american-holocaust

SEX, RACE AND HOLY WAR 183heavy cross up a hill and into a cave. There he supposedly received 6200lashes, had a crown of thorns placed on his head, and was nailed to thecross he had carried. After reciting various curses mocking Christ-someof which (such as that Christ was "the bastard son of a perverse and adulterouswoman") came straight from the To/dot Yeshu, discussed earlierthechild's heart allegedly was torn from his chest and was used, alongwith a stolen consecrated Host, to cast an evil spell on the inquisitors andon Christianity in general. All the accused, of course, were found guiltyand were burned at the stake. Immediately, the place where Christobalicowas said to be buried became a shrine that for years to come was visitedby thousands of pilgrims, including such royalty as Charles V and Philip11.110vTo most Europeans, as the fifteenth century was heading into its final decade,the world was not safe for the saintly so long as infidels remainedcamped at Christendom's gates, while Jews who refused to accept Christremained a cancerous threat from within the autocratic body politic of theChurch. Both groups were hated and spurned and persecuted by Christiansbecause they were defined categorically as enemies of the faith and oftenwere identified with Antichrist.Still, neither Muslims nor Jews were unsalvageable. The Muslims inhabitedthe ancient cities of the Holy Land. In Europe they were famedfor the culture, art, and architecture they had created in Toledo, Cordoba,and Seville. And the Jews were an ancient people, the very stock fromwhich Christianity was born. They also were urban people and an integralpart of European society. That is, both Jews and Muslims were human;they were "civilized"; their main offenses in Christian eyes were religiousand cultural. And however craftily resistant they may have been to Christianproselytizing, they were capable of conversion. No doubt, on manyoccasions, individual packs of Christian zealots had been seized with sufficientblood lust that they would have exterminated every Jew or everyMuslim had they only been given the chance. But for all its savage ferocity,Christian ideology did not encourage campaigns of extinction against humancreatures who had souls that might be saved.Important changes were in the air, however, even as Columbus wastramping about in search of someone to underwrite his voyage to Cathay-changesin the religious province of ideas as well as in the moremundane worlds of politics and money. These changes will be examinedbriefly here, and more extensively in the chapter to follow, because it isthe particular conditions of a given time and place that bring on events ofhistorical consequence. Of course, an exclusive focus on such particularitiesinvariably results in historical nearsightedness and thus leads to super-