The Inventor. W. E. Gutman

treatise on the creatures, some real, others skillfully improvised, that personify “sin.” The demented tract is promptly endorsed by the Church and circulated among high-ranking prelates.

      In 1481, the “Holy” Inquisition, under the bestial tutelage of Tomas de Torquemada -- himself the grandson of a “converso” -- and acting on behalf of the king and queen, engages in wholesale persecution, torture, murder and expropriations masterminded to purge Spain of the Jews and to enrich the Church.

      Six years later, backed by a papal bull (edict) the German inquisitor Heinrich Kramer publishes the Malleus Maleficarum, or Witches’ Hammer, a manual that “ascertains the existence” of witchcraft. Challenging and chastising skeptics, the Malleus offers “evidence” that witches are more often women than men. It trains inquisitors to identify them, describes the physical characteristics of the “possessed” and teaches their tormentors the essential methods (think “enhanced interrogation techniques,” -- including water-boarding) most effective against a long list of imaginary transgressions. A latter-day variation on the theme, phrenology, a thoroughly discredited late 18^th century pseudoscience based on the false assumption that mental faculties (or the lack thereof) can be identified by palpation of the skull, would unfairly brand certain people morons, criminals and perverts -- labels that better describe the practitioners of this quackery than their unwitting subjects.

      Repression escalates and spreads like wildfire.

      Jews are expelled from Spain. In Portugal they are forced to convert to Christianity -- or else. So are the Moors. The persecution continues under the reign of King Philip II and Pope Clement VIII. Openly anti-Semitic, the pontiff links Jews with usury -- the only occupation they are legally entitled to pursue, not with their own money but with funds supplied to them and controlled by an elite of rich, non-Jewish trades people.

      Barely concluded, the One Hundred Year War stokes the political and religious discord that cleaves France and England. It will take nearly four centuries for the enmity to cease.

      The plague, cholera and a host of venereal diseases erupt, claiming thousands in their wake. The Jews are blamed for spreading these scourges.

      Religious frictions, awakened by isolated efforts to breathe fresh air into the Church and resisted by those who aspire to dogmatize it further, threaten to destroy the very fabric of Christianity

      Members of a Calvinist sect in Northern Italy are nearly exterminated by the Armies of French king Francis I in a campaign billed as a “crusade against religious perversion.”

      In 1497, Girolamo Savonarola, book-burner and self-styled moralizer and prior of St. Mark’s convent in Italy, is excommunicated by Pope Alexander VI. A year later he is roasted alive in the public square where the Bonfire of the Vanities had once blazed. His crime: he preaches against narcissism and the unbridled moral turpitude of the clergy.

      Charged with heresy -- endorsing and promoting the Copernican theory that the Sun, not the Earth is the center of our solar system -- Italian philosopher and pantheist Giordano Bruno is expelled from the Dominican Order in 1576. He aggravates his case by arguing that the physical universe is infinite and asserting that human beings are not unique because the presence of life, even that of rational beings, may not be confined to planet Earth. He signs his death warrant when he affirms that absolute knowledge is a myth and that there are no limits to the advancement of learning. He is burned alive. [In 2000, on the quadricentennial commemoration of his execution, the Vatican issues a statement, troubling in its ambiguity and cynicism, insisting that Bruno’s death was “a sad episode of Christian history” but that his writings were “incompatible with Christian thinking and he remains a heretic.”]

      Luther, the firebrand reformer, drives a wedge that irreparably widens the abyss dividing Christians and alters the course of western civilization. His ferocious anti-Semitism, his venomous tracts provide the template for the modern hatred of the Jews. His last vituperations, three days before his death, call for the expulsion of all Jews from Germany.