Return of the inquisition? 

The painful history of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions has been on my mind since I heard from a friend that he and his wife are pursuing dual citizenship with Portugal. My friends’ applications take advantage of recent initiatives by both Portugal and Spain that open a limited “right of return” for Sephardic descendants of Jews expelled from those countries during that dreadful period. These openings have been small but practical gestures of atonement for the many murders, tortures, and other mayhem carried out over a century or more against our people in the name of making those countries strongholds of pure Christianity.

The bad news is that our own country, until recently among the world leaders in democracy and the free exercise of religion, is becoming much less tolerant of us.

There are many aspects to the backsliding. The most recent and probably most significant development has been the refusal by the leaders of the conservative MAGA movement to take a clear stance against hardcore antisemitism within its ranks. When the gathered supporters of Turning Point USA met in Arizona in late December, the Jewish media host Ben Shapiro asked whether his colleagues there would part company with such figures as the prominent podcaster Candace Owens, who floats conspiracy fantasies about “evil Zionists” behind the assassination of Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk, or Tucker Carlson, who increasingly promotes Holocaust deniers and other assorted fans of Adolf Hitler.

Not only was Carlson himself given a prominent speaking slot at the event, but the individual with presumably the most influence over the group, Vice President JD Vance, pointedly refused Shapiro’s appeal. Moreover, Vance’s speech put forward that Christianity “is America’s creed,” another hit against our country’s religious pluralism and the status of minority faiths. I’m noting that in August, President Trump told reporters that Vance would “most likely” be his heir apparent for the Republican nomination for president in 2028, and Erika Kirk, the widow of the Turning Point leader and now the group’s CEO, announced her own endorsement of Vance at the start of the conference.

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Unfortunately, white Christian nationalism was already a prominent feature of the Turning Point group before Mr. Kirk’s death, and it remains so. In 2022, Kirk falsely claimed to listeners of his podcast that separation of church and state was not in the Constitution.

This development will probably come as a shock to those among our fellow Jewish Americans who were inclined to believe the Trump administration’s claims that its assaults on institutions of higher education and culture (allegedly against “diversity”) were designed to protect us.

Donald Trump’s second term as president has seen a return to and an extreme amplification of federal government actions against religious and ethnic minorities and immigrants. This has included the extremely aggressive mass round-ups of undocumented people and a push for the reversal of the Constitution’s guarantee of citizenship to all who are born here, accompanied by vindictive prosecutions of any number of Trump’s perceived political enemies.

Among the related new program changes the administration apparently is considering is an inversion of long-existing policy toward refugees. Officials in the departments of State and Homeland Security would “prioritize [for refugee status white] Europeans who support ‘populist’ political parties,” like the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany (“AfD”), as the New York Times reported this fall.

In the wake of Kirk’s assassination, the administration has claimed new powers to persecute opponents, including not-for-profit organizations, which it plans to label domestic terrorists, a vague political/ideological catch-all that experts say has no basis in law. Trump’s September 25 National Security presidential memo characterized those it plans on targeting as people espousing “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” and “hostility toward … traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” An inquisition in the making.

Lest we think that the many objects of persecution under such a move couldn’t include people like us, at around the same time FBI director Kash Patel maligned the Anti-Defamation League as “functioning like a terrorist organization.”

As in his first presidency, Trump and his appointees have singled out our Muslim neighbors for particular animus. At the Turning Point conference, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, a friend of Tucker Carlson, used her speech to claim, without any evidence, that Muslim Americans in the city of Paterson are plotting to infiltrate city institutions and impose Islamic law on non-Muslims “through the use of laws or violence.”

To be clear, right-wing media have been pushing the fear-mongering about alleged “imposition of Sharia law” for a number of years. It has never been documented anywhere in this country, and this hasn’t changed. In most respects it is like the promoted falsehood that American Jews and other adherents of separation of church and state have been pursuing a war on Christmas. That libel was first promoted here by automaker Henry Ford in his 1920s series of slanderous articles he called “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.” Let’s remember that a libel is a libel.

When we think about our own history as a people, we need to have a clear view of the Spanish Inquisition period, which had multiple victims. “Moriscos,” as Spanish Muslims were called, were persecuted and expelled alongside Sephardic Jews. Some scholars estimate that as many as 300,000 Muslims were expelled. Relations between the Iberian Peninsula’s Jews and its Muslims fluctuated wildly between cooperation and antagonism over many centuries before the Inquisition. One of those thought-provoking unresolved questions of history is whether the vast tragedy of the Inquisition for both groups could perhaps have been avoided or minimized if the cooperation had been more consistent.

Perhaps we have a second chance now to get it right.

Ties between Jewish and Muslim Americans have been greatly complicated by the events of October 7, 2023, and the subsequent Gaza War. But this need not mean that dialogue and communication can’t happen. As a starting point, New Jersey Jews should step forward to denounce the inquisition against our Muslim neighbors in Paterson.

Mark Lurinsky of Montclair recently retired from a career in public accounting. He is an activist in local politics and a member of the steering committee of J Street’s New Jersey chapter.