For sale: The Manual of Inquisitors by Nicholas Eymerich

A copy of The Manual of Inquisitors, written in the 14th century by Nicholas Eymerich and published in Portuguese by Edições Afrodite in 1972, recently came up for sale for Euro 40.

Interestingly, it was classified under: "Portuguese-Jewish culture, Marranism, History". As the juxtaposition of culture/persecution reveals, Jews were routinely treated with the most horrendous cruelty in Europe. And to illustrate the point, this is how the booksellers casually present the book: "This volume contains some basic texts for the study of the Inquisitorial Institution. At its base there is the text of the Manual of the Inquisitors, whose first printed publication was of 1578 (but two centuries before it was already famous and celebrated) and it is presented as an important work in all the legal literature that was in force in the Peninsula. Initially it is a result of the work of Friar Nicolau Emérico (1320-1399) of the Order of the Preachers and the grand inquisitor of Aragão, where he became famous for his great competence in the subject and where he began building his Directorium Inquisitorum". How extraordinary: "famous for his great competence in the subject"!

Biographical details from Answers.com
Nicholas Eymerich (c. 1320 - 4 January, 1399) was a Roman Catholic theologian and inquisitor general of the Inquisition of the Crown of Aragon in the later half of the 14th century. He is best known for authoring the Directorium Inquisitorum.

He entered the local monastery of the Dominican Order on 4 August, 1334.In 1357, Eymerich replaced Nicola Roselli as the Inquisitor General of Aragon, as Roselli had been raised to a cardinal. A year after obtaining the position, Eymerich was given the honorific Chaplain of the Pope as a recognition of his diligence in pursuing heretics and blasphemers. However, the zeal he displayed as inquisitor general earned him many enemies, including King Peter IV of Aragon. Peter IV sought to have Eymerich removed from office in 1360 when the inquisition interrogated the Franciscan spiritualist, Nicholas of Calabria.

A further example of Eymerich as inquisitor general is his sentence of the Jew, Astruc Dapiera in 1370. Dapiera was a native of Barcelona accused of sorcery. He was sentenced to publicly repent in a cathedral, and then to life imprisonment. Eymerich also ordered the piercing of heretics' tongues with a nail so they could not blaspheme. He was the first inquisitor to get around the Church's prohibition against torturing a subject twice by interpreting directive very liberally, permitting a separate instance of torture for a separate charge of heresy.

His epitaph describes him as praedicator veridicus, inquisitor intrepidus, doctor egregius.

Eymerich's most prominent and enduring work was the Directorium Inquisitorum, which he had composed as early as 1376. It defined witchcraft, and described means for discovering witches. In compiling the book, Eymerich used many of the magic texts he had previously confiscated from accused sorcerers. The Directorium Inquisitorum was to become the definitive handbook of procedure for the Spanish Inquisition until into the seventeenth century.

Cross-eyed Europe. The Protocols of the Sages of Information, by Pilar Rahola (2003)

"The present anti-Semitic edifice is built on two equally powerful pillars. One has to do with the culture of the hatred and prejudice that marks us as a people. However, the other pillar is absolutely necessary for those prejudices to take wing and fly: the informative lie. And "lie", nowadays, is a verb conjugated with equal enthusiasm by journalists and intellectuals, to such a degree that the truth about Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict is being superseded by a parallel truth, based on the distortion and falsification of history. Here, too, there is nothing new, inasmuch as historical and contemporary anti-Semitism have to do with lying. I will put in the harsh terms merited by the accusation: Europe - erudite, intellectual, media-minded; the Europe that reports daily on the Middle East and which is responsible for the voraciously anti-Israel cast of opinion, is rewriting a new version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The secret agents of czarism have replaced by modern-day journalists; the ancient peril of a Jewish plot is now being couched as a Yankee-Israeli plot; the evil Jew of yesteryear is the same evil Jew he always was, except that now his plot is situated on Wall Street and he has an army. I shall never cease to be amazed and horrified by the force of old iniquities. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) put it this way in a study it conducted among adults in five European countries: it is alarming to find in this post-Holocaust and post-September-11th world that one out of five persons believes in the old slanders. In Spain, for instance, some 70% believe in the concept of a Jewish financial lobby, as lobby that, naturally, pulls the world’s strings. Thus, in the beginning of time, we had Christian texts converting the Jewish people into God killers. I believe that somewhere there is a wretch who wants to make a movie out of it… In 1903, we had the Protocols garbed by the Russian extreme right, who contributed to instigating the pogroms that devastated that country until 1914, with the slaughter of 60,000 Jews in the civil war between the whites and the reds. In 1920, we had Henry Ford and frenzied international Jew. And in vanquished and convulsed Germany, well nourished on the Protocols, Hitler wrote his Mein Kampf and Rosenberg and Goebbels saw to the propagation of hatred and, therefore, the legitimization of persecution. The outcome is well known.
Today, the same Europe which gave rise to everything - hatred, persecution and extermination, is now giving birth to a new narrative whose stigmas are distant and the distortion of which is equally inconsiderate and whose consequences, in any event, will never be good. This is my explicit accusation: the journalistic and intellectual world, fundamentally composed of leftists, has written new highly influential Protocols, with devastating consequences. Day by day, with every news item, with every declaration, we don’t have the odd ferocious book; today, we have a library full of them. Like their forebears, the Protocols of the Sages of Information are fake, criminal and false. Israel is the target. The reason - there are many, most of which are ignoble. The justification is Sharon. The excuse - anti-Zionism. The weapon - prestige. The propagator - thousands of media. The ally - Arafat. The result - anti-Semitism."
From a speech delivered at the International Keren Hayesod Conference, 25.11.2003.
Pilar Rahola comes from a republican and anti-fascist family. She is a Catalan writer, journalist and former parliamentarian of the republican left.
Also by Pilar Rahola.

Cartoonist Ben Heine draws a Zionist "Myriam" (Tlaxcala blog)

Fausto Giudice, an Italian, announced on Tlaxcala (a Spanish website) that he and Ben Heine will shortly be writing a constitution for Israel based on the Decalogue. In the meantime, Ben Heine, a Belgian, has drawn a Zionist "Myriam".
A German reader of Tlaxcala expressed utter shock at the article and drawing: "It is really saddening to see the overt and disgusting anti-Semitism you are publishing on your homepage. It is a pity that right now I don't have the time and money, but I hope somebody will sue you for this article, Ulrich Becker."


"Every state has its motto, its flag, its national anthem and its Constitution. But one state does not follow this rule: Israel. Besides, what kind of political system has this State? Monarchy? Republic? No one can answer it, as even if Israel has a flag and a national anthem it has neither Constitution nor motto. It is also the only United Nations state member that has not deposited a map of its borders before the UN. ...
Therefore from this proposition cartoonist Ben Heine has drawn a Zionist "Myriam". At glance everybody will recognize Delacroix’s Marianne standing up on 1830 barricades from the famous picture "Liberty guiding the people". However she is armed with a menorah, the Jewish seven branches candlestick. It is possible that her bare breasts could shock orthodox rabbis, although Zionists can be accused of anything except prudery. Evidently, this Zionist Myriam should be suspicious and keep a distance from Israel’s fallen president Moshe Katsav, a sexual harasser of women.
So we have repaired an oblivion and henceforth the state of Israel has a motto. In short we will start writing a Constitution tailored to this State, directly inspired from the the Bible’s Decalogue, the 10 Commandments transmitted to Moshe by Yehova on Mount Sinai."

Fausto Giudice and Ben Heine and their motto for Israel ... in German (Tlaxcala blog)

Fausto Giudice, an Italian, and Ben Heine, a Belgian, announced on Tlaxcala (a Spanish blog) that they had "repaired an oblivion" by proposing a motto for Israel. They drew their inspiration from the French Republic "Liberté, Egalité et Fraternité", which was translated from French into German, and then appropriately adapted to fit the "Zionist state". What is the rationale for the choice of German? Well, isn’t Israel a Nazi State and isn’t German the language of the Nazis, which according to them "a big chunk of Israeli citizens" understand? A German reader wrote a letter expressing utter shock: "It is really saddening to see the overt and disgusting anti-Semitism you are publishing on your homepage. It is a pity that right now I don't have the time and money, but I hope somebody will sue you for this article, Ulrich Becker."

"An oblivion repaired - A motto for Israel

"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity": this proud and beautiful motto, engraved on the pediment of each and every town hall of France and its colonies since 1880, is the official motto of the French Republic, written down in both the 1946 and 1958 Constitutions. It needed time to impose itself: In 1790 the Convention rejected Robespierre’s proposition to include it on flags and uniforms. From 1793, Parisians wrote down on their houses: “Unity, indivisibility of Republic; liberty, equality, fraternity or death”, but soon they will be invited to erase the last part of it; it’s too associated to Terror...
Every state has its motto, its flag, its national anthem and its Constitution. But one state does not follow this rule: Israel. Besides, what kind of political system has this State? Monarchy? Republic? No one can answer it, as even if Israel has a flag and a national anthem it has neither Constitution nor motto. It is also the only United Nations state member that has not deposited a map of its borders before the UN.
So wanting to repair the oblivion of the State of Israel founding fathers we propose a motto. It is in German, therefore it will easily understood by a big chunk of Israeli citizens. For those who don't understand German, here is a small explanation:
In German Liberty is Freiheit. In our proposition, it becomes Frechheit = cheek, brashness. It is the exact equivalent of the Hebrew/Yiddish word chutzpah, the fact of being insolent, brash, in a few words of being shameless. Chutzpah seems to be the main characteristic of any Zionist.
Equality is Gleichheit. In our proposition, it becomes Gleichgültigkeit = indifference. Indeed, Zionists’ other characteristic is their indifference to the fate of those who, to their eyes, are not Jewish, are either goyim (gentiles) or “self-hating Jews” (they define so any Jew who is critical with regard to Israel).
Fraternity is Brüderlichkeit. In our proposition, it becomes Unbarmherzigkeit = cruelty, derived from unbarmherzig = without compassion, pitiless. It is useless to explain this pitiless character: it is enough to contemplate the 60 year history of the Zionist state. ...

So we have repaired an oblivion and henceforth the state of Israel has a motto. In short we will start writing a Constitution tailored to this State, directly inspired from the the Bible’s Decalogue, the 10 Commandments transmitted to Moshe by Yehova on Mount Sinai."