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Comparing The Spanish Inquisition And The European Witch Craze

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Parallels Between the Spanish Inquisition and the European Witch Craze Around the time of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Europe was undergoing two of the most brutal instances of violence both stemming from societies with deeply religious groups, and while these two instances may be separated by hundreds of kilometers they in fact share many similarities. The similarities I wish to draw in this essay are between those of the victim and victimisers as when the two are compared and contrasted it can be seen the violence in both these instances stemmed from religious groups and ideologies, which targeted marginalized groups. To better understand these events, we must understand the perpetrators and how the Catholic Church invariably linked …show more content…

The result was many would confess to even worse crimes than they were accused of, many desperate to escape the suffering took their own lives while in captivity (36-39). Innocent VIII, despite his name, played a large role in why the both the Spanish Inquisition and the European Witch Craze were so violent and why they went on for such a long period of time. It’s important in any type of conflict or violence to talk not just about the perpetrator, but also the victim. In both these instances of violence, the discriminated groups were seen as outsiders that sought to devalue the major religious populations as I discussed earlier in this essay. But these groups of affected victims have more in common than just that. In both cases, we see anti-Semitism as a key theme in persecution. In the European Witch Craze, the perversion of Jewish traditions being applied to witches and witchcraft in the form of the Black Sabbath (Ben-Yehuda, 4), the Spanish Inquisition especially targeted Jews in its persecution and torture. Why in particular those of Jewish descent were targeted is not confirmed, but Gunst suggests that this could be the result of economic disparity between Jewish and Christian communities at the

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