nguy%E1%BB%85n_lords
[2] History of the Cham–Vietnamese wars:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Cham%E2%80%93Vi...
[3] Pork politics and the Spanish Inquisition:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/06/pork-politics-...
[4] Spain decides to make up for its persecution of Jews — but won't do the same for Muslims:
https://theweek.com/articles/445777/spain-decides-make-perse...
> [4] Spain decides to make up for its persecution of Jews — but won't do the same for Muslims:
Because they rebelled against the Spanish Crown, lost the war and left of were expelled [1].
Through the history of Spain there has been waves of conquerors that have forced their culture to the natives (with different level of success): Carthage [2], Rome [3], Goths [4] and Arabs [5]. Most of the time, the natives converted to their masters' language, culture and religion. Of course, most of the time, those who refused to assimilate, were then battled, exterminated and those that were alive left or were expelled (Numantians in the case of the Roman conquest [6], Christians in the case of the Arab/Muslim conquest, Muslims in the case of the Christian re-conquest). It's not pretty but it's the history of the Iberian Peninsula.
- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebellion_of_the_Alpujarras_(1568%E2%80%931571) - [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthage - [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_conquest_of_the_Iberian_Peninsula - [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visigothic_Kingdom - [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umayyad_conquest_of_Hispania - [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numantia
Funny, but the first thing that came to my mind reading the study abstract was ham in Spain - particularly its ubiquity in Andalusia, where I lived for a few years. There are only two kinds of restaurants in Granada - those that serve ham, and those that are Halal. I developed a theory that it had to do with forcing pork onto Muslim and Jewish populations during the Reconquista. It still serves as a form of self-segregation today (although you could argue that the actual self-segregation is by practitioners of Halal and Kashrut diets - and I say this as a Jamon-loving Jew who feels sorry for my people who can't enjoy a bit of pig). Interesting to learn there's some truth behind my suspicion.
In Portugal, Jews invented an ingenious decoy sausage to evade pork surveillance:
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20170929-the-unlikely-sau...
Oh yes, it was used as test and for persecution. To circumvent that, Andalusian cuisine even had fake pork meals, to keep suspicion low. (Can't find the source now, but it IIRC it was an article about a book on Andalusian cuisine in general, and it was mentioned in passing).
> Apparently, there are many other major religious persecutions that are not well-known today.
Yup, like the Coptic Christians of Egypt. Or Christians in the Middle East/Near East more generally.
And we have today the "New Puritans of the Left" aka SJW/Woke. Very much a religious movement in that facts don't matter, only ideology/catechism do, and followers are highly prone to violent enforcement and persecution.
Did they really just put "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition…" into the abstract? I am not going to believe that was accidental.
That was classic.
If you don’t understand the meme, it’s an old Monty Python skit[1].
[1]
I saw that and busted up laughing.
Smoothly done, but obvious to anyone that knows the reference.
Is inserting a joke in a scientific paper common?
The causality might go the opposite way. Maybe areas with poorer economies were more prone to persecuting minorities. So it’s not the persecution that led to the poor economy, but the poor economy that led to the persecution. Or maybe a third factor drove both of these things.
The Spanish Inquisition was centrally ordered and to an extent managed, not spontaneous local events. Unless they specifically targeted poorer areas, which isn't impossible but is unlikely ( if they killed or expelled infidels, guess who got to keep the gold/money/property?), causality seems more probable to be in the way Spanish Inquisition -> poverty.
Typically papers like this find some instrument. The fact they don't have one might explain why they went for PNAS and not an economics journal, which are usually more rigorous (or more anal?) That said, their results on trust fit their mechanism pretty well.
The big possible confounder might be that the inquisition correlates with Muslim ("morisco") or Jewish presence. There's a big literature arguing that ethnic heterogeneity weakens trust, and that might persist over time even when the ethnic heterogeneity has vanished. But: "adding a control for pre-expulsion morisco population has little impact on the results."
> Unless they specifically targeted poorer areas, which isn't impossible but is unlikely ( if they killed or expelled infidels, guess who got to keep the gold/money/property?)
Being rich tends to coincide with having some kind of power. The poor people are more likely to be targeted by oppressive campaigns of any sort, because rich people use their power to protect themselves.
There would be nothing exceptional about targeting poor rather then rich and powerful.
While they can't prove there wasn't an unrelated third factor, the abstract does say they attempted to control for religiosity and wealth.
Well maybe, but the abstract says they controlled for this.
Seems difficult to thoroughly eliminate confounding factors.
Maybe the CCP can do a randomized controlled trial.
Or the Indian Territory management boards
Makes sense at face value. Generally speaking, religious minorities tend to perform better economically than the majority religious group(s) since they have to work harder to overcome institutional and historical hurdles placed in their way. So when they are persecuted, their economic productivity is reduced. Quite simply, they are either killed, flee, or are reduced to poverty. All of these affect economic performance. We see this today with the Christian minorities in the Middle East and Near East (Copts in Egypt, Syriacs in Syria, Assyrians in Iraq and Turkey, Armenians in Turkey, etc.).
> religious minorities tend to perform better economically than the majority religious group(s) since they have to work harder to overcome institutional and historical hurdles placed in their way
They dont? Religious minorities tend to worst then majority. They do sometimes get accused to be too rich by propaganda.
Jew in Europe nor in Germany specifically before WWII were not actually richer, statistically. They were on average lower middle class. Many of them were poor and refugees from eastern europe. Where individuals have been more successful, majority resented that and wanted to punish all Jews for it.
Yazidi are not richer then average in Iraque. Kurds are not richer then majority.
Legacy papers are very popular these days in econ, history, and political science. I don't have the time to dive deep into this one, but spatial identification of long-term causal effects is prone to errors. Specifically, the error terms in regression specifications capture unexplained variance that can be very persistent over long periods of time. These errors can also be spatially correlated across treated observations:
https://voxeu.org/article/standard-errors-persistence
I can't dive deep either, just a quick note that the OP article reference list includes the (important) review you linked.
That's great. Not all methodological insights get adopted by applied studies. Thanks for pointing this out!
Ungated version:
https://repec.cepr.org/repec/cpr/ceprdp/DP16030.pdf
no one mentioning that civil criminals would blaspheme just to have their cases moved to and heard in the much more fair inquisition courts, eh?
okay.
700 years of muslim conquest in Spain, led and facilitated by jewish communities literally opening the gates to cities like Toledo and encouraging the murder of christians.
but hey let's keep up the Anglo protestant and secular myths
The persecution of religious minorities in Europe resulted in a very secular Europe—-because many of them fled—-and a very religious America, because that’s where they all went.
Only a small fraction of American settlers / colonists were fleeing religious persecution, and those mostly came from a few countries in western and northern Europe. There weren't many religious fanatics emigrating in the 1600's from Greece or Poland.
Interestingly, Massachusetts banned Christmas for over 20 years for being a pagan holiday.
The enlightenment exploded after the Lisbon earthquake. Atheism took off. I don't think it was religious persecution as much as the emergence of secular philosophy and science.
No. The persecution of religious minorities in Europe culminated in the Holocaust, which led to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Don't blame the minorities who have suffered and continue to suffer.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I have always thought this was an ethnic/cultural/social persecution, not mainly religious-based.
Both/and, I think. If you don't like "them", and they're religiously different too, then religion becomes one more avenue for you to attack them. On the other hand, if it starts with you not liking their religion, then you can wind up not liking their ethnicity too.
To what degree did they control for the regions in question being already less educated, trusting etc, and that leading to more people being persecuted there?
"Using data on the Spanish Inquisition, we show that in municipalities where the Spanish Inquisition persecuted more citizens, incomes are lower, trust is lower, and education is markedly lower than in other comparable towns and cities."
In other words, defund the Spanish Inquisition?
As with many other maps of Spain (or Italy for that matter) it would be interesting to see also "correlation with kms away from the center of Europe".
(The white bit doesn't really count because afaik is empty anyway)
Without conscious policy the inequality resulting from racial persecution is probably going to go the same way in the US.
In 2019 the median white household held $188,200 in wealth—7.8 times that of the typical Black household $24,100.
This article makes me think about the internet conspiracy that the spanish inquisition invented Rome, which did not exist
Whoa, I've never heard of that one before. Any off the wall homepage with mid-2000's aesthetics that lays it out for me?
There are TikTokers with a lot of influence promulgating it from their basements.
The vast number of commentators seem to be taking the insanity at face value. A lot of comments like 'Wow, that's an interesting perspective' of 'I've never heard that, they don't teach us everything in school'.
While I'm not worried about that meme, it's just shocking to see how easy it is to delude people.
Combined with the Pew polling showing young people don't really get their news from normative sources, it's a bit worrying. Cable news is all Senior Citizens while Gen Z is off on Twitch and TikTok.
> While I'm not worried about that meme, it's just shocking to see how easy it is to delude people.
You can see evidence of that sort of thing in every online community, even right here on Hacker News. No community is immune from being weaponized to spread outright nonsense. The question is what you can do about it.
1. The creator pushing this is Momlennial (Donna). She’s almost certainly not meaning for her content to be taken seriously.
2. Even if she was serious, the reaction amongst most users has been extremely incredulous and negative. Her follower count has stalled/slipped and the various anthropology/history/other social science creators have had a great time debunking her.
3. If you’re not seeing the negative assessments of her content in her interactions, it’s due to how she handles contradicting comments and duets/stitches.
> Cable news is all Senior Citizens while Gen Z is off on Twitch and TikTok
Both of those are garbage sources. It's a lateral move, in my opinion.
Cable news reports on the news of the day and generally doesn't lie, rather, they misrepresent.
TikTok, Reddit etc. is mostly just fantasy, opinion.
Older people are much better informed about current issues.
Yes, but TikTok is even more fragmented than cable news, with far more varieties of insane nonsense.
We're still struggling with the fallout from Pope Urban II starting the Crusades in 1095.
Well, that was unexpected.
I can't read the article, but the Spanish Inquisition is generally misunderstood in the historical context and innumerable myths have been spun about the affair through later Protestant leaflets and the like (outrageous claims of the genocide of millions, for example, compared to the actual 3,000-5,000 executed over the course of close to four centuries; compare this to the 150,000 secular witch burnings during the same period elsewhere in Europe). Most people don't even know what it was about, its historical character, or the historical antecedents that led to it in the end. Typically, it is used as a rhetorical device to halt discussion through whataboutism, like calling someone a racist without merit ("What about the SPANISH INQUISITION? You know, that horrible SPANISH INQUISITION? Oh, yes, the SPANISH INQUISITION was bad.").
How many people understand the converso crisis and its antecedents that threatened the very existence of Spain? The widespread social unrest that resulted that the Inquisition was brought in the resolve? Or that the judicial standards of the Inquisition were ahead of their time?
Persecution and forced conversion were not the objective, and indeed, the very notion of forced conversion is understood as not only evil by Catholics since it violates the conscience of the unbeliever, but it is an impossible feat because conversion can only be done freely. Rather, it was the widespread fear of feigned conversions, to obtain high offices, among the general populace that led to widespread unrest (many conversos had attained high ranking positions in the Spanish government). Whether there was any truth to these fears is another story, but the unrest was such a threat to the stability of Spain, that the Spanish Inquisition was called to resolve this crisis by subjecting the matter to an orderly judicial process. Some may argue that the later ultimatum of conversion or expulsion is a kind of de facto coerced conversion, but that's debatable, especially given the number of Jews who left for places like Poland.
We can criticize the affair (which, despite the investigation of claims of heresy, was actually of a secular character), but the attention it has received though the "Black Legend" as some egregious orgy of evil (committed by the Protestant's favorite punching bag, the Church) out of step with even the common practices of the day is simply wrong. Sadly, these sorts of things can seep into historical accounts and curricula, especially when they agree with prejudices. So I wonder about the substance of an article that uses this episode as a basis for investigating this question.
> How many people understand the converso crisis and its antecedents that threatened the very existence of Spain?
> Rather, it was the widespread fear of feigned conversions, to obtain high offices, among the general populace that led to widespread unrest (many conversos had attained high ranking positions in the Spanish government).
Sounds like the same tropes used to spread racism and fear of migrants in our times.
Except they set up an institution to investigate people from other races and cultures who tried to integrate and assimilate, tortured them for confessions and burned them alive if they were found to still secretly maintain any traditions of their own culture.
I can see why people with a Catholic identity would want to whitewash the history of their church, if they feel singled out for criticism. But you are right that it wasn’t only Catholics who did bad things, and the Inquisition probably didn’t do them _because_ they were Catholic. Doesn’t make it any less evil though.
Is 'widespread social unrest' an euphemism for the pogroms and riots such as the 1391 massacre of Spanish Jews, culminating in (a century later) all Jews being thrown out of Spain with little more than the shirts on their backs?
Sadly, anti-semitism was rampant in medieval Europe and I would say that it was present until XX century [1], and massacres of jews were popular among all countries, e.g.:
- 1066 Granada Massacre (Granada was a Muslim Kingdom at that time)[2]
- England: 1190 York Massacre [3]
- Castile & Leon: 1391 Massacre [4]
- Brussels: 1370 Brussels massacre [5]
- ... [6]
In fact, I would say that jews have been the most hated ethno-religious group through Europe. The animosity of many cultures in Europe against them was almost omnipresent, both Christian and Islam-based.
Thus, jews were expelled from countries in Europe all the time [7], Spain was in fact one of the last countries to do so, on a side note, most countries expelled jews much earlier e.g.
Most of the Spanish jews chose to be baptized (among them the Abraham Senior, a senior member of the Castilian hacienda [8]) and is estimated that from a population of 400,000 a half of them remained in Iberia. Other sources (Henry Kamen) claim that [from] "80,000 Jews and 200,000 conversos, about 40,000 emigrated".
Of course, those who remained were subjected to discrimination as _conversos_, but that's another issue that even them was subjected to criticism by some important figures like Ignacio de Loyola (founder of Jesuits).
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/anti-Semitism/Anti-Semitism-in-medieval-Europe
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1066_Granada_massacre
[3] https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/cliffords-tower-york/history-and-stories/massacre-of-the-jews/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_1391
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_massacre
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Medieval_anti-Jewish_pogroms
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsions_and_exoduses_of_Jews
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Senior
Oh yes, I'm not hating on Spain, but the parent comment seemed to deny the persecution Jews experienced and portrayed it as some sort of righteous anger on the part of good Catholics.
I don't think it was "rightous anger", but the hate against jews were commonplace in Medieval Ages. That also involves Spain of course. Until recently, most people were extremely racist/prejudiced against "the other" (hate against jews included).
However, I'm afraid that the popularization of the Spanish Inquisition [1] is due to propaganda. It is called Black Legend in academic circles and the publication in England and The Netherlands (and their orbits) of exagerated stories about the atrocities of the Spanish Crown, Spaniards and the Spanish Inquisition is because of that.
Most of the sufferers of the Spanish Inquisiton were Spaniards, and the Holy Office had the aim of control (with an iron fist) the population, not exterminate them. In fact, during its 4 centuries of life, the Inquisition executed around 6,000 people [2] (according to Henry Kamen). For example, you can compare to the 57,000 - 70,000 people killed during the reign of Henry VIII (only 40 years)[3][4]
- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legend_(Spain)
- [2] https://strangenotions.com/spanish-inquisition/
- [3] https://www.history.co.uk/article/the-killer-king-how-many-people-did-henry-viii-execute
- [4] https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/how-could-you-survive-in-tudor-england/znvmkmn
Control with an iron fist _is_ better than extermination, but it's a pretty low bar...
We are talking about XV-XIX centuries. Most countries had different levels of "iron fist" population control for a segment of their population. It could be control of women, poor people, people of different ethnicity, jews, etc.
What I want to highlight, is that the behavior of the Spanish Inquisition, while abhorrent to our XXI eyes, were not uncommon during those times. Note please that I'm not justifying anything, I'm making a point that Human History has been horrible during almost of its existence: discrimination, wars, slavery, segregation, etc. Human Rights are a "new thing".
Spain was the las country to expel Jews in Europe indeed.
"Secular witch burnings" is a term I haven't heard before.
Religiously motivated, but conducted by laypeople, yes?
> the very notion of forced conversion is understood as not only evil by Catholics
Funny you say that, given how one of the cornerstones of Catholicism is forced conversion of children.
As I understand it, conversion requires renouncing your previous faith. If you are referring to the practice of baptizing newborn babies, I don't think it can considered a conversion (much less a forced one) at all.
Not really: “Religious conversion is the adoption of a set of beliefs identified with one particular religious denomination to the exclusion of others.” It would seem rather pointless to have a separate terms for “conversion” and “conversion from effectively atheism”.
And it’s definitely a forced conversion: the whole purpose is to explicitly ignore one’s will, and is used to “trap” children into religion, generally followed by indoctrination about alleged “obligations” and “duties”.
If(when) right-wing extremists in the USA take power in their hands and eliminate all the opportunities for other political parties, we might see religious persecution of abortion rights, LGBT communities, freedom of speech, and common sense.
_Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition_ to still matter today, but it does.
Touche
I get the feeling they wrote this paper just to make this joke, lol.
What does this have to do with religion?
Secular ideologies killed about a two hundred million people in last century alone and nearly destroyed all of civilization.
Secular Totalitarians were putting people in gas chambers and gulags by the 10s of millions 'In The Name Of Whatever' (and of course, about 1/2 of those secular ideologies were specifically anti-religious).
If you look at a map of Europe, you can see the 'near term effects' of living under Soviet Authoritarianism quite obviously.
That said, I doubt very much that 'The Spanish Inquisition' has strongly material effects today, rather, those groups who were 'On The Side of Power' were more likely to prosper, than those on 'Other Sides', in all eras, in all cases.
Vienna 'prospered' as the HQ of Hapsburg 'Empire', some other places, would have not been so well off, obviously.
I downloaded the data set but was unable to parse, if anyone has any suggestions please share.
I think the finding of this study is suggesting religious persecution is bad for for a community, not religion itself. It would likely see all the persecution you mention as harmful, just not part of this study.
I think the study is erroneously attributing the term 'religion' especially in the context of the Spanish inquisition.
If the study was titled 'Long-Term Effects of the Spanish Inquisition' - that would be fine, but they are more broadly applying their conclusions without evidence.
Getting rid of the remnants of two foreign peoples who had not sort of familiarity or loyalty with the natives, and their faiths was the best thing that happened in Iberia.
When were the Portuguese and Spanish Golden Ages, again?