In March 1492, six months before Columbus reached the New World, an event took place that was seemingly unrelated to the seaman but was clearly an offshoot of efforts to solidify the Reconquista. Spain’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella decreed that within four months, all Jews had to leave Spain. Those who had converted to Catholicism, the Converso, could stay. The eight hundred thousand Jews who had not were out. Of course, an unknown number of the Conversos were attending mass but still secretly practicing Judaism. These people, these human beings, were known as Marranos—swine.3
There is good evidence that Columbus, whose Spanish name was Cristóbal Colón, was Jewish, possibly a Marrano. The evidence is found in the will he signed on March 19, 1506. In it he honored the Jewish custom of leaving a portion of his wealth to the needy. He specifically named a Lisbon Jew as the beneficiary of a portion of his estate. Columbus also earmarked part of his estate to go to a group that was charged with retaking Jerusalem from its Muslim occupiers. And finally, he signed the document with a triangle of marks that appeared on Jewish headstones. Those dots and characters were intended to represent the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the deceased.4
Though born in what was then the Republic of Genoa before it was part of Italy, Columbus went to sea at the age of ten and built a life for himself as a seaman and trader based in Portugal and Spain. He was married to the daughter of a Portuguese governor. He had two sons who lived in the region. He had local interests, both familial and professional, to protect. He also had a livelihood to expand, and trade with the Indies was a part of that. At that time, the traditional land route, the Silk Road, fell under the domination of the Ottoman Turks, who were intermittently at war with Europe. Merchants then came up with the sea route that was safer—though this so-called Cape Route (named after the Cape of Good Hope in modern-day South Africa) required a long and arduous journey around the African continent. Columbus—who was fluent in Latin—schooled himself in both the Bible and astronomy. His studies gave him the idea that there had to be a quicker way to get to the Indies and back, one that would give his adopted home a trading edge. It would also, perhaps, insulate him by both distance and accolades from Spain’s rampant anti-Semitism.
This book is not the place to debate the modern-day furor surrounding Christopher Columbus and the voyage he undertook in 1492. The voices of political correctness won’t even let us call it “the discovery of America” any longer, since uncivilized natives were here before the civilized Europeans arrived. Voices of mass hysteria want his statue removed from New York City’s Columbus Park and his name removed from the October holiday that bears it—both actions I oppose, by the way. Whatever else may be said of him, Columbus had courage, sailing three tiny vessels west into waters that were uncharted and said to be populated by sea monsters, on a world that many uneducated souls still thought was flat. That alone should be celebrated. In its own way, he set a standard for the ideal of American exceptionalism in which I wholeheartedly believe.
Without ignoring the historic truth of the diseases his crew and those that followed introduced to the defenseless native population—among them, syphilis, measles, smallpox, and influenza—and also, of course, the horrors of slavery, Columbus’s enterprise failed in its original goal yet succeeded on a scale he could never have imagined. Columbus’s search for a trade route triggered the sixteenth-century colonization of the continent to the north of Hispaniola in the Caribbean, where he had landed.
Let me repeat what I said at the start of this chapter: context matters. The anti-Israeli rhetoric and passions of Barack Obama—a Muslim by virtue of his paternal descent and tradition—helped to fire new waves of anti-Semitism, the most open and vitriolic since the days of Goebbels and Hitler. Neither he nor the critics of Israel have a sense of history. They claim Jews have squatted on Palestinian land that was, in fact, Hebrew land since before the days of Moses. I mention this because the Jews of Spain today are faced with a situation almost identical to that faced by Columbus and the Jews of the fifteenth century. In August 2017, just days after a terror attack in Barcelona killed fourteen and injured more than one hundred others, the chief rabbi of that city gave an interview in which he warned that Spain had become a nexus for Islamic terror.
“I tell my congregants: Don’t think we’re here for good,” Rabbi Meir Bar-Hen said, “and I encourage them to buy property in Israel. This place is lost. Don’t repeat the mistake of Algerian Jews, of Venezuelan Jews. Europe is lost.” He described the Muslim community in Europe as harboring radicals and terrorists and warned, “It’s very difficult to get rid of them. They only get stronger.”5
The voices who damn Israel, like the tobacco-smooth tones of our chain-smoking, forty-fourth president, Barack Obama, do so knowing that were it to fall, there would be no safe haven for Jews. Though Jews are accustomed to living in diaspora, spread among the nations of the world in communal pockets where tradition, education, and faith are peacefully preserved, it would be easy to find and target them in the modern era. No one wants to see injury caused to the people of Palestine, who are victims themselves—not of Israel but of their own greedy leaders and terrorist fringes. Many are content to work in the Jewish state, where they have always been welcome. But the voices raised against Israel are effectively proposing what I call a soft holocaust: the slow but methodical herding and destruction of the Jews.
Mass hysteria. What Ferdinand and Isabella did in 1492 actually fell short of that benchmark. They were purists, yes, but as monarchs they had the power to simply order Jews to convert, leave, or die. There was no need to win public support. Hitler was different. Hitler told lies in order to obtain a desired result.
There is not a nation on earth that was not founded in warfare and blood. The history of America, its Founding Fathers, its wars, is also not antiseptic. But to those of us who are patriots—no, let me proudly rewrite that as Patriots—the voices of mass hysteria will not discourage our love of country or silence both history and the truth.
IN THE NAME OF GOD… OR THE GODLESS
Religious persecution is often a form of mass hysteria. The war waged by the Third Reich against the Jews is the most extreme example of that. Islamophobia in contemporary America is sporadically that—but not entirely. In Great Britain, nine major cities, including London, have Muslim mayors. That was accomplished with just four million Muslims—a mere sixteenth of the voting population. There are three thousand mosques and more than 130 sharia courts in that nation.6 At what point do they, or we, have a right to be concerned about what goes on inside mosques that are known to radicalize members? And mosques have an obligation to recognize that people of other faiths have a right to be concerned, since virtually all acts of terror are committed in the name of Islam. When loudspeakers blaring the call to prayer remind citizens in Germany that they are a conquered people—as one mosque has done—legitimate concerns have a way of hardening into mass hysteria.
America may have been opened for colonization as the result of religious persecution in Spain, but it was most definitely populated by people seeking to worship freely. Today, many Godless or—worse—God-hating people openly mock those of us who follow a Judeo-Christian faith. As if their narcissistic, sociopathic diatribes are going to change one single mind. When I was a boy, we began each school day with a standing, hand-over-heart salute to the American flag that was proudly displayed in every classroom. We stood that way as we recited the Pledge of Allegiance and its reference to “one nation, under God”—the kind of act that offends the ungrateful and graceless Colin Kaepernicks of this world, professional football players who are happy to collect huge paychecks courtesy of an American institution but think it’s beneath them to stand for the national anthem.
Atheists and their allies in the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) seek to crush public displays of religion wherever it takes root, claiming that the Constitution provides for the separation of church and state. Unfortunately for them, the Constitution does no such thing. Wh
at the First Amendment actually says is “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.…” In other words, the government is not permitted to interfere with worship or its doctrines. The Founding Fathers did not want to see the kind of internal and external conflict that occurred in Europe when churches were established and controlled by the government, such as the Church of England. There is nothing in the Constitution that says or even suggests that the Ten Commandments, some of the first laws ever devised to govern growing populations, could not be displayed in a court of law. The antireligious lunatics of the ACLU said that.
There are many millions who believe religion is the ultimate example of mass hysteria. Don’t get me wrong. I believe in God. I wrote a book on the subject, God, Faith, and Reason. However, organized religion has corrupted the concept of the Almighty. Based on a mythical vision in the last of the ancient Israelites first Judaism, then Christianity and Islam emerged. For the Hindus, religion is expressed as fantastic idols, the Buddhists the image of a portly, naked man-baby. Yet to this day, millions of highly educated, highly conscious people continue to follow and practice the teachings of these and other ritual and personality-based religions.
Millions have died, and others have killed, in the name of one religion or another. Was the mass-murdering communist Karl Marx right when he said, “Religion is the opiate of the masses”?7
Which is not to say that religion without government is a good thing. Most Americans do not want to be governed by Muslim sharia law. If someone wants to practice it, among the willing, that is their business and their right. But they cannot—yet—force it upon any American.
We actually started down that path, once. And the result was a deadly fit of mass hysteria.
HYSTERIA AS BULLYING
Famously and historically, the permanent presence of European faiths on the shores of America was begun when a shipload of 102 English Pilgrims—along with thirty crew—departed England following a stop in the port of Plymouth, England. Reaching these shores, they anchored the Mayflower off the commemoratively named Plymouth Rock on November 11, 1620. These souls were refugees from England’s Anglican Church who felt their religion had gotten too wrapped up in idolatry. The Pilgrims emigrated across the Atlantic, enduring the hardships of a voyage on an aging ship to potentially hostile shores for the sole purpose of establishing a settlement where they could freely practice their own brand of worship.8
But there is an interesting subtlety here, one that bred the seeds of future strife. Contrary to popular belief, the Pilgrims did not leave England because they sought religious freedom: They came to the New World to establish an order under their own terms, one in which anyone who didn’t fit in, who defied their Calvinistic mores and morality, could be cast out—or worse. The foundation of their creed—the Bible—gave these fanatics all the guidance they needed to govern. They arrived with what was ultimately to be one of the most insidious ideas to take hold in the New World—that the Bible does not mention juries, and a truly divine society does not need them. Instead, with scripture as a guide, the Pilgrims were free to serve as judges and executioners. Men like William Bradford, a Mayflower passenger and Massachusetts governor, were among those who dispensed “justice.”9
In such a setting, anyone who ran afoul of them didn’t stand a chance. And by “running afoul,” one can say that a primitive form of racial cleansing and class struggle was in effect: the victims were all misshapen, irreligious, or socially common.
The first recorded example of their unique brand of mass hysteria played out in 1642 in the matter of George Spencer. And it played out in the social media; not the Internet of today, but word of mouth. Mass hysteria on the village level. People discussed the matter in the town square, before and after church, in shops. You know how it is: all it takes is one person to be horrified for everyone to suddenly be equally horrified, afraid of being different or appearing sympathetic to the accused. In Spencer’s case, his differences led to being charged with bestiality by a self-righteous populace, charges falsely substantiated by those who wished to ingratiate themselves to officials.10
Before any of this had happened, Spencer’s very appearance—stooped, balding, with only one eye—made him an easy target for malicious taunting. It’s what we’d call bullying today, and which until recently was accepted as a painful, inevitable result of simply being different. But the real root of the slander against him was his unwillingness to attend church, or to read the Bible unless compelled to do so. Twenty-two years previous, The Mayflower Compact, the original governing document of the land—which was written and signed by men only—laid out clearly what was expected of settlers. Christian advocacy and practice first and foremost, and the power to arbitrarily make new rules right below it:
Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic; for our better ordering, and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.11
The reference to Virginia had to do with the ship’s original destination, which it was unable to reach because of rough seas.
Spencer is said to have lived in or around Boston, where he had once been punished with a public flogging for being a thief. He thereafter moved to the Connecticut colony of New Haven. It was during his time as a servant to Henry Browning that a panic arose, fueled by those who were inclined to mistrust or simply dislike Spencer because of his appearance. Browning sold a sow to John Wakeman, a farmer. The sow gave birth to a litter of piglets, one of which was misshapen and had large patches of soft, hairless skin. Most damning of all, the piglet was blind in one eye—and the blind eye was gray and clouded, much like the marble Spencer had placed in the socket of his own missing eye.
That was all the evidence a society preprogrammed to hate Spencer needed to become hysterical and bring charges of bestiality against him—in other words, charges that he was the father of the piglet—with accompanying punishment being clearly laid out in Leviticus 20:15: “And if a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death: and ye shall slay the beast.”
Spencer was arrested, placed in prison, and told that if he confessed his sins his punishment would be tempered with mercy. This was a lie, of course, but the forty-two-year-old prisoner was no fool. He wanted to live. So he confessed to the charges, though he later denied the confession under oath at his trial, saying he had made it only to appease the magistrate.
At said trial, the skimpy puritanical legal code actually threw a roadblock into his potential conviction. Under the code, a capital offense—one that would lead to a death sentence—required two witnesses. The accusers had none, the alleged crimes having been committed outside of anyone’s view. But the Puritans were not ones to let their own restrictions come in the way of a preordained conviction, and the horrified and brainwashed public was not about to stand in their way. The Puritans decided that Spencer’s own confession, though recanted under oath, made him the first witness. For the second witness they presented the mute piglet itself, in all its hairless, misshapen, one-eyed misery.12 The guilty verdict was like something out of a Monty Python film:
“How do you know she’s a witch?” a magistrate asks the mob.
“She looks like one!” is the spirited reply, which is good enough.
Spencer was convicted and executed by hanging. As for the sinful sow, she was killed with a sword.
There were similar trials in New England, though 1642 was a particularly robust year. Perhaps the record holder for su
ch “criminality” was one Thomas Granger, who was said to have had relations with a mare, a cow, two goats, two sheep, two calves, and a turkey. Overwhelmed by the sheer number and diversity of Granger’s alleged bestiality, the offended public raised no objections and he was executed.13
Tragically, these were hardly isolated incidents of localized hysteria driving aesthetic and religious cleansing, in which the public was eager to be seen as being on the side of the angels—or at least on the side of the powerful clergy. They were so willing to serve power that they were willing to accept clearly unreasonable charges, without witnesses. In short, fake news.
Though records of the era are scarce, the New Haven Colony boasted at least one other similar trial in 1647, of another man whose only offense was being a lowly pig-tender for a well-to-do sea captain by the name of Lamberton. This farmworker’s right eye protruded, and he suffered from a hernia which forced him to wear a posture-bending “steele trusse,” according to court records. Perhaps the man’s name made the charges inevitable: it was Thomas Hogg, and he was accused of bestiality by Captain Lamberton’s wife, Margaret, because—according to the warrant—one of a sow’s two piglets “had a faire & white skinne & head, as Thomas Hoggs is.” Fortunately for Hogg, because he did not confess, the threshold for conviction was not met. And he passed a rather unscientific test, petting another sow who did not respond favorably to his touch.14
As it turned out, however, the Puritan bestiality trials were was just a warm-up.
We mentioned the Salem Witch Trials earlier, and we’ll be returning to them shortly. But the witch hysteria of 1692 wasn’t the beginning of the panic in New England. The roots of the New England witch hunt were planted when Alse Young, a forty-seven-year-old woman, was hanged in Hartford, Connecticut, on May 26, 1647.15
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